10 minutes
November 12th 2009 -
…is how much time I manged to do on the Cars short film yesterday, despite also running “Horror on the Orient Express”. More storyboards.
Regarding the adventure – I ended up getting quite irritated when I couldn’t adequately explain (let alone control)l the game state. I didn’t have a good mental picture about what was happening, and the players were distracted a lot throughout the session, and they went far into the realm of “unrecoverable error: press ok to reboot”. The module is not well-written. It appears to have very little insight into likely player actions, which is unhelpful for a module that is, quite literally, railroading the players. I’m looking forward to being a player again.
Part of the problem, I think, is that the Cthulhu combat system is story-telling based, while the players (including myself) are more used to tactical position-based combat. As such, I need to stop talking about rounds, de-emphasise distances, and more explicitly encourage improvisation and dramatic moments. I should also use dice rolls as a *general* guideline for success, not specific cutoff numbers. I recovered from my general annoyance and malease a bit by the end of the session, but then one of the players used the expression “double tap”.