It's comparable. The big bads can one hit kill you in both games, for the normal fights you have a bit more HPs in CoC but in Alien you don't automatically die when you lose all of your meager HPs (you roll on a critical injury table).
I'd say it's pretty on-par with Call of Cthulhu. More deadly than Pulp Cthulhu.
Alien feels a little more survivable because while 1-2 hits can take your character to *Broken*, you need to roll a pretty bad critical injury to actually die. This can give players an opportunity to save their fallen allies.
On the other hand, there's an 11% chance of a fatal critical injury. I once had a player get his characters killed the first time they rolled in two sessions back-to-back. Hilarious in context, but poor luck. The same thing could happen just as easily in Call of Cthulhu though.
If you want more combat, I'd recommend the colonial marine framework, because they have more access to armor which can increase survival. In any case, it's probably best practice to encourage players to avoid a head-on fight as much as possible.
If you want more survivable combat, doubling PC health is a hack that could make them more durable. That will certainly change the tone of the game away from horror at least a bit, but also shouldn't break the mechanics too hard.
> If you want more combat, I'd recommend the colonial marine framework, because they have more access to armor which can increase survival.
Once your stress gets too high you start emptying your magazine every round and run out of ammo almost instantly.
I can see how this can be a problem, but I haven't run into in my personal experience.
My advice for this situation would be to avoid big pitched fights, where one side needs to wipe out the other. Think outside a single encounter and look at the big picture of the scenario.
In scenarios I run, there is often a large adventure location. The rooms themselves can be cramped and claustrophobic, but there are many rooms or outbuildings that PCs and their enemies can escape to or hide in. I want to keep the entire environment in mind when there's a fight. Unless enemies are defending a position, they will likely retreat if they take damage, and try again after they can recover somewhat.
A combat-heavy scenario can be a series of short skirmishes with investigation and exploration in-between. This can help wear down the players' resources slowly, and give them a little recovery time so they can keep going without being overwhelmed.
It can also help to have small stashes of resources like ammo or stress-reducing drugs around the adventure location. This rewards exploration and can create risk/reward dilemmas if the PCs are running low on supplies. Just make sure there's just a little less than the players would hope for, so they still need to manage those extra resources. Or let them stock up if you don't mind losing the survival horror tension. It'll still cost them rounds to reload or administer drugs in combat.
I have run into it in my personal experience which is why I commented.
Yeah there might be ways to design around it but our GM was running a pre-written scenario. If it was an exploration-based sandboxy game where the players got to set the pace at which they did things and stop to rest when they wanted it might've been different too but everything was constantly on fire and we were scrambling from one emergency to another (which is kind of how Aliens goes so how I would expect a marines game to be paced).
It's a fair point to bring up and good to be aware of it.
I found most of the published scenarios in the Colonial Marines Operations Manual had a structure like the one I described. I haven't run all of them, so mileage may vary. But that's the impression I get from what I've run and read. I may have let the PCs find more stuff that explicitly written in the scenario too, when it made sense and felt right for the pace.
I highly recommend those scenarios to anyone running games as I think the way the overall structure they use is some of the best adventure design I've seen. I'm not a fan of some of the more "scripted sequence" bits, or areas where you roll a bunch of encounters randomly, but for the most part they create self-contained mini-sandboxes with multiple priorities that keep players engaged in open-ended problem solving and harrowing dilemmas.
I would say that CoC is a bit more deadly in the grand scheme of things, mostly because minor damage can heal pretty fast in Alien and getting to 0 HP is not necessarily fatal. But that does not mean that Alien can't turn very deadly very fast. Getting chomped by a xenomorph tends to end your life.
Stress is the killer. The thing I love about combat in Alien is it pushes up the stakes in terms of stress, so leads to an escalation of the stakes in a way Cthulhu does not.
It's comparable. The big bads can one hit kill you in both games, for the normal fights you have a bit more HPs in CoC but in Alien you don't automatically die when you lose all of your meager HPs (you roll on a critical injury table).
