Call of Cthulhu 7 is finding its way into letterboxes all over the world. Not mine yet, but that’s what you get for failing to even be aware of one of the largest Kickstarters in RPGs ever.

Anyway, the more people who play a game of Call of Cthulhu the better in my opinion.

Why is that?

Well I’m pleased you asked! I hope you’re sitting comfortably.

In early RPGs, as written, your character was less of a character and more of “piece” you moved about the place. They represented your interests in the game but were not these fully realized characters as we see in games today.

For the better, games in the early nineties, like those from White Wolf began directing people’s attention inwards to focus on a character’s personal arc. This focus highlighted a facet of RPGs that people were investing in but off their own bat and, generally without rules support. However, because of this investment, dealing with one of these characters dying, even mechanically, could not be dealt with in the same way as just re-rolling the fighter that got killed by a giant rat in the first passageway.

A consequence of this was that GMs had to either change their style to accommodate interactions that were less lethal, or tell stories that had limited deadly interactions. I mean, I guess they didn’t “have” to but consider this…

In these games a player spends a whole lot of time, hours rather than minutes rolling up, and then fleshing out, a character. As a GM you’ve encouraged this, at the very least by offering to run a game which intentionally includes it or even by entering into email/play by post back-story development and integration of a character. Once this has all been done, it would then take a pretty special kind of player to be okay with a character they’d developed in this way getting killed by a metaphorical giant rat in the metaphorical first passageway.

This isn’t me railing against letting the dice play their part, I’m all for it, but I believe there’s a social contract in this sort of game a GM should honour.

This brings me to Call of Cthulhu.

Unlike most other RPGs, everyone knows that once a Call of Cthulhu game begins, nobody is getting out “alive”. Just playing the game means you’ve accepted that your character is likely going to die, go mad, or both. It’s counter-intuitive but this mindset is liberating. By confronting their character’s mortality from the start, it encourages players to do the most interesting, entertaining, and fulfilling things in any situation, rather than the safest.

This implicit directive to squeeze the best stuff out of a character before their glorious end is what makes Call of Cthulhu the most important roleplaying game for the way it has informed how I play RPGs and for the play I try to encourage when I run them.