The Gaming Den

OSSR: Call of Cthulhu
Horror Roleplaying


There are a lot of editions of this game, which don't actually differ that much.

Theme music for this tome is Cacophony by Rudimentary Peni

Call of Cthulhu the Roleplaying game lurched into life in 1981, and as we speak in 2014 is on the cusp of its 7th edition. It's been a long, weird ride, and CoC has had a devoted fanbase that has stuck to the almost-unchanging game for decades, though publisher shenanigans and card games, often finding success in bizarre places and staggering forward like an old lich stumbling forth from the crypt one more time. While we at the Den often like to compare it to a living fossil among RPGs, the veritable coalecanth of the gaming aisle, it's still hanging on, and even flowering somewhat; besides the new edition off-brands like Trail of Cthulhu and The Laundry RPG continue to shine.


Which is even more impressive when crap like this gets released. You just know that cover cost somebody a SAN point.

My copy is version 5.6. The copyright note says it is ©1999, but I think it came out in 2000. Publishing delays happen all the time. It has the same number of pages as version 5.5 which came out 2 years earlier, and I'm not really sure what the differences are. Frankly, I don't know what the differences are in any of the editions or sub-editions of Call of Cthulhu. All of the editions are kinda-sorta compatible, and few supplements bother to tell you what edition they are nominally written for. This is kind of amazing, because the first Call of Cthulhu box set came out in 2001, and the 7th edition coming out later this year is supposed to be vaguely compatible with it despite 33 years having come and gone.

Really, the fact that the rules haven't changed much is as much hubris as anything. Can you honestly imagine someone claiming that their first typewritten draft of an RPG back in 1981 got things basically right and didn't need any major overhauls? And yet, that's pretty much what Chaosium is claiming and has claimed for over three decades. And the fans, for the most part, seem to be pretty much OK with it, which paradoxically has to do mainly with the fact that Call of Cthulhu players almost universally acknowledge that the rules aren't very good.

Basically how this works is that Call of Cthulhu comes from the 1st edition AD&D era, when expectations of rules quality and consistency were pretty low. So Call of Cthulhu players have been pretty much expected to house rule and mind caulk everything together from the beginning. But unlike the players of other games, Call of Cthulhu players never actually stopped. Just as it's always the 1920s for the characters, it's always 1989 for the players; and everyone is still pretending that it makes any sense to try to play AD&D together with 2nd Edition AD&D and the inconsistencies and shit rules don't matter because the MC can and will change it all anyway. As far as Call of Cthulhu gaming culture is concerned, the 21st century never really happened – which is as good a reason to choose the edition copyright 1999 as any. Retroactively, let's say we planned that rather than that this version happened to be close at hand for a review.

To hang out my nostalgia cred, my early nineties gaming group had a Call of Cthulhu period right around the time of our RIFTS period. It scratched a similar itch, honestly: frankly bad rules with a cool setting that we could take or leave dim sum style. At that time of my life, my expectations from a game system were pretty low, and Call of Cthulhu exceeded them.

Most of the rule changes have been...eh...I don't want to say minor, but the essential mechanics of the game haven't progressed much in three decades (7th edition is supposed to have some tweaks), and with the exception of spell multipliers and whatnot the guys playing in 1989 can play pretty much the same campaigns in 1999 or 2009...and that's by design. GURPS and d20 and whatnot trade on their system, Call of Cthulhu trades on Cthulhu. They release new material, sure, but the basic stats and conceptions of the game are pretty much identical because there's a large desire among the playerbase to keep things compatible with the classic old campaigns like Shadows of Yog-Sothoth or Horror on the Orient Express. It's a bit like people that show up to Rocky Horror showings in costume with buttered toast in that respect.



Anyway, Call of Cthulhu uses a slight variant of the Basic Roleplaying System, which underlies...oh, at least 75% of all Mythos-related roleplaying games at this point, even if Chaosium doesn't publish it. I suspect Frank will want to get his rant on about that when we get to the actual systems, and I would never deny him that outlet. The main take away is that as weird and stupid as it is, BRP was influential because of Call of Cthulhu. The whole Sanity mechanic (i.e. "mental hitpoints") by Sandy Petersen has influenced from d20 Sanity to Unknown Armies. So if nothing else, consider this gaming anthropology, a look at one of the common ancestors of modern gaming.

The book doesn't look terribly modern or professional. Part of this is that they are going for an “archaic” look, but partly this is because compared to the 90s output of TSR, White Wolf, or FASA, this is pretty much a garage printing. The main credits are for Sandy Petersen for writing most of the 1983 text, and for Lynn Willis for writing most of the fifth edition text. Why the 1983 text? I don't really know. That's the second edition, but considering how hard it is to get your grubby hands on either a first edition boxed set from 1981 or a limited run “designer's edition” from 1982, I assume that Lynn Willis happened to have a 2nd edition boxed set to crib off of, and was citing it so it's not plagiarism. There's also a quite extensive sidebar that cites exactly what every minor contributor contributed, which would be really helpful if CoC was the kind of game where the fans expected the opinions of individual writers to matter. As is, it just seems like a kind of nice thing to do. They also namecheck a bunch of mythos fiction that they are referencing with permission running from 1932 to 1993. I think it important to note that the amount that is being used from these books would constitute fair use, and they don't have to do this. But they want to, and I am personally OK with it.


Playtesting happened! Seemingly some time in the early 80s or late 70s.

There are playtesters credited, but they are divided into two groups: the “Utah playtesters” for the first edition, and the “Chaosium playtesters.” The Chaosium playtesters apparently included a single keeper and a pile of disposable bodies players, one of whom was Lynn Willis – who went on to write most of the text in this edition. Notably absent of course, is any apparent playtesters of any new ideas that might have come up in the decade and a half between the first Chaosium releases and this book.

They also acknowledge that Call of Cthulhu was originally a RuneQuest hack based on the original 1978 engine.

Acknowledgments wrote:Mark Morrison has remarked that when he wishes to see how some problem of physical action is handled in a game, he turns first to RuneQuest. He is not the only one.

Yes. It fucking says that. The rules in your hand are a thin coat of paint on an incomplete near-past hack on a trippy and experimentalist fantasy RPG from the seventies, but that's OK because you could always write your own fucking rules based on 1970s fantasy RPGs that would probably be just as good! Really. The game straight up tells you that you might as well go back and recompile the engine from its FORTRAN-era source code. If Call of Cthulhu wasn't a game that relied heavily on description and atmosphere to the point of most players ignoring the rules entirely – that would be a deal breaker right there. As is, the essential frank admission that they haven't really had a new idea or bothered to flesh out their game system in nearly twenty years makes the question of why you'd bother picking up this edition if you already had one of the earlier printings a pretty open one.

Chaosium has always benefited in that it's more or less a licensed game for a unique collaborative fiction effort which has a huge fanbase. This means there's a very diverse and dedicated audience built right in, there's a shit-ton of art they can probably license that goes directly with the setting, and they can do one-off projects like the Call of Cthulhu Fiction line which is probably more profitable than the game itself.


Which means they've never had to do a sex supplement!

Anyway, this book being 28-ish years in, there's actually a vast supply of art just sitting around in the archives for them to use, and unlike with D&D or FASA they have no qualms with using it nor does it look especially dated even after 20 years. Or at least, no more dated than the layout and typography. Seriously, I don't know how they did it, when White Wolf tries to make a book look "old skool" it looks like hammered shit, but Chaosium makes it look like a weird but somehow appropriate blend of computer-aided design and I-did-this-in-my-basement-with-a-letterpress-and-xeroxed-it.

The foreword is mostly just Sandy Petersen congratulating himself for how many awards Call of Cthulhu has received. It has in fact received a lot of them. Many of those were even ones it deserved to win. But here's the thing: then as now, industry awards were a sham. And RPGs as a segment of the game industry are very small. Winning an award for best adventure handed out by some guys who help organize a gaming convention is not even as big of an achievement as winning an AVN for “Best Specialty Release – Foot Fetish.” You literally just impressed like three nerds who are bribable with beer. If you sent a sexy lady with a cooler full of beer to
lobby on your behalf, you could probably win yourself an Origins Award, an Enny, and an Indie RPG Award for a new edition of FATAL. Call of Cthulhu has a dedicated following and is probably the only game from its era still standing, but pointing to a shelf covered with participation trophies awarded by your mom is not the way to get that across.

