Yep, that's right. The way you play Kult is wrong.

So! Let's unpack that.

Most games designed after the initial explosion of roleplaying games are based on a Simulationist model. What they aim to do is simulate reality, unlike ye olde hallowed DnD (which is blatantly a game). The goal is to tell stories that fit inside the real world, and if they don't, there's extra rules for that (superhuman powers etc).

And this is the wrong way to play Kult. Why?


Says right there in the book: "Reality is a lie."


Your Strength attribute? It's a lie. Your training in handguns and electronic surveillance? Lies. Your ability to bend time and space to the will of the raging darkness inside your soul? Yeah, now THAT is true.

Now, if you're playing a military tactics game or a detective game, using the background/cosmology of Kult as your basis for supernatural elements? That's cool. And that's not what I'm talking about.

I'm talking about playing the game described by the setting material - the setting fiction - in Kult. Because that game is not the game described by the rules, in any edition. The rules describe a Simulationist game, the fiction describes a Narrativist game.

Most games present Game Reality as being the same as Our Reality, plus a little bit extra. Kult does not. It presents what we think of as Our Reality as a false section of Game Reality. Kult Game Reality is based on fictional paradigms - or fictional elements - that don't correspond to how things work in Our Reality.

So, in order to play the game described by the Kult setting fiction, you need rules based on those elements of the fiction.


Now, frankly, I think some of you guys are half-way on my side already. Where do you think Narrativist games come from? If all people were really satisfied with the old games, nobody would be making new ones. No, it's the same attitude some of you have - get the rules out of the way so we can tell a story. You don't want the rules intruding into the cool story stuff and turning it into a wargame.

But not everybody wants to just ditch the rules. I certainly don't. I want to play roleplaying games, not do improv theater!

The solution here is to play with rules that support the story. And the Kult story IS highly specific. It rejects our reality and posits a Gnostic reality where the only escape is through extreme mental balance. Yeah, you can start with characters in almost any situation, line of work, place in the world, but you always end up dealing with the same issues, because those are the issues that the Kult fiction is based on.

Yeah, its not specific like, say Lacuna - where you're Mystery Agents who go into the collective unconscious to "cure" violent criminals and it all takes place while you are asleep.

And we could argue about whether it's as specific as Don't Rest Your Head. Sure, it's about people who gain supernatural powers and fall into an alternate reality because they can't sleep, but the rules are set up for a certain experience - the more you use your powers, the harder things can get, and you're always trying to stay awake. You can lay the fiction with different rules, and its a totally different experience. You can also play a decent game of Shadowrun with the Don't Rest Your Head rules. It's been done before and it will probably happen again.

Nor is it specific like Shock: Social Science Fiction by Joshua A.C. Newman or Primetime Adventures by Matt Wilson. There's no setting material with those games - just rules that you can only play a story with. Shock: sets up a science-fiction story, although you can use it for any story, really, and Primetime Adventures sets up a television show. It can be any TV show - Doctor Who, Buffy, The Wire, or made-up - as long as your game is a TV show. You can't use these games for tactical combat, or leveling-up, or min-maxing your advantages and disadvantages. They focus only on telling a story, and let you bring the fiction.


Kult rests on the strength of the fiction in the game books. It doesn't work right with rules that are totally unconnected - neither Simulationist rules that defy the fiction, or purely story rules that make setting a secondary product. Kult needs - no, fucking Kult DESERVES rules that lay down the experience of the fiction, that support the fiction, that give you the player the means to employ that fiction - even if you haven't read it all.

Some more detail:

All that stuff like real world physics? how strong and smart you are? how hard the concrete is? what fish taste like? how many bullets you can take before you die? how much of your body is made of flesh? LIES! ALL LIES!

That weirdo Gnostic paradigm where you get more powerful the more crazy you are, and how you are really a divine being imprisoned in the jail of the world, and how you have this destiny waiting for you and you can't really die, you just lose your memories and are re-imprisoned? That's the truth. In the game.

In the real world - Our Reality - you are playing a game about how this fictional reality is the truth and how the real world, or some fictional version of the real world, is fake. And the characters go on to discover this.

So why are the rules geared towards Simulating the real world, when it is a lie? Shouldn't they be about how your character interacts with the Gnostic reality? (True Reality) The whole point of Kult, what the game is all about, is characters stepping out of the real world that they think is true, and finding a secret world that shows them the truth - that the secret world is true, and the real world is a lie. That's the game right there - really the essence of the horror genre, actually.
"Hey, that shit you thought was true? It's not. This bad stuff right here is what's true. Sucker."


