Help me understand Call of Cthulhu

[Bae'zel]

At long last I've been invited to play an RPG, not as a GM, but as one of the player characters! Huzzah!

And Call of Cthulhu, no less! Awesome.

...As someone who's run many different games over the years, including Mythras, I do have to say that the Call of Cthulhu dice mechanic seems... brutal?

Now, of course, that's the whole point, right? The genre is cosmic horror: your characters will die horrible deaths or go insane, inevitably. Sure.

But... Here are some things that make me less excited about getting too invested in my character:

• the Dice mechanic is d100 roll under your skill. Okay, I'm familiar with that (former WFRP, Dark Heresy, Unknown Armies and Mythras player).
• the Critical failure range is 96-100 (or worse, depending on your stats). The critical success range is... 01. So already, you're more likely to critically fail than succeed. Okay, horror etc...
• There are clear difficulty checks: regular, which is you roll you skill straight up, half your skill or 1/5th of your skill. There are no beneficial modifiers.
• While there IS an advantage / disadvantage system (re-roll tens die, for good or ill), this purely GM fiat. They can totally have you roll your skill at 1/5th it's rating WITH disadvantage too. Ouch.
• Upgrading skills means you have to PASS a skill check first, then roll to FAIL a skill check after the game is over. This makes it pretty hard to level up poor skills (in Mythras, it's different; when you fail a check, you get to see if you level it up after the game is over, and even if you fail, you still go up 1%).

So... in this game, odds are you won't really improve much and there are no ways to get beneficial bonuses besides GM calls.

This doesn't seem like a very fun system to play with, I admit. Even WFRP 1e had a bit more going on in it.

What am I missing? After 40 years of game design evolution... Call of Cthulhu still seems "stuck".

Maybe it's a OSR thing?

I'd rather play Dark Heresy 1e, to be honest. Grim and Dark as it is, at least there are ways to negotiate a +10% to a skill check once in a while.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I think this is a system, like Mothership, where you aren't rolling most of the time. Your post-doc student knows how to look something normal up in at the library at Miskatonic University.

You are rolling when you're under pressure or looking for something that's been intentionally misfiled or snuck into the card catalog in a way where the cultists can find it again but where people won't accidentally spot it.

You also have the ability to reroll in CoC, I believe, if you have the luck currency to do so and can articulate a different and improved approach for the second try.

 

[Retreater]

Ok. Here's one of the big things to realize about Call of Cthulhu. A check that doesn't succeed isn't the same as a failure.
Let's say you are trying to sneak into a warehouse. A failed roll doesn't necessarily mean that you're found and have to deal with security. It means that you are able to sneak in, but you took so long that you gave up valuable time that you need in the warehouse, so you have to move quickly and you may not have time to search it thoroughly.
A skill check has a disastrous outcome when you roll a Fumble or you fail after Pushing the roll (taking a second attempt).
Otherwise, you succeed with consequences for most checks.
Also you can spend Luck to turn failures into successes.
Hope that helps put it in perspective.

 

[VashVet]

At long last I've been invited to play an RPG, not as a GM, but as one of the player characters! Huzzah!

And Call of Cthulhu, no less! Awesome.

...As someone who's run many different games over the years, including Mythras, I do have to say that the Call of Cthulhu dice mechanic seems... brutal?

Now, of course, that's the whole point, right? The genre is cosmic horror: your characters will die horrible deaths or go insane, inevitably. Sure.

But... Here are some things that make me less excited about getting too invested in my character:

• the Dice mechanic is d100 roll under your skill. Okay, I'm familiar with that (former WFRP, Dark Heresy, Unknown Armies and Mythras player).
• the Critical failure range is 96-100 (or worse, depending on your stats). The critical success range is... 01. So already, you're more likely to critically fail than succeed. Okay, horror etc...
• There are clear difficulty checks: regular, which is you roll you skill straight up, half your skill or 1/5th of your skill. There are no beneficial modifiers.
• While there IS an advantage / disadvantage system (re-roll tens die, for good or ill), this purely GM fiat. They can totally have you roll your skill at 1/5th it's rating WITH disadvantage too. Ouch.
• Upgrading skills means you have to PASS a skill check first, then roll to FAIL a skill check after the game is over. This makes it pretty hard to level up poor skills (in Mythras, it's different; when you fail a check, you get to see if you level it up after the game is over, and even if you fail, you still go up 1%).

