I always thought Delta Green was just like cthulhu meets x files buta BudsRPG review of impossible landscapes really opened my eyes. Then watches glass cannon and loved it...
Ive been playing Delta Green for the past couple years, and the character bonds system is the best part. I like Call of Cthulhu as well, but the major difference was one of my players having to lie to his wife, miss a 4th of July celebration together to go on the mission, and then eventually die. The realisation that his wife never knew where he went or would ever know what happened to him sunk in... And it was amazing. Talk about horror.k
Just discovered your channel, fantastic... I've said, you can tell the players WHAT their characters see, smell, hear, taste, touch, etc... their senses, but never tell the players HOW anything! How you feel, or what you feel... I guess the externals versus the internals... the internals are always for the player to give life to, to tell, to describe., never for the GM. As a GM I want players to have complete agency over their characters unless some game mechanic comes into play and lately, I've been pondering emergent happenings, proactive roleplaying and the world is more reactive to the players rather than the players reacting to what happens around them... just some outload thoughts.
this getting difficult here with the discussion of agency over emotion. We normally handle it the way that the GM is allowed to describe a first "inner" emotion because there is simply no other way to describe it sometimes. but all Players are allowed to a) describe the visual external reaction to it and also change the emotion to something different through describing an inner process.
It's a tricky balance for sure. What I often do is either ask "How do you think [Character Name] reacts to this? What's going through their head?" or if I have something specific in mind I'll use "maybe" a lot. "On seeing this, maybe this reminds you of the time that X, or maybe it brings back those old feelings of dread..." and that usually leaves room for the player to jump in with their own interoperation of what the character feels. When we played DG though, sometimes the game really calls for a strict "your character freezes in fear" or "you go crazy and shoot your friend in the head" moment.
In a previous video I mentioned Monte Cook and the Cypher System. Turns out they also have a game in vein of DG but it's based on a fiction podcast, it's called The Magnus Archives. From what I've seen I'm pretty interested in both settings but I'm not sure I'm willing to go back to a d100 system.
I have to disagree on that gcn being the best (I hate being that person) but I really don't like the amount of humor they bring to the table. the tension breaks way too many times with that group. my favorite actual play of impossible landscapes is from adventures in lollygagging. it was near perfect.
I watch them a lot! I’ll check it out. I agree that sometimes glass cannon takes it too far, their gatewalkers PF2e game is like 90% banter 10% game so that one I watch more like a comedy show, but the more their DG game goes on the darker it gets.