So I think that Kult, the game, the rules, should be about the fiction (as a whole). It should support the cosmology.

If the rules were BETRAYED by the cosmology, that would be one thing. You got some rules you use for the "real world" (Elysium, the Illusion), but when True Reality comes around, as a magician, the undead, a Lictor, a portal to Gaia, the rules completely change, that would be pretty cool.

But I don't really care about the normal "real world" stuff. Violence is supposed to strain Mental Balance which breaks the Illusion - same with any extreme experience. Great meditation raises your MB and gives you the magic powers of the Light Road. So those things are not really part of "normal life," of being a 0 MB person. So they need rules.

But I don't see any need for rules for normal life. You go to work? You make lots of money? Fine, done. Do you need a skill for that? No, not if you don't need to roll. Will your business skills really help you in Metropolis? You actually know all those skills already, you just forgot them when the Inferno brainwashed you.

I think the rules should come into play when the cosmology comes into play. And that requires completely different numbers on a character sheet. I have a few thoughts on this, but they are mostly just small ideas right now. I don't have any rules that could be played yet.

tl/dr


/jest.

Good man for starting discussion of this J, I really ought to get to grips with the sciencey side of gaming if I'm ever to improve as a GM and writer. Bear with me as I attempt to express my view of this...

You say rules exist in the game to crystallise reality; Kult's present rules only address that reality which, we are told in the next section of the book, is actually a lie, or The Lie. Where the Illusion ends, the rules end also. Thinking about my own games, I find that to be fairly true. Once the character steps outside the Illusion, the amount of dice-rolling diminishes and the style of play tends to become almost entirely narrativist. Note, almost...

There was a thread years back started from an offhand remark by LC in which he suggested even our need for oxygen is a lie. We don't actually need it to remain alive, we just think we do, and we believe in this falsehood so strongly that we'll die adhering to it. The same principle applies for blood loss, blunt force trauma, electrocution, fire, decapitation, etc. Mortality is psychosomatic. If we believe it can kill us, if we subconsciously expect to die, we will die.

My interpretation has been that we carry this self-destructive belief system with us even when we step outside the Illusion. The bullet in Metropolis is equally as deadly to us as the bullet in the Illusion because the unawakened mind believes it to be so. There is no spoon bullet. But there is a mind which believes there is a bullet, and that mind will shape reality to suit this falsehood, and so creates a false wound in your false body when this false bullet hits it, causing you to die a false death. In essence: no matter where you go, there you are, and you're still fucking stupid. The Illusion is not a place, but a state of being, a state which cannot be escaped short of Awakening*.

So, the game rules - the barriers separating the possible from the impossible - describe only the reality in which we are imprisoned. But this reality is collapsing, making it easier to move the walls and potentially escape. Sometimes we catch glimpses of the True Reality beyond our prison, a place without any walls separating the possible and impossible, where we can do whatever we wish. Sometimes we can even venture out on jaunts into these lands of freedom, but, even when we're outside the jail, we still think like prisoners, we still act like the walls are there.

You ask "So why are the rules geared towards Simulating the real world, when it is a lie?" To which I say: because the essence of the Kult "fiction" (the very same as the Buddhist, Hindu and Christian "fictions", and other words long written down) is that this Lie is something humanity perpetuates and inflicts on itself. That's where the horror, and the hope, and, for me at least, the whole point of Kult stories comes from. IMO the characters' very existence as prisoners means they must be subjugated to the rules. If they weren't prisoners, if they were Awakened, that by definition would mean there no longer are any rules, and you can neither play a game nor tell a story without rules.

It's a paradox: the game is predicated on the concept that it is possible to transcend the rules of the game. By imposing any rules on the True Reality, I think you're damaging the fiction and removing the players'/ characters' motivation: why should they struggle to escape one prison to find themselves in another prison, albeit one with slightly more liberal conditions? So your Strength stat of 12 is a lie - what is the profound truth? That it's actually 20? 100? 5000? Or that the very concept of strength itself is wholly illusory, that you can move anything in existence, that you're a god?

The rules are biased toward the unawakened because that's what all rules must be. The rules of The Lie can be bent by crazy people, and IMO these instances are covered fairly satisfactorily in the existing rules of magic, dreams and the catch-all Dark Art, but of course they could always use refinement. The concept of the rules changing based on alterations to the in-game reality is intriguing, but I don't know to what extent you intend that (admittedly the idea of suddenly switching to Ninjas & Superspies rules when the characters cross over into little Jimmy's dreamworld has long held sadistic appeal).