So... in this game, odds are you won't really improve much and there are no ways to get beneficial bonuses besides GM calls.

This doesn't seem like a very fun system to play with, I admit. Even WFRP 1e had a bit more going on in it.

What am I missing? After 40 years of game design evolution... Call of Cthulhu still seems "stuck".

Maybe it's a OSR thing?

I'd rather play Dark Heresy 1e, to be honest. Grim and Dark as it is, at least there are ways to negotiate a +10% to a skill check once in a while.

Keep in mind that you have the ability to push a roll as well as use Luck points. The 1/5th roll is on an Extreme Difficulty check - if you’re in this position, it’s because things have really not gone well.

Call of Cthulhu is definitely horror focused and in OSR fashion, you want to have backup characters. The game is investigative but not heroic. It is meant for players who are okay with their characters slowly going mad or trapped with no way out as they continue to investigate. If that doesn’t sound fun to you, it may not be the game for you. Different GMs/Keepers have different takes on the game though, and talking to them in advance about what to expect in their game is always a good idea. With that said, there are variations on the rules and different rule sets like Pulp Cthulhu which allow for more heroic characters and adventures in the vein of Indiana Jones or The Mummy that have greater survivability and more heroic abilities.

One note on improving your skills, it’s easier to improve a skill that you’re worse at, but harder to improve one that you’re already good at - hence having to roll high. The idea is to minimize characters being total experts in areas, but make them more broadly competent overall.

 

[billd91]

It's rare that you'll need to get an extreme success for something. Those values (hard, extreme) tend to be used more to rate a level of success for extra benefits or in an opposed contest (like hand to hand combat), though sometimes you do need to make a hard success because of circumstances.

Criticals may be on a 1, but even an extreme success allows you to inflict extra damage in combat. And while fumbles may be 96-100, that applies if your skill value is under 50. If it's 50 or over (like a decently developed professional skill), the fumble is only on 100.

Definitely check if the Keeper is using the luck score as a pool of dice modifiers. It works well for campaigns, less well for one-shots.

I'd suggest investing points in either Brawl or Dodge. They overlap a lot so I don't think it's so great to invest a lot in both. In HTH combat, these will be rolled a lot and opposed by the enemy's skills (in weapons, claws, bites, pseudopods, etc). Compare level of success. Best level of success wins. If that's you using Brawl defensively, you get to inflict damage on the attacker (which is nice). On a tie for the same level of success, Dodge wins ties, but Brawl does not. It's a nice trade off. If your investigator has a good strength, size, constitution - consider Brawl when fending off cultists and weaker mythos creatures and maybe carry a knife. Otherwise, invest in Dodge.

Invest in one firearm skill (more than one is probably unnecessary for most characters except maybe ex-soldiers or game hunters). Anybody can say they do some hunting in the right season, even a mild-mannered antiquarian.

 

[Benjamin Olson]

I've only ever been on the player side, and have never read more than the basic rules, and that's been a while, but having played several games the concerns you seem to have have mostly not been issues. If your character does survive the adventure some of your skills will improve, because if it's important enough to get multiple calls for rolls you will generally succeed at some point (luck points and pushing can also help secure some successes), and if it's low enough that you struggle to succeed you are statistically likely to be able to roll above and upgrade it after the adventure.

The skills can be a bit wonky if rolls are called that shouldn't be. A skill like Drive Auto should only be used to pull off something difficult with a car, not to competently drive under normal circumstances, or things can get real silly real fast.