And finally, before we get to the table of contents, we get an alphabetical listing of everyone they could remember who wrote supplemental material. The list of people is crazy long, but it doesn't include the people who wrote Green and Pleasant Land, which is probably for the best but is itself proof that even these massive credits to try to acknowledge everyone in Call of Cthulhu history are themselves incomplete.

The table of contents hasn't changed much in 25 years. I seriously doubt they did more than update the page numbers. I know it seems like I'm trying to turn steak into beef, but you have to understand that CoC is such a constant in the gaming world that pretty much everybody has resisted change on it as much as possible. Don't like the rules? Go make your own home rules. I bet you can get those published in a fanzine. No fanzine? Well, start your own. Hey, you did a good job at that, why don't we put out our own supplement? Sure, let's ask Chaosium for permission.

...and that shit happened. Pagan Publishing is the more gratuitous example, but it's really a DIY system with vast and obscure and twisting branches. Nobody knows all of it, and I really doubt much of it gets used, but it's sort of breathtaking in its sheer scope. I mean, there are two separate fucking spin-offs involving cats, an they were released at about the same time.




This game is insane.

The Call of Cthulhu


That is not dead which can eternal lie.

The game starts off with the full text of H. P. Lovecraft's story, "The Call of Cthulhu." It's what gave the game it's name, but it's still a bold choice, because it's seriously 15 pages of fiction. Even Shadowrun didn't like to go beyond 5-7 pages on the intro fiction. The thing is, this is the entire setting in a nutshell. The game doesn't try to spin this as an alternate 1920s + cults and magic and Elder Gods - you're really just playing in the same world as "The Call of Cthulhu." Encountering horrors, following clues, investigating mysteries, chatting up jailbait flapper girls, drinking to forget the horrors of World War I...whatever works.


Last True Detective still, I promise.

Being primarily based on weird fiction from the 1920s, the Call of Cthulhu game has a lot of historical literature to draw upon. This edition of the book is simply prefaced with a 15 page reprint of an HPL story. We could go into big discussions of literary critique on this, and people have, but basically this is being used as filler text. We have the entire text of The Call of Cthulhu, all three chapters, from 1928, being used as the intro text.

Now obviously, you could do worse. Doing a reprint from a 1928 Weird Tales issue is certainly cheap, and obviously it's decent mood ambiance for Cthulhu-based role playing. One problem I have with it, of course, is that Cthulhu actually appears in that story, and while it's big and scary and a thoroughly bad news giant monster, it very explicitly isn't the team ending wall of madness that Cthulhu has become in the eyes of fans. Putting up this original work is basically just admitting that Great Cthulhu is way overhyped by this game. The god like being described in this book causes you to lose a d100 sanity just to see it and kills d3 investigators per turn. It's a horrible keeper penis insert that you can't possibly defeat or escape from – and yet the story itself involves someone successfully encountering it, beating it up with a boat, and getting away.

I should note that Great Cthulhu does actually kill d3 sailors in that story. But I digress.


Also, the props for this game have gotten nuts.

Next Up: Game System. That's 73 pages of chargen, skill systems, sanity, magic, combat, and game conceits. So... we'll see if we get through it all. This might be a chapter that requires more than one post.

Cthulhu gamers treat the fact that the game hasn't really changed in 30 years as a point of pride. I don't know if it's because it makes it easier to use old adventures (and really they are the best thing about CoC) or a kind of Stockholm syndrome effect. I suspect some combination of the two.

..or the rules are simply good enough for them.

And Runequest 6 was released just last year and is getting very high praise from players and reviewers everywhere. Being from the same kernel as CoC, I suspect it says something positive about Chaosium design prowess.

silva wrote:Oh, and Runequest 6 was released just last year and is getting very high praise from players and reviewers everywhere. Being from the same kernel as CoC, I suspect it says something positive about Chaosium design prowess.

D&D 4e was released six years ago, and D&D 5e is being released this year, both to some very high praise from many players and reviewers. That says nothing about WotC's design prowess (or lack thereof) and everything about their marketing prowess and the playerbase's lack of a clue.

D&D 4e and 5e are far different from its first incarnation.

Runequest and CoC are very similar to it.

What design do you think is better ? The one who changes everytime, or the one which endured decades ? If this isnt a sign of quality of a design in fulfilling its player base wants and goals, I dont know what is.

Two silva posts and no mention of "evocative"? Thank god for small miracles.

I would say "the one that managed to hold the top slot for over a decade".

There actually was a narrow window, where RQ3 was really selling damn well and TSR wasn't putting out anything decent, where RQ looked like it might really go some where. Then Avalon Hill decided that the "at least one product per year" in the agreement with Chaosium really meant "At most one product per year".

silva wrote:What design do you think is better ? The one who changes everytime, or the one which endured decades?

How are you always the worst? That is verbatim the christian apologetics argument against believing in science. Because science changes but the Bible never does, so doesn't that prove it's better? Well the short answer to that is that you're retarded but the long answer is that change and progress are signs of strength not signs of weakness. If you spend 30 years doing something you should be better at it at the end than when you started. If you don't change or improve over the course of 30 years then you are an embarrassment to yourself and others. When Ray Bradbury says "Being a writer is simple. Write a thousand words a day and after a million words you'll be a writer" he's assuming you don't write the same fucking words the whole time. Change and improvement are what makes Ray Bradbury a good author and Jack Nicholson a bad one.

kzt wrote:There actually was a narrow window, where RQ3 was really selling damn well and TSR wasn't putting out anything decent, where RQ looked like it might really go some where. Then Avalon Hill decided that the "at least one product per year" in the agreement with Chaosium really meant "At most one product per year".

Yeah, this. And RQ3 is the most criticized version (mongoose dont count). RQ2 and now RQ6 have much higher acceptance by the player base.

Game System
Introduction

Your musical accompaniment will be Master's Hammer, because you need more Czech Metal in your life.


Eventually we're going to have to stop just putting up pictures of Cthulhu doing a Godzilla impersonation. But today is not that day.

The game system chapter goes on for 73 pages of stream of consciousness stuff. We'll keep going until we decide to stop and start up again in the next post. This chapter has its own introduction. Or rather, the introduction to the book is crammed in to the game system chapter. This is because this book looks like something hacked together by a fly-by-night outfit in 1984 rather than a millennial edition of one of the best known RPGs. Production values are shocking low, and having stuff in the game system chapter which very clearly does not belong is just the tip of the iceberg.


The iceberg also contains monsters.

It's not exactly clear where the Introduction actually ends. Headings are not used in any consistent fashion that I can see, and the minisections just get gradually more game related until we are listing game terms and talking about miniatures. But we start out talking about how August Derleth contributed a lot to the early Cthulhu Mythos (including naming it), and that since then a metric asstonne of people have picked up this particular ball to run with it. But remember: we're all copying HPL, even when the specific story elements we're using were written by later fans after Lovecraft was dead.

We are indeed. A fair bit of this is minutiae for Mythos fans who are, of course, the core audience. Sandy Petersen never imagined this would ever be anyone's first RPG, so most of the basic terminology should be familiar to roleplayers - roleplaying, players, characters, dice (singular die), etc. The major distinctions are that Mister Cavern is referred to as the Keeper (I think that was originally "Keeper of Secrets" but I think that was one of the few things dropped at some point), and the player characters are Investigators rather than Adventurers or Shadowrunners or Kindred or what have you.


In Call of Catthulhu, the Keeper is known as the Cat Herder, and the PCs are Player Cats.

The advice to starting Keepers is actually amazingly practical and to-the-point, provided that it amounts to "read the fucking book, pick a scenario, read the scenario, photocopy the important bits and have fun."

With the purchase of this book and some dice, you have everything you need to play the game.

This is kind of important, because it's true. Most people think of CoC games as going like this:



...but you don't get that just reading the book.

While Call of Cthulhu 5.6th edition lacks a “what is roleplaying?” section per se, it does deliver its manifesto through the expedient of a series of essays about how to play the game. The MC is called the Keeper, the player characters are called the Investigators, and the book seems to think that you're probably going to rotate keeper duties because it's a lot of work. Which is interesting to me primarily because their list of playtesters from the beginning of the book claimed that they only had one keeper and a big roster of potential players that they rotated through. Rotating MCs was considered extremely standard in the seventies, so we're probably looking at some exposed 1970s source code again.


Sometimes someone just seems suited to be the keeper.

