i remembered that blogs are for posts

I've just finished playing in a one-shot (The Haunting) of 7th edition Call of Cthulhu and I have many thoughts which I will now be forcibly subjecting you to. I won't be discussing the plot or anything so fear not.

This is the first time I've been a player in a TTRPG in roughly four years. Possibly as many as six, I can't remember. I'm that sort of forever-DM.

I made my own character, as did one of the other two players: regarding the character creation I have no complaints. It is excellent, I love the generative process and coming up with a character idea based on the basic stats, then refining and customising it with the skills. Freely distributing hundreds of points between 30-something skills is... daunting, but fun! Really fun. It was so exciting to see the character come to life through the process. I ended up with a seventeen-year-old shut-in artist with an occult fascination. She'd never been to school (35 EDU) but was extremely intelligent (80) and had a strong will (75 POW).

She was joined by a middle-aged professor of parapsychology and a young woman, an aspiring author. We ended up with a fantastic dynamic of "believes-in-ghosts (scientific), believes-in-ghosts (insane), and could-go-either-way".

Mechanically I love the system. We definitely didn't see all the mechanics; our Keeper admitted forgetting to have us roll sanity checks and as it was a one-shot there wasn't much of a cycle of getting injured/mind-broken and recovering. But overall, I love the percentile system and the half/fifth successes. The combat is nice, we avoided any kind of wargamey positioning stuff and mostly took our turns narratively. I loved getting away from the D&D style of just killing everything you see as effectively as possible.

The GM was wonderful. The whole thing came about because I didn't have time for prep for Curse of Strahd this week, and I'm so glad it all went smoothly. Many thanks to you, you. You know who you are.

Playing is harder than GMing, to be honest. I'm exhausted. This might be incomprehensible, but I wanted to get my thoughts down right away. I will also throw this up on my webbed site as part of my ongoing attempt to be popular and cool.

And that is all I have to say

About the game tonight was played

I bid good night to

‎‎‎‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ Lost Carcosa.