I must close before experiencing a postmodern hermenuetic crisis of some sort.


* I'm firmly of the belief that Awakening implies such a radical elevation beyond dualistic reality that, well, it's not remotely playable. It's not supposed to be playable, because if the characters have achieved it, they've won, their story is told, they have transcended the lie of self. Tao. Atman. Game over, man, game over.

Just for clarity: this is NOT about slagging anybody's skills at being a Game Master (or a player). I'll be the first to advocate playing a wide variety of games to make yourself a better player (all-around), but rules are something separate from individual social skills. They facilitate the experience, and rules that make it easier to get what you want out of a game (or a story) make it easier to play, to tell that story, to have fun.



But let's take an example. How about the movie Izo, directed by Miike Takashi (or see here).

This movie is pure Kult.

The main character catapults along the Dark Path, wreaking havoc, jumping through time and space, terrorizing the Japanese Parliament, until he meets the Emperor. The Emperor is +MB up the wazoo. He is the epitome of the Light Path. [spoiler] They square off and the Emperor just raises his hand. End of the fight. He wins. [/spoiler]


How do you game that? Isn't this what Kult is all about - walking the Light or Dark Path? And yet, the rules won't get you a story even remotely close to this movie. This is a story more at the heart of Kult's setting than most of the actual prose fiction in the rulebooks, and yet you can't play it.

That makes me pretty sad, man.

This is going to be a rant, I just know it. There's just too many small blips of thought passing through my head... The sad thing with writing this long post is that I've made the attack surface so big

I agree with both of you to some extent, especially the point Underspawn makes in saying that even when the Illusion shatters, men are still just men - not gods. I think that the rules explain and justify this quite well. In many cases, they're even weaker than they would be in the Illusion; deranged, confused and shocked.

Quote:

Isn't this what Kult is all about - walking the Light or Dark Path?

I think that can be what it is about, for some groups. For others, it might be just be all about discovering that there even are paths. Either way, the backdrop is there only to please the game master. By the time the feeble minds of the player characters have understood the concept of the game, they're probably too insane to know whether they're coming or going.
    To me, Kult is simply 'all about having fun' whether that is to just run a small detective story using the Kult mechanics, or having all the players die for the sake of the plot and escape from hell, become insane, awaken, break all the seals, read the iron book and destroy the illusion. The Light and Dark Path are for me only devices to gauge the sanity of a character, and how the more insane creatures and NPCs affect the player characters.
    If the game were to be a fairly boundless narrative such as seen in some of the Dream sequences employed in Kult, I think the game would, at least for me, be hopeless to play after awakening. Of course, that would only be in the Illision - which begs the question of whether or not the awakened characters can see the illusion, or are 'limited' to seeing only reality? If an awakened person would only be able to bend the Illusion, they would probably have to enter it, but then again, there is nothing explaining how an awakened person would act.
    Would an awakened person want to awaken others? Maybe not. Maybe they enjoy being the select few who are very powerful, maybe they like imprisoning us mortal meatpuppets.

Most importantly to me when it comes to playing real-world-beyond-the-illusion-scenarios is that the players do not understand what is going on. Since the logic of the workings on the other side are ineffable by definition, one can as a game master not convey the intentions/actions of other beings to the players. Explaining something that requires EGO 200 by my very own Ego 13 mind isn't even remotely possible.
    I admit it, I play Kult wrong. I probably will until the day I awaken so I can get to grips with what goes on beyond.

SPOILER WARNING
I'm not entirely sure if I remember this correctly, but here goes:
    In the anticlimatic end sequence of The Black Madonna, the player characters have been instrumental in destroying some incarnates and end up in a battle between an archon and a death angel. If I remember correctly, the way this is described is by the author telling the GM that this is a large battle in several realities at once. The player characters understand it only because there's only because part of the citadel manifestations in the illusions by the death angel are suddenly gone. So the players sit there going:     "What? Where was the battle?"
    And you have to explain that "That was it just then. That brief flickering thing."
    The players shrug and look at one another. Obviously, it is something they are not supposed to comprehend. Also it is something the game master cannot comprehend, how the wars between archons and death angels take place - it is not done with legions rioting in streets, that's for sure. Or if it is, it happens for aeons and in an instant at the same time, so you don't even know it's happened. Who knows?
    So the end of The Black Madonna was in a narrative form (sure, the players sit there with their dice ready to roll, but it's not going to happen)... So was also a large dream sequence, where the players have learned some insane dreaming skills, to the point where they say things like 'I stretch a brick into a bridge so the children can walk across the river, then I turn that small mouse into a fur jacket so I'm warm.' It is a part of The Black Madonna that I know many people skip, because it can really mess up the pacing of the game, because the narrative form feels like it's slower (it's actually much faster, since the players never have to bother with mechanics or anything). It works, but as you say, it can take shape of improv theater if you're not careful.

