Limit your players

 

I love Call of Cthulhu. I'll gush about it some other time; for now it's enough to begin with the fact that it is my favorite game system I've ever played and I've played more than anyone I know IRL. (Granted, online I am basically an infant. I don't know how you people are able to play so many games; I don't even know how you're able to find them.)

There are many reasons to love Call of Cthulhu, and few of them really make sense to me. The typical setting of the 1920s is fun but hardly a cultural juggernaut; I don't know anyone who's particularly interested in the 20s other than in the context of the occasional Halloween party themed around Gatsby. The combat system isn't particularly good; it's fine but it's mostly just a way to die, especially as combat only rarely advances the investigators towards success. 

But perhaps the most confusing element of the game's fun is that it's generally pretty formulaic. 

Please don't panic. I know about Horror on the Orient Express and I know about Masks. I know there are probably thousands of surprising, interesting investigations, written by hundreds of talented writers who should in a better world be producing movies. I know that a well-written investigation played by clever and creative players can go in a dizzying number of directions and be full of memorable characters, near-deaths, actual-deaths. 

But I've read a lot of people talking about the game, played it a lot, read dozens of investigations, and I'm pretty confident for *average* Cthulhu players, an investigation boils down to:

1. Learn the premise.

2. Hit the library, archives, widow's house, etc

3. Visit a weird location

4. (optional) Use new leads to do a little supplementary research/acquisition; go mad. 

5. Do a ritual, stop a ritual, or find a Thing. One of you will probably die, a sacrifice the keeper is willing to make. 

At its core Cthulhu is usually a haunted location simulator with a puzzle. Where D&D has dungeons with combat, Cthulhu has Locations with a Puzzle, and if you solve the puzzle wrong, or slowly, or without the right information, a big leathery mosquito from a distant galaxy sucks your juices out. 

This is not a complaint. It's a great formula! Cthulhu is, I stress, my favorite game to play. But there is definitely a stock formula that most new players will fall into. The problem is then: how do you get your players to play it differently, if you ever want to?

This is where I return to my Thing, if I can be said to have one: take away options. Limit your players. 

This is my least OSR-friendly advice, and it obviously doesn't apply to that world. A sandbox adventure in that style, a hexcrawl or whatever; a simulation--these games probably thrive on giving a decent amount of freedom. But there are still plenty of games that are more or less adventure stories that follow a prewritten plot. Cthulhu is generally one of these! Each investigation might evolve differently, but the overall flow of events is predetermined (Until the investigators do something to derail it, which in my experience is pretty much guaranteed!). And for this style of story, I think freedom is a bit of a curse. 

Imagine it like this: a good story needs a consistent tone and it needs a consistent voice. If you're telling, for example, a gothic horror story, you need to have characters and plot events that fit that vibe. Your main character can (should!) be a trembling young girl; your villain can be a lecherous castle owner, a jealous and wealthy lady, a jilted lover--but probably not a slick Fortune 500 CEO. Similarly, if you're trying to run a serious investigation in a smoky 1920s Chicago waterfront, you want player characters that fit that vibe: detectives, gin runners, lounge singers, a beat cop. If a player wanted to be Red Sonja it would kill the vibe. 

So don't let them be Red Sonja. 

Don't dare think I'm going to say you need to just forbid characters. What, are you dumb? This is group activity! It's not your story, it's everyone's. The keeper tells it, so you have the most vital say, but you're not  some kind of boss. 

Instead, work them into the process. These are your friends, right? Tell them beforehand what the tone of the game is and how the characters should *feel.* Tell them how they definitely shouldn't feel! If they insist on bringing a Kenku to a pulp murder investigation, explain why that doesn't work. Show them Spider Noir, if you must. 

In my favorite Call of Cthulhu game, I explained the investigators were all kidnapped teenage girls. They generated characters like normal but didn't start with any assets; they were already in the dungeon of a cult. They had pretty limited options for character generation. They all had more or less the same backgrounds, and the same limited EDU score. On paper they were a poorly-balanced party with a lot of overlapping strengths and nearly all the same weaknesses. 

And it was one of the best, most coherent parties I've ever had. 

The game was a huge hit. We actually finished it and it remains one of my most consistently-fun investigations. Friends still joke about it. I lowkey wanna make it into a novel.  And while we have fun with more orthodox Cthulhu games, none quite capture that particular narrative for intensity. I give credit to the fact the characters were made with limits, and those limits, while they removed player freedom, forced them to really invest in the character they made and think of them from the start as part of the game world. They meshed with the vibe! Normally, you make the character separately and stitch them in; you try to merge them with the vibe, but they're always just a little alien. They weren't born in the game, they were born in the infinite white space of the player's mind.

Limits and rules can be suffocating, but they also give context to make decisions. Walls can be a prison. But walls also give structure. Don't be afraid to put them up. Let there be doors and windows, make the walls pretty and think them through. But you should probably have them, or you'll end up with the same sorts of parties, their feet always floating just an inch above your world.