Rip It & Run! The Board Game Set Up

A constant problem with “Call of Cthulhu” (although some would call it a strength) is the fact that characters tend to die quickly and often. In the big picture world of the horror genre, this is probably as it should be; however, players get attached to their alter egos and death can be the tipping point that sends a player off to look for a another game to play, one with a lower mortality rate. There are ways around this issue, and I’ve addressed some of them in other posts, but one particularly fun way to ameliorate the problem is to approach the campaign as you would a board game.

Awhile back, I played a “Cyberpunk” campaign where all of the characters worked for a legal corporation called “JurisCorp©”. At the start, rather than generate a character each and jumping in, we were asked to make a number of quick characters – Corporates, Techs, Fixers, Solos, Netrunners, Medias – and assign them a range of strengths and weaknesses in compiling their skill sets. None of these personae were particularly well fleshed-out – they were one step up from blank slates. These all became the employees of JurisCorp©.

At the start of each story, we (in our roles as CEOs) were given a case, delivered to us from the corporation’s client. What JurisCorp© did was to make potentially damaging legal issues disappear, while ensuring the client wasn’t seen to be trying to dodge any legal bullets. Once we had the case and knew the stakes and the risks, we then looked through the employee list and picked out the best people for the job. Then we each picked a character to play from that subset and got into it. Over the course of play, the characters became well-rounded and they developed personality tics and generated history; some of them died and were replaced. Since we all, as players, added things to each character, no-one felt like they “owned” any particular role (although, certainly, there were characters we each like playing more than others). It meant that we looked upon the characters as pieces in a board game: in “Monopoly” you can play the top hat, or the iron, or the Scottie dog, but they all go back in the box at the end of the game until next time. This method – which I call the Board Game Set-Up – can work equally well with “Call of Cthulhu”.

To do this you need to gather all your players together and give everyone a character sheet. Get everyone to roll STR in the usual way and then pass the sheet to the left. Now everyone rolls DEX and passes the sheet to the left once more. Once all the roll-able stats are generated, look at the results: It should be clear which characters are going to be good at purely physical things like lifting and running, and which are going to be better at the more cerebral activities. They don’t have to fall exactly into these areas: some massage will have to take place. What you want though is something like this:

On one side are players whom I refer to as “The Biff”. These are the fighters and door-openers, the ones who can kick heads, shoot guns and vault high walls. They will also be the ones hiding and sneaking and schmoozing their way past bouncers and armed guards. Their skills will be of the more physical variety; not things gained through study. On the other side are “The Smarts”. These are the party bookworms, the ones who will spend their time tracing clues and reading tomes. They will have learned skills such as Medicine and will also probably be the spell-casters of the group. As I said, they don’t have to fit exactly into the spaces provided, in terms of their raw statistics, but they should get assigned to a spot in the group and some gentle mathematical massaging will make them more at home.

The fifth spot in the party is optional. If the group needs a leader, then this is where you put them. This should be a character that sits astride both the Biff and the Smarts, and who has a reasonably solid POW. If your group is a team of psychic investigators, then the head of the company goes here; if they’re a company of private eyes, then likewise. The role might well be an NPC played by the Keeper, but essentially, if there are any legal ramifications to the group’s activities, this is where they’ll be directed. In generating skills a solid Credit Rating should fall this character’s way.

Once the primary stats are assigned and the secondary stats have been calculated, the party should then sit around the table and discuss the characters in greater detail. Who are they? Where are they from? Why are they here? Attributes such as race and gender should be assigned. Once things start to fall into place, ideas about what skills the characters should focus on will arise out of the discussion. Soon, you will have all generated an entire team of Investigators. Now the fun starts.

Depending on the whim of the players, you can randomly assign characters for the first session. Talk about the next session with the players: will they swap characters each time they play, or for each story arc they embark upon? Some players may wish to have at least two sessions with their first character choice to get some “meat on their bones”, so to speak. I’d encourage swapping as often as possible – at least as much as the players are comfortable with at first – so that no-one gets too attached to any one persona.

After that, it’s play as usual. Some characters will be everyone’s favourite; some will be a grind. If one doesn’t work, junk it and start another one. Depending upon your party’s rationale, you can make many more characters than just four or five.

Death will, of course, start to take its toll. In these instances, keep track of the NPCs which the party has worked with in the course of their Investigating and, rather than rolling new characters, take these people on board. Did the party use the services of a local doctor? Was there a particularly helpful librarian they spoke with at some point? Rope them in: the Keeper will probably have some roughed-out stats for these characters anyway which will save time in character-generation and will make the Keeper’s hard work go further. The benefit of doing this is that the new character doesn’t need to be introduced from scratch: they already have some familiarity with the party and its undertakings.

And that’s it. Depending on the sort of game you run, this method won’t make the death rate fall, but the pangs of loss will be ameliorated by being spread across the entire party. Keepers moan about the amount of work they do to prepare a session of play, but players put a lot of effort into their characters as well and the grief associated with losing a favourite one can be very real. The Board Game Set-Up method can soften the blow: after all, when the “Monopoly” set gets put away, no-one cares about the top hat until the next game...