The game stresses its nature as one of cooperative storytelling. Indeed, it even has a heading called “Cooperation.” But the basic structure it espouses is still “Player says their character wants to do something, MC decides whether they automatically succeed or fail or get to roll dice, and then the MC narrates what happens.” So while the book presents the keeper as a benevolent, cooperative dictator, he's still a dictator. The book has very little confidence in its mechanics, and asks that you use them from time to time to build tension and keep people honest – not to actually attempt to use the mechanics themselves to inform the world simulation.

If the investigators do things stylishly and memorably, keeper and players alike have won.

Old Man Henderson has won.

The important thing here is that Call of Cthulhu is one of those games where even at the highest conceptual level, the PCs are ants in a world of blind, thoughtless giants that don't care where they tread. They can defeat all the cults and burn all the books and commit genocide against Innsmouth, and they're still going to be mortal men and women that grow old and die and the Great Old Ones will remain. So even if you win, it is only a temporary reprieve, and your only reward is likely to be an extended vacation at the bottom of a bottle or a sanitarium. That sounds like a bit of a downer, but it's actually immensely freeing in some respects. Players tend to focus on the now, not "leveling up," and most player character occultists and would-be-wizards are just conceptual sketches that never actually appear and muck up play.

Of course, there are any number of supplemental rules and spinoff-games specifically to address this, but we'll save that for the magic chapter.

Before we even get to the die rolling bits, we get some discussion on how it's nice to be scared sometimes and also how 1920s fiction is kind of absurd in a way and you can make fun of it if you like. And about how the 1920s themselves were pretty racists, sexist, and vile by modern standards and you can either work with that or whitewash it as you like.



The 1920s were actually kind of vile.

It's not exactly a “Rule Zero” declaration, but within the “Game System” section we get declarations that we can take or leave: the mechanics, the setting, the mythos, the time period, and even the tone. We get official blessing to not roll dice to play low comedy adventures that aren't in the 1920s and also ignore the realities of whatever time period we're using instead in reference to books that aren't even part of the Cthulhu Mythos and this is still considered “playing Call of Cthulhu” according to this book. And we haven't even gotten to the point in the book where it tells you what kind of dice to roll. Or you know, not roll.

This helps explain why Call of Cthulhu fans generally look at you like you've just said water is wet when you complain that the game as written has problems.


This is in many ways in keeping with the fact that the Cthulhu Mythos covers a lot of ground. It's been in everything from pornographic comics and films to light-hearted webcomics, in every possible setting and era, and there are indeed settings which convert the already loose mechanics to do everything from Dark Ages Europe (Dark Ages Cthulhu), Roman Empire (Cthulhu Invictus), 1890s (Cthulhu by Gaslight), 1940s/1950s (Atomic-Age Cthulhu), 1980s/1990s (Cthulhu Now), into weird futures and game concepts like Delta Green (Cthulhu + Spies).

...and this attitude is why we call CoC a "Rules Lite" game - not because it doesn't have rules or anything, but because players and Keepers alike tend to actively ignore them - and are often ignorant of them. Not hard when there's so much material, so spread out, and they actively encourage you not to focus on the fiddly numbers.

Expectations & Play


Unless you play it as a light hearted romantic farce, which is apparently also an option.

Are we out of the introduction? I don't even know. Probably not, because we aren't to the next point that gets called out on the table of contents. But it does seem to get an abnormally large header at the start of a page. I think the typesetter is trying to sap my sanity, but in any case, we wanted to use that demotivator. Anyway, it's still before we've actually gotten to the in-game assumption that you roll percentile dice to determine whether you succeed at mundane tasks, and we get a walk-through on how investigation works and contrasting points with “other role playing games,” which I guess we are assumed to be familiar. Despite the fact that I know several people for whom Call of Cthulhu was their first RPG experience, the book itself doesn't seem to even consider that you haven't already played Dungeons & Dragons. Call of Cthulhu tells you straight up that you are going to fail and die.

Expectations & Play wrote:The majority of other-world monstrosities are so terrible and often so invulnerable that choosing open combat almost guarantees a gruesome end for an investigator.

The suggested solution is for players to accumulate information, comb crime scenes for clues, make a plan, use the diverse skills of your team mates, avoid gunfights at all costs, and complete the adventure via deus ex machina. Or in other words: do everything you can possibly think of to stay as far away from doing a single fucking thing that interacts with the rules in any way. Which considering how well the rules work, is good advice. But seriously: how did the authors not see that this was a problem after they had been telling people to do this for fifteen years?



There is a learning curve with Call of Cthulhu in that respect: players are not good at handling asymmetric threats, and get frustrated if they do something stupid and ineffective and you make clear that their efforts are, in fact, worthless and doomed. This is also why established players have a preference for dynamite.

None of which is necessarily in any of the Mythos fiction. Some of it is, a lot of it is not. Depends on the writer. August Derleth had entire harems parties of "investigators" armed with star-stones and Elder Signs flying around the world (and beyond) on Nightgaunts and dropping a nuke on R'lyeh, but he's rather the exception.

On the other hand, you don't get a lot of this either.

There's a lot of advice given here to the investigators that amounts to "don't try to fight the Deep Ones with a shovel, you will lose."

Having pontificated about how Call of Cthulhu is not a power fantasy, and subtly suggesting that you may wish to ignore some or all of the text in the book, we finally get to a discussion of what dice and stuff are actually used in this game if you stoop so low as to actually use the game rather than playing magical teaparty. This is ironically the first part of the book where it admits that a player might be new to roleplaying and have no experience with non-cubic dice. It wants you to know that you mostly use D100, D6, and D8, but that you may also have to roll D20, D4, D3, or D2s. It wants you to roll a D6 and a D10 together to generate 1-20 results, because having actual twenty sided dice to generate 1-20 results is too high tech.


A Call of Cthulhu game in progress. It may call for some weird dice, but whatever.

And now I think we are in another subsection, but it starts in the middle of the Playing Aids section, and there's a thing where it calls time to explain game terms (including “PERCENTILE”) right between telling you about percentile dice and eight sided dice. This is a fucking typesetting nightmare, and it looks like an alpha copy of a first edition rather than a second revision of the fifth edition of a nearly twenty year old game. If they honestly felt that the rules were so unimportant that they didn't need to be fixed or improved upon, at the very least they should have new chapter sections begin halfway through the description of the fucking dice. Anyway, while this gets dragged out over four pages because of the intermission, it does an absolutely atrocious job of telling you what the core mechanic of the game is. In fact, it's not in the roll descriptions at all. You have to check the glossary in the middle, where it tells you that we're using d100 roll under in the entry called “SUCCESS.” Even in the “PERCENTAGE” description it just tells you that a roll of 00 is an automatic failure – but it doesn't tell you if a 00 is a failure because it's a zero and too low or because it's a hundred and too high. To find out that information you have to go to the die description. Keep in mind, all this shit is hidden in a glossary created by a typewriter explosion that includes entries for “PSYCHIATRIC DRUGS” and “OUTER GODS.”

Actually, according to the headers at the top of the odd-numbered pages we're still in the introduction, but whatever.

Players of Call of Cthulhu have, generally speaking, no idea what the possibility is of rolling anything; most of them don't care. There is in fact an argument over on Facebook right now where someone is arguing that it is better for CoC to have incomprehensible dice mechanics, because it is more in keeping with the tone of the game.

I was thinking about dice mechanics lately. I prefer D20 because it has a very simple dice mechanic (as opposed to dice pools and different dice types as ratings). However I was thinking about Call of Cthulhu and I realized that this is one game that should NOT have a clear dice mechanic. I was thinking that it would add to the anxiety level for the game if the players didn't really understand their chances to do something.
For example I have a dice that has weird symbols on it instead of numbers. Or what about using different dice mechanics based on how sane you are. Start with a d20 at first and then as it goes down it gets more and more confusing. You could have i- ching used at some point! Maybe start using tarot cards and interpret the results!

The big thing is, of course, skills on a percentile system. Because people like to know they have a 35% chance of making a given roll, even though that is a terrible chance that you pay real points for. But I'll let Frank rant about it.

I don't think I really can accurately convey how fucking batshit this glossary is. Considering how everyone treats Call of Cthulhu like a rules-lite, the shit here is amazingly math intensive. I don't think I've ever played in a game that bothered with half this shit. I think I need to just quote some of this shit:

Game Terms wrote:IMPALE: a D100 result which is one-fifth or less of a character's chance to hit with the attack. An impale represents a particularly successful attack, and consequently two damage rolls for that attack are made. Most keepers accept the idea as inherent in a skill roll – one-fifth or less of a skill represents a fine performance, and it should earn some extra reward.