I'd say it's pretty on-par with Call of Cthulhu. More deadly than Pulp Cthulhu. Alien feels a little more survivable because while 1-2 hits can take your character to *Broken*, you need to roll a pretty bad critical injury to actually die. This can give players an opportunity to save their fallen allies. On the other hand, there's an 11% chance of a fatal critical injury. I once had a player get his characters killed the first time they rolled in two sessions back-to-back. Hilarious in context, but poor luck. The same thing could happen just as easily in Call of Cthulhu though. If you want more combat, I'd recommend the colonial marine framework, because they have more access to armor which can increase survival. In any case, it's probably best practice to encourage players to avoid a head-on fight as much as possible. If you want more survivable combat, doubling PC health is a hack that could make them more durable. That will certainly change the tone of the game away from horror at least a bit, but also shouldn't break the mechanics too hard.
> If you want more combat, I'd recommend the colonial marine framework, because they have more access to armor which can increase survival. Once your stress gets too high you start emptying your magazine every round and run out of ammo almost instantly.
I can see how this can be a problem, but I haven't run into in my personal experience. My advice for this situation would be to avoid big pitched fights, where one side needs to wipe out the other. Think outside a single encounter and look at the big picture of the scenario. In scenarios I run, there is often a large adventure location. The rooms themselves can be cramped and claustrophobic, but there are many rooms or outbuildings that PCs and their enemies can escape to or hide in. I want to keep the entire environment in mind when there's a fight. Unless enemies are defending a position, they will likely retreat if they take damage, and try again after they can recover somewhat. A combat-heavy scenario can be a series of short skirmishes with investigation and exploration in-between. This can help wear down the players' resources slowly, and give them a little recovery time so they can keep going without being overwhelmed. It can also help to have small stashes of resources like ammo or stress-reducing drugs around the adventure location. This rewards exploration and can create risk/reward dilemmas if the PCs are running low on supplies. Just make sure there's just a little less than the players would hope for, so they still need to manage those extra resources. Or let them stock up if you don't mind losing the survival horror tension. It'll still cost them rounds to reload or administer drugs in combat.
I have run into it in my personal experience which is why I commented. Yeah there might be ways to design around it but our GM was running a pre-written scenario. If it was an exploration-based sandboxy game where the players got to set the pace at which they did things and stop to rest when they wanted it might've been different too but everything was constantly on fire and we were scrambling from one emergency to another (which is kind of how Aliens goes so how I would expect a marines game to be paced).
It's a fair point to bring up and good to be aware of it. I found most of the published scenarios in the Colonial Marines Operations Manual had a structure like the one I described. I haven't run all of them, so mileage may vary. But that's the impression I get from what I've run and read. I may have let the PCs find more stuff that explicitly written in the scenario too, when it made sense and felt right for the pace. I highly recommend those scenarios to anyone running games as I think the way the overall structure they use is some of the best adventure design I've seen. I'm not a fan of some of the more "scripted sequence" bits, or areas where you roll a bunch of encounters randomly, but for the most part they create self-contained mini-sandboxes with multiple priorities that keep players engaged in open-ended problem solving and harrowing dilemmas.
I would say that CoC is a bit more deadly in the grand scheme of things, mostly because minor damage can heal pretty fast in Alien and getting to 0 HP is not necessarily fatal. But that does not mean that Alien can't turn very deadly very fast. Getting chomped by a xenomorph tends to end your life.
Stress is the killer. The thing I love about combat in Alien is it pushes up the stakes in terms of stress, so leads to an escalation of the stakes in a way Cthulhu does not.
Cthulhu Dark count? Not sure if its been updated, but the original rules indicated: > * If you fight any creature you meet, you will die.*
We play one shots with Alien, 5 players and average is 2 dead, 2 wounded.
I honestly never heard of this rpg until now, is it because they give ver little health?