Call of Cthulhu d20 Sanity / CM skill question

[weezoh]

I asked the following in Monte Cook's forum and thought I might as well ask here as well

I'm getting ready to start a CoC d20 game in the near future (probably starting with infestation and moving into Nocturnum.

Regarding each rank of Cthulhu mythos skill being -1 to your max sanity.

I see some people suggesting that this should be more like -5 to max sanity since in BRP cthulhu an investigator who would know just about everything about the mythos - say 90% skill rank, would have a max sanity of about 10.

Whereas in d20 CoC an investigator with a near perfect chance to know everything (CM skill of say +30 if you consider a DC30 to be very difficult) would have a max sanity of 70

How many of you are using -5 to max sanity?

Any other suggestions? I still see this as a problem based on someone with +20 ranks of CM really should be about ready for the huggysuit. rather than having a good high (max) sanity. Does the -5 per rank work out well, have any problems come up in other areas due to this?

Thanks in advance

Another posibility I was thinking of doing was to use d% for Cthulhu mythos checks and just use it as a percentile check --- although this 'breaks' the d20 syntax for skills and percent rolls.

 

[daTim]

I think -5 would be way too harsh. Just because your max sanity is only 70, you aren't going to have nearly that much sanity anyway. In all likelyhood you have seen so many horrors you were insane a long time ago. I have one CoC character that somehow survived to level 5, and had only 5 ranks in Mythos. This is also considering that most characters do not have 18 Wisdoms, so their sanity wont be that high anyway.

If you consider a new character with a fairly high wisdom of 15

They have 15*5 Sanity or 75. Their maximum is 99 (I think). This means the first time they see something horrible they will have a 1 in 4 chance of losing sanity, they will then possibly gain a rank of Mythos. So now they are down to 72 (for example) and their maximum is 98.

Losing sanity is such a downward spiral in the first place, I wouldnt make any harder on the players. You do want them to at least finish the adventure right?