Game Terms wrote:Percentiles may be added or subtracted from each other: thus subtracting ten percentiles from 60% yields 50%, while subtracting ten percent from 60% yields 54%.

Game Terms wrote:SPOT RULE: in the rules chapter, several pages are devoted to minor rules covering special situations.

Game Terms wrote:FIRST AID: this skill and the medicine skill can restore 1D3 hit points to an injured character. See also Healing.

But if you just ignore all this shit, it's a rules-lite.

Keep in mind, this is all just delivered in an alphabetized rant. The choices of what rules to include or not include in this rules summary are incomprehensible, many of the terms are unrelated to the rules per se, and they are all just stuck in wherever the cruel dictates of the alphabet decree them to go. Except for the terms which are jumbled in with their synonyms who get alphabetized by whichever word the author likes the best (so “ROUND” is alphabetized under “C” while “ADVENTURE” is alphabetized under “S”).

You would have a very hard time understanding the game by reading this section. And because of that, I have no idea what this section is for. Obviously, the people making this section don't read it or care because they've known all these rules since the Reagan administration – and there's no effort at all made to make this shit even a little bit approachable.

The basic problems of roll under systems are pretty severe – you basically just have tasks you succeed on without rolling, tasks you fail on without rolling, and a die roll that pretty much gives binary outputs that are largely independent of the task at hand – that's not a lot of room for variant skill and variant difficulty to touch each other. But Call of Cthulhu is primitive and shitty even by those standards. Remember: their critical skill success mechanic is an incomplete rule for causing internal organ damage with piercing weapons from a 1970s D&D hack. Really. That's not even a fucking joke. If you roll critical success on a Pharmacy skill roll, that's called an “Impale” and the Keeper is supposed to maybe try to recompile something for that to mean based off the exposed source code lying around in the combat section. Words fucking fail me.

I think the glossary is something added as the editions added up; it's the kind of thing you'd get from somebody that heard games had glossaries at the front these days but didn't actually have any understanding about how glossaries in World of Darkness or Shadowrun actually work. It also doesn't help that unlike other games, CoC never needed to make up much in the way of specialize, pretentious language - that came prepackaged with the Mythos. So while White Wolf's version of this game would talk about how you have a personalized reservoir of Tau or Phlegm to fuel your Mysteries and other abilities....well, Chaosium doesn't do things that way. Hell, there's really not much worldbuilding beyond the shit in the short stories and novels, until you get to some of the later products like the TCGs and Arkham Horror.


We've come a long way, baby.

All the fiddly dice-mechanic bits remind me of nothing so much as Unknown Armies, which of course Frank and I both assume just started out as a homebrewed version of CoC. So I'm not even sure how much of this stuff was added on over the years, or how much was there from the beginning. I'm fairly certain nobody actually uses all this crap, because I can't remember a single time people rolled for impalement.

A lot of the references would make more sense as things to put in the back of the book. In today's world, they would probably rather be links on the website rather than being in the book at all. I mean, it's interesting that there's a Finnish translation of Call of Cthulhu called Cthulhun Kutsu, and possibly helpful to have contact information for local Finnish Lovecraft guru TK-kustannus Oy. But, since I don't Finnish, I'm not even sure if that whole thing is a name, and I further posit that if you are reading this English copy in my lap, you probably don't need this information.

There's a section on "figures" which I think is a direct call-out to the fact that D&D has tried to emphasize miniatures and positioning and crap in every edition. Possibly because lead has a higher profit margin, I don't know. That said, Chaosium also sold minis, but was a couple more steps removed from actual miniatures wargaming.


That said, you can entirely buy an entire bag of Cthulhu.

Investigators

It's probably best to have backup investigators. Both because of the lethality of the system and the baroqueness of character generation.

The first thing you see when you get to “Creating Your Investigator” (or perhaps “About Investigators” if you believe the Table of Contents instead of the page heading, because fuck this book) is a two page spread that is supposed to be read clockwise rather than the more boring and traditional method of putting readable information in a “left to right, top to bottom” format. This make character generation a literal spiral into madness, which is at least not false advertising. The actual character sheet has a lot of numbers on it. In fact, it literally has hundreds of numbers on it, because it has counters written in rather than little boxes for you to write your flexi-numbers, and some of those flexi-numbers go to 99. Fucking fuck. But completely non-hyperbolically it has dozens of numbers that are actually important on it. And calculating each number is done by an arcane (and often unique) formula that may include one or more of addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, or comparing a number to an arbitrary chart and getting an output that is then plugged into other equations because things weren't complicated enough using the numbers themselves as the basis for math functions. Also, you have piles of omni points that can be used to buy things that then force you to recalculate other things.

It's difficult to explain in words how fucked up these character sheets are, because they are so unevolved that they communicate in liquid form if not in a solid state (praise Xenu). So I guess we just have to show one of these things:

This character is simplistic and poorly made. Also, I don't think she spent all her points and I don't care.

If you don't like your character, you are encouraged to reroll (and repeat until you get stats you like), because “Rolling up an investigator's characteristics takes only a minute or two. Fully fleshing out an investigator may take half an hour or more.” Because we're playing in the 1970s, and people don't immediately notice that there is something badly wrong with your chargen system if it results in people literally sitting at a table rolling dice over and over again, writing down and then crossing out the results until they get a character who fits what they want their character to look like.

Character gen is cribbed off of RuneQuest which is cribbed off of D&D, which means that in the strange world of 1999 you're still being asked to roll 3d6 in order (more or less), although at least you don't suffer the chance of dying during character creation. It's sort of quaint. Unlike modern RPGs which try to eliminate complicated math like multiplication and negative numbers out of fear of alienating the audience, CoC is still under the impression that we all have pocket protectors and calculator watches or maybe even slide rules. Charts are consulted, points values circled, and little winged silhouettes float unhelpfully around the chart.



It does get easier over time, but it's still a system where you're basically using a random number generator to find a kernel and then deriving all the other stats from that. Which is, you may remember, the exact same shit that Dwarf Fortress does during world generation. If I were making 7th edition, I'd either make it point buy or just cut out the middleman and make an app that rolled basic attributes for you and let you skip straight to "Determine Occupation and Skills."

The attributes themselves are the RuneQuest attributes plus Education. The RuneQuest attributes are D&D attributes where Wisdom has been renamed “Power” and Charisma has been renamed “Appearance,” and there's a Size attribute. The Size attribute was of course familiar to California D&D gamers when some of them made RuneQuest in 1978 because the CalTech rules added it in 1975. These attributes are, frankly, terrible for a modern or near past game. I don't actually care how “strong” a character is in the era of rifles and dynamite, and all these things are gloriously, stupidly unbalanced. And the players of this game don't even care because you're encouraged to just roll until you get the stats you want, so it's all bullshit and there's no game balance or fairness to be had anywhere.

More damningly, stats are still on a 3-18 D&D scale, which is the kind of thing that kind of makes sense when you're rolling attribute checks on a d20, but is completely fucking terrible when your RNG is D100 based. So the game asks you to multiply your stats by 5 and record that separately so you can roll percentiles at them. That is not a joke.

Also, we have hit points like this was a D&D hack, because it is in fact a hack of a hack of a D&D hack. A hack stack that never looked back to track how they were using conventions that were whack and should go to the shack and mack on some new flak. Bologna. Hit points are on their own scale and damage is handled primarily with d6s, because this branch of RPG thought got its start when OD&D was the only D&D and longswords didn't do d8s yet. Note that hit points are fucking terrible at handling gun fights between nominally mundane humans, and rather than write rules that actually work the writers simply look down their noses at you and tell you that you're doing it wrong if this fundamental failure of world emulation comes up in your games.


Call of Cthulhu is too hipster to bother with functional game mechanics.

The important take away from the low-hitpoints thing is that combat is really incredibly deadly in CoC, to the point where it's like everybody is a wizard with 1d4 HP and a holdout that approximates their magic missiles.

Another important takeaway is how influential this stripped-out hack of a system is. As we mentioned, Unknown Armies looks like nothing so much as a gutted version of CoC with more magic, funkier dice mechanics, and a five-fold sanity track. Yellow Dawn uses a bastardized version that goes back to steal some more ideas from AD&D. D20 even got into it with the Sanity mechanics, which we'll get into.


Entire generations of gamers have added shit to the system until they couldn't comprehend it any more, then scrapped it and went back to the well. It's uncanny.


Some occupations are better than others.

