StarDestroyer.Net BBS

1. could it be done, a shared delve where your not supposed to hallucinate, etc. Lovecraft based MMO?

2. Who would play

3. would it suck?

The Yosemite Bear wrote:3. would it suck?

Yes.

End of thread.

The problem with taking HP Lovecraft's work into anything beyond using it as the basic skeleton of a pen and paper RPG (i.e Call of Cthulhu RPG) is this;

As you read his work, you quickly realize you're reading someone's personal fears, paranoia, and psychological issues in literature form.

While that can make for enjoyable reading and source material, attempting to build a good MMO out of it would be difficult at best. One with a limited audience I might add.

In fact, it would probably be safer, and reach a wider audience, if a major company that was doing horror games in general simply liscenced Lovecraft + related Cthulhu mythos works as a appendium/add on for an existence horror system.

It also doesn't help that Lovecraft's monsters are typically all indescribable horrors, and attempts at visual representation of them tend to not live up to the imagination of the reader/viewer.

Or that the danger often comes from going insane/fainting/being instantly killed, which doesn't translate well into the no-penalty hitpoint-based grindfest of MMOs.

That too. It'd be pretty hilarious if someone managed to make it work, though. It'd be interesting to see how well servers could deal with hundreds of simultaneously connected players experiencing Eternal Darkness-style mindfucking, but the whole point of making it an MMO would be a little questionable since to achieve full effect you'd have to screw with the chat system, too.

LF7M Nyarlahotep, need archaeologist and psychiatrists. PST with current/max SAN.

Try picturing Penumbra as an MMO, that would be a good aproximation. Or maybe an updated Alone in the Dark (the original).

I think an investigation-based MMO is possible (I personally think the MMO market has barely scratched the surface of the possible genres), but trying to convince publishers as well as the general public of that is impractical, to say the least.

Besides, it would quickly kill the mood when some über-leet players bring down Cthulhu and loot him (because, make no mistakes, the idea that you can't bring him down wouldn't settle with most gamers).

There's no way to make it work. The best you'd get is a "Mythos MMO" which would just equate to the kind of "Cthulhu is Sauron" watered-down Lovecraft distillations that you often see associated with the stuff.

Mythos games make good adventure games because you are generally looking for clues, attempting to avoid conflict (adventure games rarely arm you), and completely at the mercy of your interface. And, most of all, you're alone.

Suddenly being surrounded by a hundred breathing, sunlight-dwelling fellow investigators would much decrease your level of terror. I'd be like the end of Shadow of Innsmouth, where you basically shoot at all the monsters until they leave, then dynamite the entire fucking town to make sure they never come back. While there's nothing wrong with that, the idea is that there's an essential difference of experience when you're part of an FBI Monster Obliteration mission and when you're a lone investigator peering through tomes of forgotton lore.

Thing is, almost nothing in the Lovecraft stories is all that vulnerable to bullets, or even dynamite and submarine torpedo assault. Making it into a combat game is, therefore, absurd. And you can't have a 'mystery' mmo because it's easy to share information and next to impossible to do any kind of individual exploration. Redoing the same "creepy old town" investigation would be dull as well--and having to quit mid-way through would be confusing and pretty much a sure thing for most gamers over the age of 18. And most of these creepy old towns don't take well to outsiders... so being swamped with a hundred bunnyhopping investigators would seem a tad strange.

You could make a very satisfying Mythos First Person RPG designed for 1-6 players. Possibly as many as 8, but that's starting to push it. Making an MMO out of it? What's the point? So you can send 50 fedora-wearing Private Eyes from Boston to go fire their tommyguns as Cthulhu comes to a red sox game?

The closest you could get is a bastardized version where you've got like 15 factions, only one or two of which are 'normal people' and the rest are a bunch of crazyass cults all fighting for dominance in the shadows, trying to avoid the AI-controlled government's parameters for "show up and blow up your fucking town with dynamite" while investigators rummage around looking for secrets and stuff. What's the goal of the game? Fuck if I know.

Covenant wrote:What's the goal of the game? Fuck if I know.

Cultist Online: Bloody sacrifices, drug-fueled orgies, and bringing forth the end of the world!

Oh wait... That's Sociolotron (http://www.sociolotron.com/).

The only logical MMO-sized Cthulu game idea I can think of would be somewhat akin to Cthulutech. Where ancient horrors are known to exist, and people are fighting them (albeit not entirely successfully), with internal corruption and cults undermining the world, and good secret organizations using eldritch secrets to fight back. Oh, and the Mi-Go from Yuggoth are invading Earth while you're at it, for raid content

That's still just mythos-lite. The main thing in all of lovecraft's stuff was madness and terror, not a war of mecha versus shoggoths... which is what that ends up being.