SPOILER ENDS



PS: Great thread, johnstone!

Excellent thread.

I agree that most of the rule system is to quantify the Lie. This is necessary.
My take on this all, rule wise, would be to create one more Ability and call it something like RLT (Reality). It rises automatically by one point for every +- 25MB.
At MB +-500 you reach 20 and have perfect sense and control over reality. When confronting the Illusion you use all the other stats (until you realize that the only stat that matters is RLT), when confronting reality only RLT matters.
Oh, the nasty GM might have the players first roll some other, insignificant stat just to throw them off the scent and obfuscate the real working of the rules...
Objects and spells might even affect your RLT score. All the objects showing Reality might increase your score a lot while you are using them.

This lets you do a combination of simulationist and narrativist game without it going over to the dark side of improv theater.


After awakening we are all one, we are god.
This is why the awakened aren't really worried about individual deaths. No one dies.

Thanks, guys. This is very, very interesting. Who know? Maybe I'll turn y'all into dirty hippy pervert story-gamers some day.

It looks like I have a lot more explaining to do.

1.]
I'm not advocating playing Awakened characters. If you Awaken, you win, game over, like Spawnie said. But if you could get all the way up there with the game still being fun, that might be nice.

2.]
Yes, people are imprisoned in the Illusion wherever they go. I was also thinking that opposition would be worse outside of the Illusion than inside of it. The Illusion is made to conform to our lessened abilities, like a dwarf house or something, the outside is made for giants - or not even for humans in the case of Gaia.

3.]
I'm not talking about hand-wavey free-form roleplaying, either. I want rules! Rules for stuff! How can I not want rules? I am against GM fiat! So, yes, rules, they are probably just really different from what you guys are used to.

Also, rules do not exist to appease Player Characters. They exist for Players to use. PCs don't exist.

I'm not real interested in having players start playing a Sim game, thinking it's about detectives investigating the supernatural and then turn it into a journey through various purgatories and dream kingdoms. I want to play Kult with other people who want to play Kult, specifically Kult, so I want all the tropes and themes laid out on the character sheet.

4.]
Damage is two things I can see: One is making parts of you less useful (arms, legs, eyes). The other is talking you into dying and going to Inferno/the grey void/some paradise. It's persuasion, cause you don't actually go there unwillingly. Once you get to like -250 MB you're already dead, so you can't be persuaded into a Purgatory. And so damage doesn't really do much.

5.]
Science Fiction authors have been explaining the unexplainable since the '50s or even earlier. P. K. Dick has incredibly bizarre shit in his novels. Doesn't Stranger in a Strange Land have crazy LSD effects and type running every which way on the page? House of Leaves has that.

There's a difference between PCs and Players - PCs don't have to understand shit. Hell, at -300 MB your character understands nothing and his conscious brain has bailed out on him. But the Player can still make conscious decisions, and can still narrate his frenzied, monstrous PC through a story.


Meanwhile, I myself am under no illusion that I can get my point across in even one or two posts.

OK, after thorough ruminations I believe I get where you're coming from, J. The rules of Kult accord with only part of the game world, specifically the part that is unreal. Not to go too far down the rabbit hole of analogy, but, humour me: this is basically akin to having all the characters in a D&D game only able to move according to the rules of chess, because two of said characters happen to be playing chess in the game. The rules of the game-within-the-game are somehow serving as the rules of the game itself. This, clearly, would be very silly.

So, in Kult terms: the Illusion is the game-within-the-game, not the game itself. The characters of Kult are able to escape the Illusion just as the example D&D characters would be able to stop playing chess and get on with their lives in D&D land, living by D&D rules. Yet in Kult there are no rules external to the game-within-the-game.

This is where my brain grinds to a halt. As I see it, I think we kind of hit, as suggested by Chairman Torb, the Wall of Ineffability, and perhaps this is rightly so. That ineffability, I find, is where the mystique and philosophical relevance of Kult comes from. There has to be some blank space, some room for projection, somewhere on the map that reads simply 'here be dragons!' The closer you get to the Ineffable Zone of the Awakened, the more confusing things get, and therefore the more the rules break down and ever-looser narrativism has to take over.