The book claims that it does not have “character classes.” If you didn't already play D&D, you would have no idea what the fuck they were talking about. The term isn't defined here, and they don't even tell you that this is a game term from other games. In its place, you have to take an occupation. That's actually more like a 2nd edition AD&D Kit than a true character class. It sets your list of starting skill point expenditure options. The book straight up tells you that you should basically ignore name and flavor of the occupation and just pick an entry with a list of skills you like. Words don't even.

Occupations are basically jobs, although in many cases they also involve a certain status and income level. We'll get into that more later, but the big take-away is that the game is essentially classless. Once you get out of character generation, which Occupation you wrote on your sheet is essentially meaningless. They really might as well suggest you pick the skills you want and roll randomly for how much money you make.


Naturally, many players simply wrote their own Occupations. With blackjack. And hookers.

There is a rundown of creating a sample character named Harvey Walters. It's two pages of dense text, and it doesn't cover everything. The character is incomplete, and I don't even know what the fuck.

To be fair here, all PCs and NPCs in Call of Cthulhu look incomplete. The skills given cannot possibly account for all the skills of an adult bipedal descendant of plains apes. The equipment usually amounts to how much cash you have in your pockets and whatever weapons you tend to be holding at the moment. Vehicles, property, scientific equipment, tools...these all more or less only enter play as the story requires them, and are forgotten soon after. It's very much against the mentality of "monty haul" AD&D or the vast and innumerable equipment lists of Shadowrun. This is another reason why we call it a rules lite game; it doesn't feel complete.

Next Up: Rules and Skills. Yeah, we haven't actually gotten to the “real” rules yet.

Dean wrote:

silva wrote:What design do you think is better ? The one who changes everytime, or the one which endured decades?

How are you always the worst?

One word: kalashnikov. The AK-47 is considered one of the best and most reliable rifles ever, still seeing widespread use today and with no sign of retiring anytime soon. All because its design is so good it didnt need constant reformulations, just minor tweaks here and there.

BRP is the AK-47 of gaming. Greg Stafford should have his portrait in Kremlin.

Some occupations are better than others

Can you elaborate, please?

silva wrote:One word: kalashnikov. The AK-47 is considered one of the best and most reliable rifles ever, still seeing widespread use today and with no sign of retiring anytime soon. All because its design is so good it didnt need constant reformulations, just minor tweaks here and there.

BRP is the AK-47 of gaming. Greg Stafford should have his portrait in Kremlin.

Bull.

...and this attitude is why we call CoC a "Rules Lite" game - not because it doesn't have rules or anything, but because players and Keepers alike tend to actively ignore them - and are often ignorant of them. Not hard when there's so much material, so spread out, and they actively encourage you not to focus on the fiddly numbers.

CoC has survived because the setting is evocative. It's the reason Rifts had any success. The gaming community is a niche and inbred lot that gets incredibly defensive of any critique of their game of choice.

Longes wrote:

Some occupations are better than others

Can you elaborate, please?

We'll get into it more in the relevant section, but you've got some Occupations with key skills and you've got some Occupations with higher income than others...and sometimes those overlap. We'll go into it, promise.

CoC has survived because the setting is evocative. It's the reason Rifts had any success.

I wouldnt say so. Both Runequest and BRP use the same rules kernel as CoC and both are active with new editions released recently.

silva wrote: One word: kalashnikov. The AK-47 is considered one of the best and most reliable rifles ever, still seeing widespread use today and with no sign of retiring anytime soon. All because its design is so good it didnt need constant reformulations, just minor tweaks here and there.

BRP is the AK-47 of gaming. Greg Stafford should have his portrait in Kremlin.

It's one of the most reliable, but I wouldn't call it one of the best. The accuracy is shit. It's popular in the third world because it's cheap, and easy to maintain because replacement parts can be forged by the village blacksmith.

This is a dumb argument anyway, because games are not guns.

I was appalled at the people on the BRP group I'm subscribed to. They brag about how the design is basically the same as the 70s. Refusing to update a system for backwards compatibility is bullshit. It's a product of the ancient past, and it shows. Chaosium blowing me off on a ruleset product is what threw me over the edge.

Game System
Rules & Skills


Some skills you'd think might exist do not.

Players used to games like D&D where there are definite categories of character type and character generation itself can be seen as a kind of a zero sum game...well, CoC is different. Yes, you roll/calculate your attributes, include Sanity, Power, and Education, but aside from that and your skills most of the rest of character generation is basically freeform. You can be any race, sex, background, age, etc. You can start off with whatever degree, scar, mental deficiency, or anal circumference you desire. It's about 98% magical tea party after the rolling and maths exam are done - but there is they 2%, and those are occupations.

Occupations are, nominally, what your character has done in the past to get the skills your character has now. It has nothing to do with their current actual employment, or how the character can develop in the future. Sample occupations given here include Antiquarian, Artist, Clergyman, Criminal, Dilettante, Drifter, Engineer, Journalist, Lawyer, Musician, Parapsychologist, Police Detective, Private Investigator, Professor, Soldier, Tribal Member, and Zealot...and that's really just scratching the surface, considering the new occupations offered in many products.

In rules terms, occupations are only relevant with regard to what skills they allow you to buy off the bat. Each occupation has eight skills associated with it, and gets EDU x 20 skill percentiles to distribute among them, then a further INT x 10 skill percentiles they can distribute among whatever they want.

The big takeaway here is that your occupation determines, in large part, your starting skills...and unlike in other games, skills aren't dependent on attributes to any degree. So if you want to game the system, in any way, you want to have the highest EDU and INT that you can, and you want to pick an occupation that has the skills you want to max out. For example, the only occupation listed in edition 5.6 with the Handgun skill is Criminal (although others can take it as an option). This doesn't mean your character is a criminal; heck, it doesn't even mean that your character ever was a criminal. It just means that when they were writing up the Policeman Occupation, they decided the go-to combat abilities were Grapple and (optional!) Martial Arts.

So, if you want to be a bad-ass combatant, you basically have to pick your preferred weapon ahead of time, and it's basically impossible to be very proficient with more than one or two forms of combat. The same gist goes for other characters, of course. Doctors of Medicine tend to be important characters both because they can heal injuries and, if they max out Medicine and Psychoanalysis, act as Psychiatrist to the rest of the party.

If you want to be a wizard, you're screwed...mostly. Tomes are placed at the whims of the Keeper, so you never know if you've got the right ancient language. The Occult skill isn't actually good for learning or casting spells....in the main game. Parapsychologists never develop psychic powers...in the main game. But ah, you get into the supplements, and it's a different story. The ludicrously expensive Golden Dawn sourcebook, for example, is famed for it's detailed magic system. Well, that's a lie. It's not particularly detailed, and it's not particularly good - but hey, it's a justified system for letting player characters pick up a few spells, based on skills like Occult and Credit Rating, and that's a lot more than the main book.


Seriously, too much fucking money.

Income is determined randomly in this edition; in earlier editions it was dependent on Occupation. The game advises you not to fixate on income or dollar amounts, but that's probably because having a Drifter with an annual income of $10,000 and $50k in assets in the 1890s seems a bit silly.



Somewhat likewise, whereas a game like GURPS or Shadowrun would give you a big pile of points and tell you to build a list of your contacts and the groups you belong to...that's all MTP in Call of Cthulhu.

The end result is, any given group of investigators is not guaranteed to have the minimal essential skills for any particular investigation (although later games like Trail of Cthulhu would address this). There is no guarantee the books will be in a language you read, and trying to karate chop a shoggoth is not going to work. There's no set abilities - not even Shadowrun's general system of archetypes like hacker, magician, rigger, street samurai, face - so a typical game ends up very Buffy-esque Scooby Gang, with a couple bookworms, some muscle, and one guy that got lost and is playing a bootlegger or something.

The big heading for the Rules & Skills section promises us: “Movement; game time; percentile dice rolls; injury and healing; combat; using and improving skills; spot rules for injuries; firearms; definition of game skills.” That is an eclectic mix, and really quite ambitious for 21 pages. This begins with a half page mescaline experience called “Movement.” Now personally, I didn't remember that Call of Cthulhu had any rules for movement, I just remember that shit being all magical teaparty. Reading through this, I can see that my memory was basically correct. There aren't really any movement rules and most of the text is taken up with a manifesto for what movement rules should be like were any to be made.

The idea is that movement rules should be fast and loose and give relative speeds rather than absolute ones, because people can walk or sprint and sometimes you're concerned with big pieces of time (and thus long distances) and sometimes you're concerned with small pieces of time (and thus short distances). There's a sort of hand wavy description of maybe having a tiger gain “two units” on a human. But these aren't rules. These are like the stenographer's notes from a conversation of what movement rules should be like if they were to be written down.


