Ethnography Results, Week 5

This week I had meetings all day Saturday to work on the capstone project (we have a Hello World running on our Galaxy Tab, now) and was unable to attend either the morning game Stuart was planning to go to or Wesley's Saturday evening game.

Fortunately, one of my old roommates was coming through on Friday for grad school orientation and pitched getting some people together to play a session. As such things go, the instigator himself wound up having to drop out - you can certainly chalk that one up to the difficulties of getting everyone on the same page! - but the rest of us decided to push ahead, since we were all looking forward to it.

The group consisted of myself and one other guy in my apartment in College Station and one other friend of mine VCing in from where he lives these days. There were several changes from games I've played in the past: First, although we've done some gaming by voice chat before, we've rarely done much. Second, the DM for this session was not the guy who usually plays that role, but a less experienced DM (while still being a veteran player). Finally, none of us had played Call of Cthulhu before.

Call of Cthulhu is unique in that the players are supposed to wind up losing - it's of course based on Lovecraft's work - which is, in theory, a conceptual break from games such as D&D. Of course, it's all up to how the DM runs the game anyway.

We started at 6:50, against a scheduled start time of 7:00. This group never really had a problem in the past with getting started late, which may reflect the personalities of the people involved (specifically, my personal predilection for grossly conservative time estimates) or may reflect that since we were all in the intended geographic locations by 5:00 getting the game set up there were no transportation related delays.

The game session started with the usual level of out-of-character joking around, which didn't really abate as Derek observed in the Saturday night game a couple weeks back. The plot revolved around our characters going to investigate a house where multiple people had gone insane and which was unsurprisingly rumored to be haunted.

Call of Cthulhu was a good system for the setup we had going. Unlike D&D, combat is sufficiently unstructured that it's not required for all players to be able to see a grid of squares or hexes - obviously a bonus when playing without visual communication. On the other hand, the setting thinks that the DM and the players should be trying to build a horror novel atmosphere, which didn't really wind up happening.

I think the strongest conclusion to be drawn here is that the personality of the players has a major effect on the progression of games.