I don't know how you can achieve what you're proposing, J, without in some way implicitly divorcing Kult further from the real world and thereby diminishing the metaphorical power of the setting. Maybe I'm way off track in which case some actual instances of the type of changes you're considering would change my mind right quick, but right now it seems like you may be inadvertently steering Kult into what amounts to, I don't know, a superhero game?

perhaps using a different method of GMing might be possible. Using relatively experienced players and trying some sort of meta-GMing.
When working with reality:The players GMing their character and immediate surroundings (basic cause and effect) with the main GM becoming more a story/continuity editor and arbitrator as well as narrator for any scripted events.

In the illusion it might be GM as usual.

just an idea... would be horribly complex in a way and would probably be limited to 3-4 players but might be worth thinking about.

Personally I'm hitting the wall of this in my solo game, which has kind of ground to a halt for precisely these kinds of reasons. So I'm glad that this was brought up.

Most Kult scenarios are written up as horror scenarios--and that part of the game is cool, the initial levels of 'what you know to be true is a lie." I've never seen a decent scenario that went beyond that though. I'm finding it almost impossible to present one.

I freely confess I have skimmed some posts instead of reading them, so maybe it has been answered already, but J.: have you ever tried to play Kult with a narrative rulesset, and which one was it?

I am asking because I have seen my share of narrative approaches and have had the chance to hear a podcast of one in action, have read a number of session diaries of narrative games. There is one issue I have with all of them: they tend to go away from identification with a character and embrace the story as the be-and-end-all of the game. They do not experience that story, they develop it. They don't go 'I grab my sword and face the dragon alone against all odds' but rather 'wouldn't it be cool if my character grabbed his sword and faced the dragon alone against all odds?'.

This is at least one step removed from what I want from a roleplaying game. I want the hands-on first-person experience, and that I get from a Simulationist approach. But it's not about simulating boring physical reality alone; it's about simulating a reality in which the mundane can be transcended and you get to see through the Lie. This can be done using simulation, too.

Simulation isn't about physics models. I abhor games which try to simulate reality through the rules. I prefer rules which don't get in the way of presenting a plausible reality on the basis of the setting. As long as the PCs believe the Lie and exist within it, a Simulationist rules system is ok. After that, play Nobilis.

That said, I did try to use the Dread system with Kult. It didn't work, though this system is a lot more like a narrative approach. It didn't fail because of the system (you can read all about it elsewhere on this forum), but because we have this deeply ingrained Simulationist approach. We just don't do stories for stories' sake. We want to experience the horror, and if a good story comes out of it, then that's a bonus.

Robin

So the great guru of role playing games Ron (Hubbard) Edwards got his tentacles into this previously sane comunity. Great... I'm glad I don't play Kult anymore. It's all going to the gutter now...

Okay, maybe we should ditch the term "Narrativist" for now, because frankly Ron Edwards ain't got shit to do with this.

Also, because:

Quote:

Originally posted by bitpicker But it's not about simulating boring physical reality alone; it's about simulating a reality in which the mundane can be transcended and you get to see through the Lie. This can be done using simulation, too.

This is exactly what I'm talking about.

I want rules that simulate the world presented by the Kult setting. Not rules that simlulate reality - which is what the Kult rules do. The Kult setting is fiction, simulating fiction = simulating story, hence Narrativist, but nevermind, we're not even using Ron's definitions (and few people do).

I'm not gonna argue over which games are better, trad vs indie, etc. I've heard all the arguments before and my final conclusion is games I like = games I like, and other opinions may differ.

What I AM arguing is that the Kult fiction explicitly contradicts the use of rules that simulate reality, or provide some sort of "realism." ("Realistic" combat, damage, car chases, explosives rules, whatever), which is the school of rpg theory that they came out of, back in the early 90s. (Don't worry, I'll get to some specifics when I have time...)

What I chiefly admire about the "indie games" community is the idea that rules should be specifically tailored to the desired play experience, whatever that is. The common idea that "rules should get out of the way" is, IMHO, defeatist. I want more out of my games - I want them to support and promote a specific experience.

Dread, for example. It does one thing only - suspense. And it does it very, very well. There is nothing like having that Jenga tower in the middle of the table to build tension, to keep everybody's attention on the game. But I'm not surprised it didn't work for Kult. I have friends who want to play more Dread, so maybe I'll run some Kult adventures of my own with it...

Quote:

Originally posted by bitpicker I am asking because I have seen my share of narrative approaches and have had the chance to hear a podcast of one in action, have read a number of session diaries of narrative games. There is one issue I have with all of them: they tend to go away from identification with a character and embrace the story as the be-and-end-all of the game. They do not experience that story, they develop it. They don't go 'I grab my sword and face the dragon alone against all odds' but rather 'wouldn't it be cool if my character grabbed his sword and faced the dragon alone against all odds?'.

