Shooting things in Call of Cthulu, CoC Horror vs. Alien 2 Horror Options

[Wounded Ronin]

I sent the following message below to Nisarg/RPGPundit because I enjoy his blog tremendously. However, I also thought it would be nice to share these thoughts with this forum so I am posting it here also.


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Since I'm on Pohnpei right now, which is the closest inhabited place to R'yleh, and the home of the "Ponape Scriptures", AND by implication in one of Lovecraft's stories the place where they knew the anti-fish-man chant, it's only fitting that I think a little bit about cthulu. And since the USMC is going to relocate from Okinawa to Guam, I should think also about shooting things with big rifles and optionally screaming "ooh-rah" afterwards. Finally, I recently played "Alone In The Dark" as abandonware which is pretty Lovecraft-derivative.

I'm not sure that I agree that trying to shoot things with big powerful rifles in a Cthulu setting should be as futile as most people seem to think it should be, i.e. highly futile except against the very weakest monsters during the daytime. Certainly, d20 Cthulu basically makes it that way, since it uses the system of hitpoints, the monsters can have buckets of hitpoints, and it's easy to miss with your d20 to-hits and each hit only does XdY damage, where Y is almost always a value from 4-12.

However, I'm not totally convinced that's how Lovecraft would have written the rules if he'd taken it upon himself to make a Cthulu RPG. As I recall, in his stories, the protagonists generally aren't well armed and that's part of the reason why their situation is so scary. (Besides for having to accept the fact that a spooky fish man is smarter than them.) In situations where characters are well armed they're often able to defeat the Cthulu-aligned opposition. For example, in "Call of Cthulu" the policeman Legrasse is able to take some armed police and successfully raid cultists chanting in the swamps of New Orleans (where I lived for about a year 2 years ago, thus affirming that any moment now I'm going to have my mind devoured by Cthulu as I realize the truth that all my anscestors were mutated cultists). Note also "The Shunned House" where the protagonists break out flamethrowers, sulfuric acid, and scifi guns and manage, although with harrowing difficulty, to defeat the evil in the house.

I feel that Lovecraft would have emphasized the transcendent and unknowable intelligence of the horrors and the fragility, insignificance, and hollow arrogance of man, and that in the context of the 1930s that could have been a novel and disturbing concept for his readers. However, I don't really feel like Lovecraft was big into bulletproof monsters or crappy to-hit rolls. I feel like that's more something from modern horror movies. I think it should be possible to be horrified at the fact that you're actually insignificant and unsophisticated compared to an uncaring and monstrous cosmic being without necessarily adding complete helplessness in the face of cultists or lesser monstrous beings. It should at least be possible for horror to be primarily mental or spiritual, yes? Isn't that more nuanced and interesting, anyway? On the other hand if your game is a constant running battle for survival your game is going to be like Alien 2. Alien 2 is compelling, yes, but the mental or spiritual horror that, say, Cthulu would inspire is pretty much out the window, since the entire focus is on physical survival and not having aliens rip out of your chest. That's perfectly valid and fine but it's not really Lovecraft, is it? It's a different type of horror because although you feel horrified by the aliens and by being used as an egg incubator you don't really have time to feel challenged as a spiritual sentient being by the xenomorphs.

That's not to say that I feel that in a Cthulu RPG all problems should be able to be solved with firepower. For example, I recall from the CoC rulebook that there was an incorporeal monster living in outer space which could jack you up but which you couldn't just shoot. That's fine by me. It has a pleasing retro-scifi feel to it and if there's an incorporeal creature then certainly we shouldn't be able to shoot it. But, I really feel like if you're being approached by a corporeal entity made of flesh you should basically be able to kill it with appropriate firearms. If there are several fish men coming slowly down a narrow tunnel at me and I happen to have a Thompson M1A1 and I empty the magazine down the tunnel I should probably seriously injure or kill the fish men because that's just physics. If a giant tentacled thing the size of an elephant is coming at me I probably shouldn't be able to drop it with a pistol, no, but at the same time since it's so big even the to-hit for a puerile starting character should probably be a lot higher than 15%. If there's some colossal scary thing coming out of the water, sure, my M1 Garand shouldn't phase it necessarily, but if I happened to have a handy artillery piece and some shells I should really be able to jack it up. For me, it all goes back to suspension of disbelief. If the GM tells me something like, "You can't actually empty the M1A1 down the corridor and hit everything because you lack this stack of feats to enable you to use automatic fire effectively, so now the fishmen are gnawing on your fingers," I feel that my suspension of disbelief has been compromised. Or better yet, "You use that rule covered in 1 paragraph of the rulebook that says if you desperately spray and pray each round only has a 5% chance of hitting," when the fish man is supposed to be 10 feet in front of me and there's really no way at all your accuracy could ever be so bad even if you were a complete n00b. I just feel like scary Cthulu monsters should destroy my sanity, make me doubt humanity, eat my soul, or get me with magical powers, but that a Rambo-esque immunity to getting shot is totally from the wrong genre.