The best kind of mythos game is still one of relatively small groups--not 50 man raids. The benefit of an MMO is much diminished, and becomes a liability, when you want a game that stresses a feeling of alienation, despair, and a creeping sense of un-rightness.

All of these things are harder to do when you you have everyone walking around Arkham asking for a group to go farm Deep Ones in the harbor. Even if you could do everything necessary to keep the atmosphere intact, all of these things would be better when done in relatively small groups--either as a non-Massive online game, or a massive-but-instanced game like Guild Wars where the only space you share with other players is the common area. Boston, for example.

But really, any game that banks on atmosphere requires immersion. Anything that requires immersion will be a lot harder knowing that win or lose you're going back to an area with 200 people just sittin' around crafting bags.

Civil War Man wrote:It also doesn't help that Lovecraft's monsters are typically all indescribable horrors, and attempts at visual representation of them tend to not live up to the imagination of the reader/viewer.

Yes, it does take the edge off of viewing indescribable horrors which supposed send you insane, when they are perfectly descriable and look stupid.

Xon wrote:

Civil War Man wrote:It also doesn't help that Lovecraft's monsters are typically all indescribable horrors, and attempts at visual representation of them tend to not live up to the imagination of the reader/viewer.

Yes, it does take the edge off of viewing indescribable horrors which supposed send you insane, when they are perfectly descriable and look stupid.

I always figured that a good portion of the insanity was not from the fact they had strange biologies, but that the people who were witnessing them were never mentally/socially prepared to accept such creatures, and that they were indeed quite alarming--but that terror reflex is no that different from the way people treat strange sounds at night, mice, bats, spiders, and other crawling things. Given the way Shadow over Innsmouth described how liberal groups stopped protesting the strange, hush-hush detainment of the Innsmouth residents after they were let in to view the prisoners... I think people can be prepared for it.

A good way to simulate fear in a game (and here I am, sucking Penumbra's cock once more) is to make it a stat, just like health. I can tell you, the most tense and even fear inducing moments in a WoW dungeon are when people are about to die. The PnP Cthulhu game did that too, adding the sanity stat.

Of course, this doesn't help when you get the aforementioned droves of jerks crafting bags and looting mobs. The idea of making it like Guild Wars is not that bad at all. You could have the common areas be the University campus, where noisy students meet up to investigate/get drunk/make a fool of themselves, and then the instanced content.

Of course, PUGs would be hell, you know, like in WoW where the fear factor of drawing too much aggro is lost on Vanish/Feign Dead retards who just want to top their DPS meters. There's one in every party.


On the other hand, a mythos game would better be centered around solving puzzles instead than around combat, even going so far as to being a kind of graphic adveture + puzzle solving. I think one of the major weakness of MMO developments today is that no one wants to break out of the mold of RPG-ish combat centered games, and that does limit things quite a bit.

As for making monsters scary, just don't show them. The fucking dogs in Penumbra are just dogs, but scare the shit out of me because I can barely see them before my character goes into panic. I'm also terribly afraid of sea depths, because I can't see what's under there. I personally consider it a major fail on the part of Blizzard to not have added some gigantic sea monster to eat players when they went too far offshore (still, deep sea swimming still scares me in WoW).

It could be worse, we could have Hellboy meets Buffy the RPG....

Covenant wrote:

Xon wrote:

Civil War Man wrote:It also doesn't help that Lovecraft's monsters are typically all indescribable horrors, and attempts at visual representation of them tend to not live up to the imagination of the reader/viewer.

Yes, it does take the edge off of viewing indescribable horrors which supposed send you insane, when they are perfectly descriable and look stupid.

I always figured that a good portion of the insanity was not from the fact they had strange biologies, but that the people who were witnessing them were never mentally/socially prepared to accept such creatures, and that they were indeed quite alarming--but that terror reflex is no that different from the way people treat strange sounds at night, mice, bats, spiders, and other crawling things. Given the way Shadow over Innsmouth described how liberal groups stopped protesting the strange, hush-hush detainment of the Innsmouth residents after they were let in to view the prisoners... I think people can be prepared for it.

A lot of this terror and horror element however will be inevitably lost on an MMO. For one, you're around people. Having a wingman or posse backing you up is going to greatly enhance anyone's nerves.

This in any case, still is going to by Mythos lite, if you want it that way or not, for the simple reason that being 'true to source' in all ways is going to make the worst and least playable MMORPERGUR ever.

