Miss the scroll hidden under the desk because you failed a Spot Hidden check? There's no way for the players to defeat the monster, and therefore no way to win.Įxcept - and this is from my own experience, not from an objective measure - I'm not sure that's entirely accurate. Miss the next lead because you boofed a Library Use roll and don't know where the tomb of the monster is? The game grinds to a halt.
The central dilemma that the GUMSHOE system - and Trail of Cthulhu - tries to solve is the problem with investigative games in general: If the characters miss an important clue, then the investigation grinds to a halt. In fact, during a playtest, one of my players observed that it might have worked better if it had decided to dump dice altogether and go purely narrativist. It's more of a stripdown - think of it as an ultralight glider as opposed to a 747. Trail of Cthulhu isn't really a complete overhaul of Call of Cthulhu. For anybody else, this'd be an act of arrogant presumption for Hite, it's a five-finger exercise. Laws' GUMSHOE system, Trail of Cthulhu, his own take on a game that's been in print since 1982 and has won dozens of awards. So, skip ahead some five years and Hite has written, with the aid of Robin D. I noted that Call of Cthulhu is a game that openly acknowledges player mortality - you know that you're going to die, so what do you with the time that you have left? Hite made the point that Call of Cthulhu was perhaps the only role-playing game that wasn't, up until that point, an adolescent power fantasy Call of Cthulhu is about taking on the responsibilities of an adult with the faculties of an adult, rather than with the limitless potential of childhood. (I think that I held my end of the conversation up, although talking to Hite is intimidating the man knows his shit like few people I've ever met.) I actually had the privilege to meet Kenneth Hite at Origins, in 2003(?) we had an interesting conversation about a number of things, including philosophies of writing reviews, the nature of conspiracy theories and their inevitable descent into anti-Semitism, his patient explanation to me of crystal skulls - I'd always thought that they were carved, whereas apparently they're poured or something - and, most interestingly, Call of Cthulhu.