This sort of action seems like it would be important enough to have rules.

And while this goes a fair distance to explaining why I didn't know they even existed (what with them not existing), this in no way lets Call of Cthulhu off the hook from having rules for this shit. The game is trying to sell itself as one in which you spend a lot of time running from monsters and very little time fighting monsters. So it's actually pretty insulting to have the entire movement rules just be “the keeper will ad hoc decide whether you can get someplace in a round.”


It would be like telling people they could play Daphne Blake, and then not having rules for escaping from monsters. And I do mean exactly like that.

Game time is fictional: it has nothing to do with real time.

Like movement, time rules in this game amounts to "Look, we're not going to nail you down on this, just do what seems reasonable and works for your game." The exception is combat, which we'll get to in a few pages, which goes by Combat Rounds - because this is indeed a roleplaying game of the 70s, 80s, and more. This does nominally interact with the "Action" subsystem, but calling those rules a "system" might be generous. Again, it's a suggestion.

...and the more you look at it, all the handwavium that is time and movement in this game, the sheer fluidity involved, you wonder why they didn't cut the crap altogether and just truly make it a rules-lite game with a fraction of the page count.

Routine physical and intellectual actions in routine circumstances always succeed. There is no need to roll skill dice to walk or run, to talk or see or hear, nor is there reason to roll dice for ordinary use of a skill. But the routine may become extraordinary in a moment.

Your jambox is now his... by way of our actions.

The big elephant in the room as far as things not really working very well is the idea of “Automatic Actions.” The concept is that if an action is “routine” you don't have to roll and simply succeed. However, what is or is not “routine” is dependent on how skilled you are. So mixing up a dose of morphine might be “routine” for a pharmacist and not routine for some random dude off the street. But the game doesn't have a checkbox to determine whether you're a pharmacist or not. You just have skill numbers, which are rated from 1 to 99. So in order to mix up that morphine, you have to convince your keeper that whatever number you happen to have is enough to make that task routine for your character. What number will your keeper decide is the cutoff point? 5? 35? 85? I don't fucking know. I don't even know who your keeper is.

Note that if you don't get the benefit of being able to declare an action to be routine (and succeed automagically), you have to roll under your skill. And peoples' skills are very small numbers. The sample characters in the back only have a couple skills between them that are over 50%. So if a task isn't routine, you are almost certainly more than likely to fail. Some skills start at 1, and other skills start at some larger value, but in most cases that just shifts the numbers the keeper expects your character to have in order to count them as skilled. Astronomy starts at 1% and History starts at 20%, and keepers know this and adjust their assumptions accordingly so that they know that a History of 20 is unskilled but an Astronomy of 20 represents some amount of skill. How much skill is anyone's fucking guess. But it represents some amount, and if you have an Astronomy of 20, the keeper will allow you to auto-succeed on some tasks that an untrained person wouldn't be able to. But of course, if it actually came to a die roll, you'd still fail 8 times in 10.

This is sadly the core mechanic of most of the game: trying to convince the keeper that your completely undefined numbers are high enough that it would be reasonable for your character to be able to succeed at a task you want done. It's like Amber Diceless, but there isn't even a reference point for what any of the skill levels might possibly mean.

In practice, this is even more complicated than it sounds, because of secret rolls. Now, we haven't run into any part of the rules in Call of Cthulhu yet that covers "secret rolls" behind the Keeper's Shield, particularly on a cloth pad that muffles the sound of the die or dice (I always just used the golf ball d100, but some people like the two d10s).


We don't talk about the d1000 dreidel.

...but lots of fucking Keepers do it. Which means that you can take an action, not be told you're going to have to roll dice for it, and fucking fail. Which is the sort of shit you expect in Shadowrun or D&D, but not quite so much in Call of Cthulhu.

Extraordinary Actions are, honestly, the second elephant in the room, and they are the reason that some skills are better than others.

Simply put, if you are doing anything “actionish,” you have to roll dice. Whether it's part of your idiom or not. The game seems to think this means that you will be therefore disincentivized to be in combat or car chases, but actually it makes skill points spent on action skills like shooting and piloting simply better than skill points spent on other things like history or accounting. Even if you have a lot of accounting based adventures, most of your uses of the skill are going to simply be to convince the keeper that you have enough of it that you don't have to roll. Meanwhile, even if shotguns only comes up every couple of sessions, you'll still be rolling it a fuck tonne of times each time it comes up.


If you try any of this, you have to roll die. Lots of dice.

We complained about this same effect in Unknown Armies, which considering that it's obviously a derivative game is not surprising. The thing that bothers me here is that Call of Cthulhu fans and authors and fan-authors have been claiming that this setup disincentivizes investment into combat skills for over thirty years. But they have to have noticed that in actual play, people roll their firearms skills a shit tonne more than they roll their academics skills and that therefore this entire framework has exactly the opposite effect that it is claimed to have. Indeed, a few pages later they have a quarter page essay on what skills people are most useful, where they sort of admit that firearms is pretty OK. And yet, despite having obviously noticed that their entire framework for encouraging people to avoid dumping skill points and money into weapons and playing the game like D&D doesn't fucking work, they haven't changed the strategy at all. They just wax more poetic about how the monsters are going to fuck you up if you try to fight them, which is an elder gods damned lie and also totally ineffective because it just makes players double down on explosives and marksmanship.


Characters have a strong tendency to look like this, which is a demonstrable failure of the stated goal of the incentives.

Basically, the bottom line is that having a History of 85 instead of 75 is essentially worthless, because the primary purpose of History skill points is to convince the MC that you don't have to roll, and there are damn few MCs that would make you roll a check at 75 who wouldn't make you roll a check at 85. Meanwhile, a Shotguns of 85 instead of 75 is a real and substantial increase in offensive output. And while this is true and demonstrably true, and has real effects on how people play the game, the game designers' official stance on this is and has always been that if you simply don't tell this to players, that maybe they'll act like it wasn't true. The idea of actually simply changing the system so that it supports the kinds of play they claim to want hasn't been seriously considered since Carter was president.

It also doesn't help in that while you might go through an entire game without rolling your Library Use 25% skill (and yet still use the library), every action skill like Shotgun or Pilot has to be rolled every time it is used. At the other end of the spectrum are people that dump 10% into a lot of skills just so that they can say they're proficient with a number of skills - because Nodens help you if you need Electrical Repair and nobody in the group fucking has it. Likewise, it's a lot better to improve a skill starting at 10% than trying to improve it from 1% during play...which brings us to character advancement.


Call me Jones, boy.

If you succeed at using a skill during an adventure, your Keeper may allow you to roll a skill check at the end of the adventure. This is a d100 roll; if it is less than your current skill, you roll d10 and add that many percentiles to your skill. This is basically the worst experience system ever devised, because the lower your skills are the less likely you are to succeed and get a skill check, and the higher your skills are the less likely you are to succeed at the skill check and see any actual fucking improvement. It's supposed to encourage you to invest moderately heavily in a bunch of skills and then try to work them in to every fucking adventure, and you're still not going to max anything. Good luck trying to get new skills, by the way.

If, by some miracle, you get 90% or more in a skill, you regain 2d6 SAN. Congrats on gaming the system. You've earned it.

I will say that RuneQuest's learning by doing system was a shit sandwich in the original context, and in a game with a lot of academic skills it makes even less sense. We've had discussions on how the learning-by-doing created stupid incentives and rewarded dumb behavior. But for academic skills you can't even make an argument that it makes any in-world sense at all. You get asked a question about the French revolution in an important situation... and this changes your chance of knowing about Aztecs in a future scenario? The actual fuck?

Cthulhu Mythos skill, of course, goes up completely differently - and I don't know why they have never just adapted the skill check system in a similar way, so you can just take a night course at the university or something and increase your Speak Language (Enochian) +1d10%. It would make sense, right? But maybe that supposes longer campaigns than players are used to. It is such an obvious thing, several games derived from CoC do it more or less that way, but not CoC itself. In fact, CoC even has, hidden in its Skills section, rules for training skills up - but it encourages you not to use them.

I sort of skipped it, but just in case you were feeling nostalgic for big-ass tables where you have to look down one column and then another, never fear! Because Call of Cthulhu has the Resistance Table. The idea is if you're opposing one attribute against another attribute (normally this is just a POW vs. POW thing, but I guess it would cover arm wrestling or chess - the example given is STR vs. SIZ for doing a dead lift)...you compare the attributes on the table, find the number, and try to roll under it on a d100. THis is supposed to be 50% if the attributes are evenly matched.