One of the major premises of a Lovecraft/Cuthulu setting, it a actively or passively malignant universe. Suddenly having Player Characters who are special, who can do things the NPC can not do, basicly invalidates that for the audience/player.

Covenant wrote:I always figured that a good portion of the insanity was not from the fact they had strange biologies,

Things like CuthuluTech take this path, which completely fails at anything beyond small-group rollplay.

but that the people who were witnessing them were never mentally/socially prepared to accept such creatures, and that they were indeed quite alarming--but that terror reflex is no that different from the way people treat strange sounds at night, mice, bats, spiders, and other crawling things. Given the way Shadow over Innsmouth described how liberal groups stopped protesting the strange, hush-hush detainment of the Innsmouth residents after they were let in to view the prisoners... I think people can be prepared for it.

Cuthulu wankers really don't like this one.

They can wank all they want, but it's right there in the material. Cthulhu itself might active exert a madness-inducing psyhic strangeness, but the purely icky critters are terrifying but survivable, and even Cthulhu itself was somewhat partially bested by a steamship. The steamship riders were indeed traumatized by those events, but the author lived long enough to record it, in clean sanity, though stretched as he was. Still, if this guy can see Cthulhu and be on the boat as they run him over then I think you're not dealing with an instant-onset madness situation.

In any case, it just doesn't work. You're better off making a puzzle-heavy version of Left 4 Dead's gameplay and offering a variety of "run the hell away" scenarios.

One question is, why would you even want an MMO version of Lovecraft? It'd be way easier/fun to make a decent Zombie MMO if you want to play in "oh shit run from monsters" land.

I always loved on the Cthulhu RPG the combat stat that says: Scoops up 1d6 investigators per round.
Although I never threw them in front of his mighty tentacleness, I kept reminding my players: No roll to hit, bitches!

There are a few puzzle based MMOs, one of them being Puzzle Pirates, wich have a modicum of success. It would be conceivable to create an adventure/puzzle MMO of sorts set in a Lovecraftian background, but again, good luck getting the "I MUST KILL AND LOOT!" crowd to play it.

LordOskuro wrote:A good way to simulate fear in a game (and here I am, sucking Penumbra's cock once more) is to make it a stat, just like health. I can tell you, the most tense and even fear inducing moments in a WoW dungeon are when people are about to die. The PnP Cthulhu game did that too, adding the sanity stat.

Lord of the Rings Online does something similar, it's got the hope/dread-system. Monsters and places that your character is supposed to be really afraid of have an "aura" of dread, which makes you character take more damage, receive less healing and have less hitpoints overall. Get too much dread and your character starts to cover in fear, thus becoming unplayable. To counter dread you use tokens kinda like the flask Frodo gets from Galadriel and uses in Shelob's lair.

Of course it's not perfect and it's still a plain numbers game, but in my opinion it's a nice idea to translate the terror and fear Sauron's minions are supposed to induce into a standard WoW-style hitpoint-based MMORPG. So a stat like this can work in RPGs where not the player, but the character is supposed to be afraid.

in the PnP RPG, knowing that a glimpse of the big monsters was often enough to instakill the character's mind (or to severely and permanently handicap them) was a big motivator for players to fear such entities, but then again, most players I've found prefer straightforward games like D&D, instead of investigative and high lethality games like Cthulhu (I mean, you should've seen how pissed they were when they realized guns are as deadly to their characters as in real life). The same would happen with a computer based game, specially an MMO where everyone is competing for bragging rights.

To answer Bear:

Yes, fanboys, Yes

As for a real answer: I direct you to WH's response.

The only way I could see simulating the effects of the Lovecraft Mythos in any game, with any accuracy, would be to have the graphics and interface go all wonky on purpose. (With the only control that works the way it's suppose to be Operating System Based)

For example; you press/type in 'Kick', and you there is only a 1 in 6 chance of the kick working, and 5 in 6 of something else.

For mental effects, consider something like this;
You walk into a room and see experience a horror effect or see a creature, and to simulate your brain breaking, it looks like an acid trip using dark colors instead of bright colors. Possibly with groteseque versions of beloved characters dancing around trying to kill (or do other things, or both, to) you.
i.e Tentacled version of Bugs Bunny trying to mate with you using tentacles, while attacking you with a chain-saw made out of carrots.

Problem is, to really simulate the Mythos effects well, you have to really, really, really, fuck with the player, probably to the point where the game wouldn't be enjoyable (except on a macabre level), or it would never get past any form of censor/there would be massive bannings by ISPs and such after preasure from special-interest groups out the ass-end.

Aren't there MMOs geared for smaller groups of players such as Guild Wars or Phantasy Star Online? How does D&D Online work?