I played Kult without rules once, around the end of my 5-year hiatus from gaming. Around the time I joined TLC (date to the left). I haven't tried it with any other rules yet, though I have played plenty of "indie games" since then, and I have found them quite different from each other.

Which games are those, Robin? It's harder to discuss them in the abstract, unfortunately.

Some names which come to mind are Polaris, Primetime: The Adventure, Dogs in the Vineyard, My Life with Master and a couple of homebrews cooked up by the members of tanelorn.net, a German RPG forum with many RPG theory aficionados (to which I no longer add myself, as theory has done all it could do for me, and there just isn't any point for me in developing it any further).

Mind you, none of those were tried with Kult. Some tanelorn players made a podcast playing PtA, and it was all terribly, terribly meta-game: they had lots of fun talking about which story would be cool instead of experiencing the story first-hand. That wasn't preliminaries, that was the game! Not my kind of fun I guess.

Anyway, I agree that

Quote:

rules should be specifically tailored to the desired play experience.

I should mention that I am using my own system GeneSys for almost all roleplaying games exclusively for precisely that reason. The desired play experience is a feeling of 'I have been there, lived through this'. When I say I don't want the rules to get in the way I mean they shouldn't be able to take my mind off the imagined experience. Many RPGs do this: when I have to look up things in tables or have to look up even what to roll it takes my mind off the game experience. I don't like that, but most of the games (and I am using 'most' here only because I don't know them all, and because Dread exists, I know no other counter-example) which talk about story or narration expressly stay outside of the first-person experience by design.

My system is pretty much like the UA one, just older. I never have to look up rules or information, rolls are quickly decided upon and resolved with high resolution of quality if desired. There's a description in the homebrew section, so I won't go into detail here. The point is, and that probably supports part of what you're saying, when I developed the system and had no idea of the GNS definition of 'narrative' (because GNS didn't even exist back then), I want the rules not to get in the way of the narrative - in the sense of me or any other player telling their part of the story.

Still, the system is pretty classical in that it uses attributes, skills etc. But I need that for a real first-person experience. It takes much less suspension of disbelief IMO than a system which deals with narrative structures, plot construction etc. My rule of thumb: if it doesn't exist in the real world + setting deviations, it has no place in rules. Example: experience points, karma points... Especially the latter, elements which help you to override events for the sake of the story.

Robin

Yeah, I see where you're coming from Robin. You figured out what you wanted and designed rules for it - actually, that puts you firmly in the ranks of successful "indie" games designers.

But my ideal is probably the exact opposite. Instead of your "I have been there" experience, I want literary conventions acknowledged and supported. When we game, we are writing stories - its literature, oral culture, etc - we just do it as a group, improvising off each other. Our games contain setting, character and plot - as well as the literary conventions we bring to the stories we tell. Even jokes and personal anecdotes - even complaints about other peoples' behavior - have storytelling conventions to them. For example, if I play a detective game, I want it to feel like a Raymond Chandler novel, so it has to be all Raymond Chandler-y, not "realistic." If I play Primetime Adventures, I play it because I want to feel like I'm playing a TV show.

Now, despite the title of this thread - there's no real way to play "wrong" when the object of our own entertainment is fulfilled.

What I am pointing out is:

Quote:

Originally posted by bitpicker My rule of thumb: if it doesn't exist in the real world + setting deviations, it has no place in rules.

This is incompatible with a setting where the "real world" functions completely differently (is a Lie). In Kult, its not that the setting functions like the real world until things get weird - it never functions like the real world. The Illusion doesn't even cover everything real - violence is not part of the Illusion, but it still doesn't function like it does in the real world. In Kult, there is nothing that functions like the real world - the game reality is made out of literary conventions.

So, that's what I mean by "wrong" - the disconnect between this aspect of the setting and the rules. This is a big issue for me, and maybe I'm the one to bring it up because I'm already predisposed to dislike the rules. That's not an unfounded accusation - its probably dead on. But I want to see it resolved. If we totally disagree with each other, that's cool, man. I'm not trying to convert anybody who isn't interested, after all.

I think that sums up my point pretty succinctly, actually. Thanks, Robin.


But this!

Quote:

Originally posted by bitpicker Some tanelorn players made a podcast playing PtA, and it was all terribly, terribly meta-game: they had lots of fun talking about which story would be cool instead of experiencing the story first-hand. That wasn't preliminaries, that was the game!