Much can be said of the resistance table, and much has been. It is quite simply the worst implementation of opposed checks in any game system ever.


This is an entire page, and it doesn't make any more sense in context.

It's worse than A Time of War. It's worse than Masquerade. It's just fucking garbage. Even games which require people to compare results of subtracting rolls from variable target numbers are better than this shit.

If you go into combat in Call of Cthulhu, you may arguably be said to have already lost. This applies whether you're getting into a slap-fight with a drunk prostitute or wrasslin' a ghoul. Hit points are tiny (10-14 is average), firearms are ludicrously dangerous (when you can hit something with them), and you automatically fall unconscious if you HP goes down to 1 or 2 - and that's not counting being stunned, going into shock, or any other of the many and baroque possibilities of combat. The sad thing though isn't that combat is always deadly (though it often is), it's that just by getting into combat you have failed at life. It is entirely possible for two character to engage in fisticuffs who have no appreciable combat skills and their STR is so low that they damage modifier is actually negative. Can you imagine the tedium of two characters with an effective skill of 10% and who do 1d6 - 1d4 damage on the rare occasion one actually manages to connect with the other? The rest of the table might as well go grab a fucking beer.

For all the claims of Call of Cthulhu being “not about combat,” the Rules & Skills section is literally half combat by page count.

From injury to weapon damage, the combat section is ten pages. And of course there's also the stuff about combat time, the surreal buck passing about how they should get around to writing some rules for combat movement, and the combat skills. All together, more of the “rules” are about combat than all other things combined.

However, while there are a lot of “spot rules,” the core engine is just shitty 1970s RuneQuest based horse shit. You get little rules about how cavalry sabres can't impale and sword canes use the same skill as rapiers (these two facts are not both listed under the heading “Swords”). But really, this doesn't even read like a set of rules – it's like a Torah. Call of Cthulhu uses an old engine that does an atrociously bad job of fantasy adventure gaming and is even worse in any other genre; but more importantly this ruleset is incomplete. Keepers are expected to compile new rules from the old kernel whenever called for, and sometimes these newly compiled “rules” become codified and placed into supplemental books or even new editions of the core book. It's basically like Rabbinical law.

Now to an extent, all RPGs are like that. The spirit rules I wrote into Street Magic are just expansions and edits on some house rules for Shadowrun 4th edition that I put online and got positive feedback on. Every “official” author is just an elevated fanfiction writer. But at the least that shit got edited. There were design committee meetings and agreements and so on and so on. For Call of Cthulhu, they are literally just writing down the sage opinions of respected keepers as they come up – and contradictions be damned.

Call of Cthulhu wrote:Foil and rapier are similar skills, and a skill increase with one increases the rest.

Call of Cthulhu wrote:Swords, Sabers
A great variety of such weapons exist, some one-handed and some requiring two hands. A skill increase with one does not increase the rest.

These two rulings are on the same fucking page!

Really, I should probably say a few words about the whole concept of individual weapon skills. They are terrible, and shit all over the genre the game is trying to create. The actual effect of having a different skill for pistols and shotguns is that a character who is good with one will not be good with the other. What that incentivizes is for investigators to go to great lengths to have access to the weapons that they happen to be good with at all times. If you have an 85% in Rapier, you're very good with a Rapier and can probably win a lot of fights even with enemies the game claims are beyond you. But if you don't have specifically a rapier, you're just using the default melee numbers for whatever else you get your hands on – and those numbers are bullshit small. This in turn means that players walk around like god damn super heroes with signature weapons that they never ever allow out of their sights, because they know damn well that without their signature weapon they can't fucking defend themselves at all.


He shovels well, but he's essentially helpless with an ax, gun, or spear. Improvised weapons are right the fuck out.

Specific weapons and the skills associated with them go on for a page and a half. It is difficult for me to imagine a rule that more thoroughly failed to do what it was supposed to do. It's supposed to make people despair of being good at combat, but in reality it turns every character into a signature weapon specialist with a fricking uniform. When I was a kid, one of the players in our group elected to have his investigator own more than fifty shotguns to make extra double plus certain that he never ran out. And while that might sound stupid and ridiculous, that kind of behavior is literally and directly incentivized by the rules, to the point that 13 year old boys can figure it out and respond accordingly.

There's a bunch of specialized rules for acid, fire, explosions, falling, healing, and injuries, etc. The long story short: the average injury deals 1d6 damage and you heal 1d3 HP per week; first aid will restore 1d3 HP immediately (if you succeed on your Medicine roll). Healing magic is basically nonexistent for the most part. So, getting injured sucks, lasts a long time, and creative use of the environment is often encouraged.

Poison is it's own bag of worms, since it has a Potency (POT) rating, and forces you to roll on the Resistance table against your CON. At that point I'd prefer to swallow my tongue, but they'd probably make me roll on the Resistance table for that too.


O-Chuul has a higher Constitution than Cthulhu.

Armor in CoC is treated like Damage Resistance, in that it subtracts its value from the damage you take. Therefore, every single character that can manage it wants armor. Start thinking of a good reason why you're wearing your trench helmet with a leather jacket to the library.

Parrying, surprise, knock-outs, dual-wielding, sniping, pray-and-spray, and martial arts are all things with their own rules. I'm guessing they picked those up in the late 80s when complex and unrealistic combat options were de rigueur.

The first thing that the game tells you when it starts to get into the skill definitions is to acknowledge that skills don't have consistent meaning.



Their example is that an amount of Physics knowledge in the present day is more real knowledge than a greater relative amount of Physics knowledge in the past. So if a person in the present has a 60% on their Physics skill, that's supposed to be better in terms of real knowledge than a person in the 20s who has a 90% in Physics skill. So in case you thought it was bad enough that the primary mechanic is trying to convince the keeper that your skill is high enough that you can succeed without rolling, try to wrap your mind around the fact that the keeper has been explicitly told that bigger numbers aren't even necessarily better and that character background is straight up more important for that decision than what the numbers actually are.

The next thing it says is that you can probably work professionally and get paid moneys if you have a 50% in a skill. But maybe not, and arranging paid employment for investigators is supposed to be a mattering of the player and the keeper “conferring” about profession.

GURPS got around different-skills-in-different-eras with Technology Levels, Call of Cthulhu just assumes that there are three main eras of play - 1890s, 1920s, and Now - and that no characters from one era will ever meet or become characters of another era.

Skills themselves have a "base" listed for them. For most skills, this is 1% or 5%; Climb starts at 40%, Credit Rating 15%, Dodge is DEX x 2%, etc. The reason skills start at 1% instead of 0% is because some skills used to start at 0%, but people complained because this meant they could never get a skill check to improve them. Which is ridiculous, because they were never going to get a skill check to improve them anyway, even at 1%, so I don't fucking even. So the only skill that starts out at 0% is the Cthulhu Mythos skill.

Cthulhu Mythos starts out at 0%, and cannot be improved by skill checks or training.

Instead, points in Cthulhu Mythos are gained by encounters with the Mythos which result in insanity, by optional insane insights into the true nature of the universe, and by reading forbidden books and other Mythos writings. On occasion, witnessing some ceremony or participating in some event might prompt a keeper to award Cthulhu Mythos points as well, but that is up to the keeper.

This is, with the ancillary system [Max SAN = (99 - Cthulhu Mythos)], one of the defining, crucial aspects of the Call of Cthulhu game...and it's kinda weird and bullshit in some ways. The thing is, tomes are supposed to be rare and take forever to study and master, but in a given campaign where you might have villain-of-a-week, tomes can add up fairly fast and even the "big" tomes are fairly unimpressive - the complete, unabridged, original Arabic version of the Necronomicon only gives +16% Cthulhu Mythos. Reading tomes is supposed to be a chore, and there's never any guarantee that the spells in them do what you think they're going to do.

Also, there's been a lot of dispute about the "Occult" skill, which is supposed to address real-world occultism, which by most Call of Cthulhu standards isn't supposed to work - dousing the Necronomicon in holy water doesn't cause it to dissolve or anything like that, it just gets the vellum wet. Still, that's not quite enough for some people, so there are some books that improve Occult too, and if you dig in the supplements there are spells and shit that can be cast using Occult.


As I said, you can be a wizard in CoC, but it takes a lot of effort. Also, you need a serious oral sex deficit with the Keeper.