 

[Talltomwright]

CoC is my favourite system and I use it for other genres not just horror because it is so simple to play but provides players with really interesting choices.

Just on a technical level, a couple of points: there absolutely are suggested bonus/penalty die in the combat section which are technically optional, but I've always used which are player facing and add a bit more of a tactical element (bonus die for attacking a prone opponent, or firing from a braced position, etc) all the sorts of things you would normally expect to provide bonuses and penalties in other systems.

During downtime you can also elect to train in skills. It's still slow going, so your point that characters improve in skills very slowly if at all is absolutely true. There is nothing equivalent to a level up.

Also an Extreme when you just need a regular success often brings bonuses that you would normally associate with a critical, rules as written in combat it means max damage or max damage plus a die roll if you are using a sharp weapon, and I always give players extra information, higher effect or a setup for their next rolls when they get an extreme. I'm also very mean in the consequences for a fumble, but as noted above, the odds of a fumble go down from 5% to 1% if your skill is over 50%.

The thing that I love about the system, which I miss hugely when I play other games, is that if I fail a dice roll the focus moves straight back to me as a player to make further decisions - is it worth it for me to spend luck to make the roll, or am I willing to risk further consequences by pushing the roll? I feel like I've got meaningful choices to make on a failure, as opposed to other systems where it's just, 'oh you failed, dead end.'

The degrees of success being fixed numbers (with modified bonus or penalty dice) makes for a much quicker, less maths heavy game than ones where you have to add/subtract 20% for bonuses, etc. but can be just as tactical and interesting.

Your character is probably only good (and by good I mean 50%+ which with luck and pushing makes it likely to succeed a fair amount of the time) at a small handful of skills. The game becomes about finding ways to use those skills in interesting ways to overcome the challenges you face. My proudest moments in play coming from finding ways to use accounting to get blackmail material on a hostile NPC, or using jump to flee pursuing monsters by jumping from roof top to roof top.

Finally, CoC is designed to be an investigation game not a combat game, but the optional Pulp rules make for heroic combat with high survivability. Worth talking to your Keeper/GM about playing with those rules if that's more of what you're looking for. Pulp also has the option to add more Pulp talents as a campaign goes on, so you could have at least a little taste of what other systems would treat as level ups.

 

[Thierry-Advent]

CoC is all about the mystery and the investigation. The real reward is solving the case, helping people in danger and trap in a container or banish the creature. It requires a mental shift. Direct confrontation almost garantees death.

Roleplaying to get a bonus before the roll, and finding an alternate approach if the roll fails, is the bread and butter of an investigator.

 

[500 Toads]

I think this is a system, like Mothership, where you aren't rolling most of the time. Your post-doc student knows how to look something normal up in at the library at Miskatonic University.

You are rolling when you're under pressure or looking for something that's been intentionally misfiled or snuck into the card catalog in a way where the cultists can find it again but where people won't accidentally spot it.

You also have the ability to reroll in CoC, I believe, if you have the luck currency to do so and can articulate a different and improved approach for the second try.

Very much agreed in terms of not rolling much of the time. For one obvious example, Drive Auto isn't for seeing whether you can make it to the drugstore without crashing; it's for situations like vehicular pursuit or combat, or avoiding sudden and severe obstacles, or driving at reckless speeds in terrible conditions because it's an utter emergency. And in a lot of cases, failure doesn't necessarily mean that the you failed outright; but it might mean that it took longer than it would have with a success, or some other adverse consequence.

Spending luck to improve the results of a (non-luck, non-sanity, non-pushed) roll is an optional rule, but one that is commonly used, I believe. Pushing non-combat, non-sanity, non-luck rolls -- a reroll, but with increased consequences on failure, through some alternate approach -- is a standard rule, and does not require expending luck.

 

[sevenbastard]

The most important thing i learned about CoC is sometimes succeeding on a check actually is the bad result.

Specifically when you make that Zoology check, only for the GM to let you know because you made it you learned some horrible truth and now loose sanity.

Ignorance isn't always bad.