This is fucked up and NOT my experience of um, any game, actually. I can see this maybe happening if your stakes-setting in PtA goes on forever and ever, but playing Dogs this way blows my mind - its very much a game where characters are doing stuff. If those guys were having fun, hey cool whatever, but... weird!

OK, i just found this site today, and i just registered to post something on this thread (i havent even filled in my profile info yet).

This tread is called 'you're all playing kult wrong' ?

Maybe it should be called 'you're all playing kult right' ?

After playing so many games with so many sytems i've found the system doesnt matter as long as it doesnt hinder the story. now im not talking about LARPing or playing without rules because that just amounts to piles of cosmic toss resulting in prolonged discusstions on feesability (my spelling sucks, i know, i find it easier to live in phonetics). everything in the universe the PCs encounter must have interpretational stats because there is nothing that pisses a player off more when he finally gets frighteningly bored of the unstoppable statless force.

The problem (or should that be the wonderous joy) of Kult is that it takes place on sooooo many levels (and i dont know who said it but no, a PC reaching awakening is not the end, its just another beginning).
so if your playing a gum-chewing fox-muldery investigator looking into weird shit x-filey stuff that ends up being a kult of people following some arsehole that can raise zombies and mess with your dreams a bit, then.....your gonna need basic material values so you can pop 2 in the head of every cultist with a big knife and smash the brains in of every zombie shambling toward you, and you'll need some mental or spiritual values to fend off something scary in your dream thats trying to ass-ram you.
but if you playing an awakened (and if you need game ideas for that just read, lucifer or sandman) with CATASTROPHIC WORLD ALTERING WHOM!!! (whom, technical term we use in any setting for anything super-natural, super-powerful etc, when the chair and cupboard eat sigorney weaver in ghostbusters , its whom, when mr murdoch reshapes the world in dark city, its whom) then your gonna those spiritual values again but slightly different. the values should adjust depending on territory. if your a dream wizard in your own dream kingdom , you are a god, but if your the same person in someone elses realm, they will be better than you until you can impose your world onto his and make it your (then your god again, see dark city again).

there are many ways this can be done and all your points are valid. if you want to know my method ? ? ? no? anyone? ok, i'll tells ya. i dont use the kult system at all. i love the world, the setting, the cosmology, everything..i just think the system sucks, i always have, even in the material realm the stats of people things and stuff are useless and sooo wrong. i have used different systems for different games. it is feasible to find a generic system that can cover everything (its called BESM, i know, sounds fecked, but its the only systems i found that has a rule for everything without getting overly complex) but unless your working a huge campaign its un-necessary.

thanks for ready my pish, hope i havent offended to many of you.

{~D~}

Welcome aboard Fleshcraft. And never feel like you may be offending someone simply by expressing your opinions here. We value all opinions and points of view

Heh.

Hi, Fleshcraft. Read my posts again - you're more or less agreeing with me about mechanics, ie use what is necessary.

It's the constant refrain of "get the system out of the way" and the search for the "perfect" system that one can use for everything that I totally cannot agree with.

Yeah, i am agreeing with you.
The only reason i try to use one system is to cut down on prep time (cause changing everythings stats game dependant is just not worth it) and to make the players feel like they arent being railroaded (because players get annoyed when villians use the power of plot to escape thier clutches against all probability) and to make it possible for players to continue characters over long campaigns (because depending on the realm your in different things should work differently but still be based on the same rules).

{~D~}

Great thread!

Hey johnstone couldnt you give us an idea of how you would like the rules for Kult to be?

I think this discussion might benefit from making it a bit more concrete. What would the rules cover? What would the basic conflict resolution mechanism be like? What stats should the pc's have?

Some stuff I would like to see in a new rules system for Kult:

Ditch pretty much everything in the current system. It focuses on the wrong things and therefore it gets in the way of the story which in turn makes one lean towords GM-fiat instead of the rules.

* Keep the dark secrets, this is the stuff that is making the illusion fall apart for your character and thats what the Kult story should be about (IMO). Dark secrets are also flags that indicate what the player would like his hers characters story to be about (http://web.archive.org/web/20060207020334/http://bankuei.blogspot.com/2006/02/flag-framing_03.html) and is therefore also what the GM should look at when preparing the game. This will make the adventures connected to the characters personal background and to what the player is interested in. Also keep the mental balance, this is a mesure of how close you are to the illusion or to the reality.