The skill list accumulated over time, and includes things in it that only apply in certain eras. There are notes on how you can't have “pilot fighter jet” before there are fighter jets to fly. Of course, you'd be wasting skill points on such a bizarre niche skill that you'd never get to use anyway, but it's there. The skill list is also not complete, since a lot of those skills in the list are secretly windows into vistas of vast other sub skills that are raised
separately. Like Unknown Armies, there really really aren't enough skill points to go around to cover all these fucking things.

Oh, and remember how there's a different skill for using a khopesh and a kopis? Well, there's a different skill for punching, head butting, and kicking. Combined with the level of assumed combat skill specialization you undergo if you're not an idiot, that leads to:

Yes. Really.

Many of these skills aren't even labeled under the occupations. Fist/Punch for example, is pretty much given here as a default skill, not because there's a Prizefighter occupation.


Dark Ages skills are, thankfully, absent.

Skill descriptions are eclectic, to say the least. Some of them have their own subsystems attached. Loading a blackpowder weapon, for example, requires a successful History roll. They actually feel they need to make the point that with the Martial Arts skill "bullets and projectiles cannot be parried."

One of the most important skills is Library Use (which basically becomes Computer Use in modern games, but whatev). The purpose of LU is to sort through a collection and find something, anything of value. Each use takes 4 hours. This is routinely ignored in play, because of course it's bullshit and arbitrary and nobody actually wants to leave the library empty-handed.

Ilsa never really invested points in her Library Use skill.

Much ado is made over characters “having” skills. I don't know what this means. Most basically, if you “have” a skill, you can perform some tasks with that skill without rolling the dice. Then there are weird skills like Martial Arts that give you access to extra kludgy combat maneuvers if you “have” them. But remember: skills are just on a 1-99 scale. Everyone has every skill. Some people only have a 1% in them, but they still have them. In the earlier editions, a lot more skills started at 0% instead of 1% (in edition 5.6 only Mythos Lore works like that), so it probably made more sense to announce that characters had or did not have certain skills. I mean, it still wouldn't make sense for skills like Law and Accounting that don't start at the bottom, but it would be something.

There are ways to game the Skill system, of course, if you're clever. For example, Other Language (Cat) is totally a fucking skill, and you can be the fucking pet whisperer in your game. It's not specifically listed on the skill chart as an option, but then neither is French. It's one of those skills that crops up in the NPC examples and little spin-off products like Cathulhu.



Anyway, next up is Sanity and other rules.

My sister made a character for this game once. Her investigator's signature combat skill was headbutt at ~70% She sketched a picture of her blood-splattered character wearing a lizard man like a necklace, after she got a critical headbutt and drove her face through his chest.

I should see if she still has that picture.

Ancient History wrote:Game System
Rules & Skills

Also, there's been a lot of dispute about the "Occult" skill, which is supposed to address real-world occultism, which by most Call of Cthulhu standards isn't supposed to work - dousing the Necronomicon in holy water doesn't cause it to dissolve or anything like that, it just gets the vellum wet. Still, that's not quite enough for some people, so there are some books that improve Occult too, and if you dig in the supplements there are spells and shit that can be cast using Occult.

A friend of mine was in a CofC game that Sandy Peterson was running - I think as a con. A character had some very high Occult skill. So that character used his skill to build a protective circle against some decent scale CofC horror (exactly what I forget at this time). So he rolls and gets a really good result. So he has all the other players inside the circle and is convincing the other characters not to break the circle (like with their shotguns and thompsons) while the monster slowly walks around the circle, getting closer and closer.

As the other characters get more and more freaked out the occultist assures assuring the other characters that there is no way the monster can get to them as long as the circle remains intact. The monster stops right in front of occultist and the occultist tries to command it to go away. The monster reaches across the circle, grabs the occultist and bites his head off. Then the monster is torn apart as the other characters shoot the hell out of him at "I rarely miss at this range" range.

The shocked player asks Sandy what went wrong, and Sandy says "Everyone knows magic doesn't work."

kzt wrote: A friend of mine was in a CofC game that Sandy Peterson was running - I think as a con. A character had some very high Occult skill. So that character used his skill to build a protective circle against some decent scale CofC horror (exactly what I forget at this time). So he rolls and gets a really good result. So he has all the other players inside the circle and is convincing the other characters not to break the circle (like with their shotguns and thompsons) while the monster slowly walks around the circle, getting closer and closer.

As the other characters get more and more freaked out the occultist assures assuring the other characters that there is no way the monster can get to them as long as the circle remains intact. The monster stops right in front of occultist and the occultist tries to command it to go away. The monster reaches across the circle, grabs the occultist and bites his head off. Then the monster is torn apart as the other characters shoot the hell out of him at "I rarely miss at this range" range.

The shocked player asks Sandy what went wrong, and Sandy says "Everyone knows magic doesn't work."

The Call of Cthulhu book thinks that this sort of keeper behavior is really clever and pats itself on the back a few times over it. And the truth is that that is the kind of thing that happens in some Lovecraftian short fiction, and it was probably pretty scary.

But you know what? That is fucking bullshit, and pulling something like that in an RPG is grounds for every single player to just get up and walk away. You just told the player that their character's abilities are completely worthless and that they don't really have any meaningful cooperative input into the story. The spring surprise was just "Ha ha! I edited out all of your contributions to the narrative without telling you!" and there's not a lot of reason for the player to bother attempting to contribute anything more after that.

The original creator of the game bargained away the entire social contract of cooperative storytelling to get one cheap scare, and he probably thought that was awesome. If he had a golden goose, the knife would already be in his hand, and he wouldn't even understand why he was poorer later.

-Username17

silva wrote:One word: kalashnikov. The AK-47 is considered one of the best and most reliable rifles ever, still seeing widespread use today and with no sign of retiring anytime soon. All because its design is so good it didnt need constant reformulations

Three words: You're painfully wrong

Thats a picture showing the dozens of major redesigns that have occurred in the Kalishnakov family over the last seven decades. The AK-47 received major changes as early as the 50's and has probably been altered, modified and updated more than any other gun in the world. Ignoring the more varied members of what's called the "Kalishnakov family" and focusing only on the titular "AK" model, the current AK-105 is made of entirely different materials, is 3lbs lighter, fires different ammunition, has a folding stock, and has attachment rails and a flash hider. It is more reliable, longer ranged, lighter and better in every imaginable way. The defining trait that early AK's have that makes them popular in the third world is that they're cheap and they're cheap because they are outdated and they are outdated because they have been updated so many times. No one wants AK-47's anymore because even Russia has surpassed the old designs by so much that they will willingly sell their old shitty guns even to their enemies. Really, if the AK-47 was the creme de la creme of firearms why would it be being shipped by the crateload out of the more militarily advanced countries on Earth and into the poorest ones.

To address your quoted sentence; The original AK-47 HAS been retired from service and it HAS undergone literally constant reformation. Almost everything you've just said is the opposite of correct and I'm sure you'll address that in your next post when you tell me about this new Apocalypse World game that positively -everyone- is talking about.

Dean, your post just corroborate my point. The AK family with all its variants (AK-47, AK-74, AK-105, AKSU, VSS, etc) is exactly like the BRP family with its variants (CoC, RQ, Elric, MRQ, Legend, Unknown Armies, etc), since all those "childs" are characterized by little modifictations on small parts while keeping the same overarching design and DNA.

So, thanks.

kzt wrote: A friend of mine was in a CofC game that Sandy Peterson was running - I think as a con. A character had some very high Occult skill. So that character used his skill to build a protective circle against some decent scale CofC horror (exactly what I forget at this time). So he rolls and gets a really good result. So he has all the other players inside the circle and is convincing the other characters not to break the circle (like with their shotguns and thompsons) while the monster slowly walks around the circle, getting closer and closer.

As the other characters get more and more freaked out the occultist assures assuring the other characters that there is no way the monster can get to them as long as the circle remains intact. The monster stops right in front of occultist and the occultist tries to command it to go away. The monster reaches across the circle, grabs the occultist and bites his head off. Then the monster is torn apart as the other characters shoot the hell out of him at "I rarely miss at this range" range.

The shocked player asks Sandy what went wrong, and Sandy says "Everyone knows magic doesn't work."

I would expect something like that in Unknown Armies or Over the Edge, bit in CoC its a very cruel thing to happpen.

P.S:

Thanks for providing the image for my next Apocalypse World character!

Please stop engaging the well-established liar and troll.