Best Version of Call of Cthulhu

[Piratecat]

I generally find the Chaosium rules to be well written, poorly organized and with a combat system that annoys me. Like Jeff, I prefer 5th edition, but they're all pretty much the same.

Monte Cook's d20 CoC is also wonderfully written. The PCs are a little too robust for my taste, though. Level-based CoC pcs bother me a bit.

I'm currently grooving on Trail of Cthulhu, now that I've gotten used to new rules. It works really well for me, and I'd definitely recommend it.

 

[mmadsen]

Monte Cook's d20 CoC is also wonderfully written. The PCs are a little too robust for my taste, though. Level-based CoC pcs bother me a bit.

Just ignore hit points and use a Fort-based Damage Save.

 

[davethegame]

Monte Cook's d20 CoC is also wonderfully written. The PCs are a little too robust for my taste, though. Level-based CoC pcs bother me a bit.

Yeah, I also ran into the wall of too many feats based on combat and not based on anything else. It's a great book but was written when d20 was still quite young and it shows.

I'm considering a combination of Shadows of Cthulhu and Trail of Cthulhu for my next game.

 

[Voadam]

I have 3rd and 5th editions, and they're mostly the same. Mechanically, the game hasn't suffered any changes apart from some very small ones (skill caps at 99% instead of 100%, higher beginning skill points), so you could go with any of them and you wouldn't be wrong

I agree.

All of the Chaosium BRP CoC editions 1-6 are basically different presentations of the same rules so I would go with whatever you can find cheapest. I'm quite happy with mine which is either 4th or 5th edition.

Mechanical rule changes are very small and no real bar to compatible use of material. This is a big contrast to most every other game system I know of where editions represent significant rule changes.

 

[Nebulous]

I ran the Complete Masks of Nyarlathotep d20 spliced with some Modern rules. It was a ton of fun, but then again, i was deliberately running the campaign like Indiana Jones vs. Cthulhu.

If i were to do it again i would take a more low-key route.

 

[Obryn]

I ran a long-lasting CoC d20 campaign. I think Monte did a great job with the system. It was familiar enough to my players that it just disappeared and we played the game, and familiar enough to me that I could more or less ignore it when I was creating opposition.

It's a little weird to have a level-based CoC, but even characters with high HPs are very fragile, by RAW. Monte set the Massive Damage Threshhold at 10, so characters need to make a DC 15 Fort save after taking most any hit.

I know this will sound strange, but since I was running a campaign rather than a one-shot, I didn't want the PCs to be enormously fragile. If characters are dying every single session, it's tough to establish continuity and get the players to care about their PCs. So, I added the VP/WP system to it for hit points, applied WP damage pretty liberally whenever I felt like it. As a consequence, I removed the massive damage save. (Mythos creatures just used HPs and never had to worry about either wound points or massive damage. Not fair, I know. ) This had a few great results... First, it decreased character fragility, while still keeping combat very scary. Second, WP damage can stun a character, making hits kind of harsh. Third, it takes a long time to heal WP damage... I thought this was very dramatically appropriate.

So yeah, I have nothing but good things to say about CoC d20. It's a very useful sourcebook for most every time period.

-O

 

[tylermalan]

Hmmm... so now I'm divided!

I think that if I ran a game, I would want it to be in the 1930's-ish time era, and wouldn't want it to be Indiana Jones-like at all. I've always liked horror games so I would want to run it like that, like a combat-lite Ravenloft or something.

So, do only certain games have support for that sort of setting? What kind of information can I expect to find in a given sourcebook as far as setting fluff and the like? A lot? Or are they more rules-focused?

 

[jdrakeh]

For me, it's the old GW hardcover (3rd Edition) with the 1920s Investigator's Companion and the extra adventures bound into it. That said, anymore, I prefer Principia Malefex for Cthulhu-esque horror. Although the PM system takes some getting used to, I think that PM strikes a better balance between cosmic horror, supernatural horror, and psychological horror than CoC ever has.

The big selling points of PM for me are that the game talks about violent crime and social taboos in depth (both things that CoC tends to gloss over), while presenting a few very different types of magic, each with its own limitations and taboos, which is a little more believable than the generic 'bad magic' of CoC (for me, anyhow). That said, the layout is crap, as is the lack of artwork (though the leatherbound, foil-stamped binding and heavy faux parchment pages are excellent).

 

[Jasperak]

I ran the Complete Masks of Nyarlathotep d20 spliced with some Modern rules. It was a ton of fun, but then again, i was deliberately running the campaign like Indiana Jones vs. Cthulhu.

If i were to do it again i would take a more low-key route.

Pimp the story hour.

 

[grodog]

Also worth checking out are the CoC 5.5 rules by Pagan Publishing, printed in some early TUOs (I always forget if those rules are in TUOs 6 and 7, or in 7 and 8/9: I think it's the latter, since I recall one of the issues being a combined issue. In any event, they're worth looking into at least as house rules/variants to consider.