* The core mechanic should be a method for conflict resolution that helps the group decide who can say what happens in the game fiction. You wouldnt roll for a skill to see if you succeed with a specific task and then let the GM decide the consequences - instead you and the GM would say what you would like to happen and if you disagree you roll dice, if you win you decide the outcome. The GM represents the illusion, the player represents the character who may perhaps be moving towards reclaiming his/her lost godhod. As the character gets a progressively more extreme mental balance the player should get improved stats to use when rolling against the GM. In the beginning the GM should win most of the time (the illusion still being strong) but in the end the player should win most of the time (the PC having awakened).

All in my opinion of course. I'm not saying this is how you should play.

Terje, I agree. That's pretty much how I'd like to see it go as well.

Are you familiar with Dogs in the Vineyard? That's basically how I originally envisioned a new Kult system, with the addition of Mental Balance, as extra dice to be used somehow.

The problem I have with DitV as a basis, is Escalation - I was originally thinking of a new set of categories - Social, Physical Violence, Mechanized Violence, Magic - but that doesn't really articulate the range of ways to resolve conflicts available to extreme MB people, nor does it provide opportunities to see through the Illusion, or go crazy, or create hallucinations. It also doesn't figure the Dream Kingdoms or most other realties into the equation.

I think a conflict resolution system based on the themes of Kult would work best, but players need to be limited in their ability to narrate by what theme they are using. High +MB characters won't allow a player to solve a conflict through violence, for example.

This is fair enough but how are you going to do that so that the players are in agreement with you about it? How do you make the game enticing?

I think at the current stage it seems more or less like a horror game more influenced say by Lynch or Barker than by Lovecraft or Lumley, but of course that's supposed to just be the beginning. What is the lure to make players want to play the kind of game you're offering? Bearing in mind that I generally agree with you on principle.

Good question!

My main argument for rules support goes something like this...

Why do we have rules? They help us get the experience we want out of a game. They guide play. The rules we use, the game system, is more than just what is in the book - it is all our behaviours at the table. In order to have the same kind of fun - the same game, really - with different people, you need to communicate those rules. Most rpgs rely on people to figure it out for themselves or to pick up knowledge of roleplaying from other people who know.

So, for one thing, I'd like to codify a way of playing that a] encapsulates the Kult experience as I see it from reading the setting material, and b] is fun for me to play, as a set of rules that create an experience, not a set of rules for me and whomever else to ignore as much as possible so it doesn't get in the way of the story.

Why do we roll dice? Because of the random element. Dice, and other randomness generators, create uncertainty - these are areas where improvisation happens. Now, if this randomness just produces bullshit, or only functions to determine success or failure, especially in situations where one of those two is severely hindered or highly improbable, then players start to ignore it. Then they just determine which way the story moves on their own, without the rules - which means less randomness, less improvisation. On the other hand, what if the randomness created moments of surprise for all players, and pushed them into creating a more Kult-y story? Maybe dice determine success/failure, but what if they also determine elements of narration that are specifically tied to the premise of the game, thus supporting the original idea throughout play?

Well, that would be a reason to stop ignoring the rules.


Anyway, one of my projects for the near future is to go back and reread all the setting material for Kult - mostly 1st edition - and figure out what it's really about. Then I'll try to determine what kind of rules, including procedural rules, will simulate the feel of that setting material.

Okay, here's one example that would entice me into playing a game. Sorta concrete rules.

Let's say I want to play a -MB character. Getting into the extreme range. As it is, in Kult, I the player suffer a fair degree of Loss of Control. So I don't actually get to control my character or contribute to the narrative. Instead, the GM tells me what happens.

How about, I pick my disadvantages (negative traits), and these are the ways in which my character loses control over his emotions. So let's say my guy is starting to turn into a Vampire, so I have Drinks Blood, Scared of Daylight, Self-Mutilation, and Compulsively Murders Children. In a conflict, we roll to determine who wins. But I also lose control, pretty much automatically, because I have to make a Terror check against the big bad Razide, and having an extreme -MB means I lose control. So! How about we roll to see which of my Disadvantages dominate in the conflict? Instead of the GM saying what my character does, I get to say, as long as I obey the rules. So, I'm fighting against the Razide, and we determine my Self-Mutilation dominates but I win the fight, and I also get to narrate.

So I say how my guy grabs razor wire and wraps it around his arms so he can tear up the razide-flesh when he grapples the thing. Or how he lacerates his flesh with his claws in order to appear more fearsome.

And maybe I can add in some hallucination about a child's face appearing on the razide, and my guy gets all crazed in his attempts to pummel th creature, just for some added benefit.

So, anyway, that gives me the player much more control over my character, and guides me towards participating in the story in a constructive and productive way.