Help me understand Call of Cthulhu

[Bae'zel]

You did say this, but didn't provide any concrete examples of d100 games doing it better. You said you've played and enjoyed Mythras. What does Mythras do better mechanically that you think CoC 7th doesn't do?

"Doing better?" Just in my personal opinion. My goal here wasn't just to take a dump on one of the hobby's most sacred games. But to try to understand it's implied "hard mode" with mechanics. I had similar gripes with Free League's Tales from the Loop dice mechanic, where the narrative is mainly pushed forward by failure.

I hate feeling incompetent in my gaming. I like grim dark where bad stuff happens even in the face of competence. Aliens for example, bad ass marines who are competent soldiers, but out of their league when facing the cosmic horror.

I like Mythras (and Unknown Armies, and Imperium Maledictum) because there are positive difficulty modifiers instead of only negative ones. But I stand corrected, many here have explained that, unlike olden days, CoC has adopted a more nuanced skill failure outcome mechanism.

 

[500 Toads]

I will say that combat in Call of Cthulhu does tend to be difficult -- not terribly common, but difficult when it happens.

If you're dealing with an actual Mythos horror, some of them are quite difficult to put down through a combination of features like very high resistance to conventional attacks -- it's difficult to shoot something that's constantly phasing in and out of reality, and bludgeoning an amorphous blob of protoplasm might not accomplish much -- and very high lethality, and your party may not even be in full control of themselves due to some losing enough SAN to trigger bouts of madness.


If you're dealing with cults... well, if you're playing something that's sufficiently pulp-y that you're trying to interrupt a grand ritual featuring a few dozen (or more!) cultists, you really want to have a plan rather than assume that you're so much inherently better than them that you can readily defeat them despite being significantly outnumbered. For something like that, you probably want to figure out how to disrupt an event without needing to fight them all; and if violence is appropriate, figuring out something like who's to target with a .30-06 from a good vantage point might be a good starting point.

The good thing about the latter situation is that CoC doesn't really have mass-combat rules, and that your Keeper probably isn't planning to run a full-on 48-on-4 combat and almost certainly has something else in mind, should you be presented with such. Maybe there's some way to disrupt or sabotage the gathering that doesn't require fighting unbeatable odds (figuring that most Keepers wouldn't be nudging you towards a solution involving a pair of Vickers machine guns and a trunk full of Molotovs, anyway).

 

[John Dallman]

For something like that, you probably want to figure out how to disrupt an event without needing to fight them all; and if violence is appropriate, figuring out something like who's to target with a .30-06 from a good vantage point might be a good starting point.

Don't be afraid of engaging in heartless, unsporting crushing of your opponents' plans. In a Cthunlhu by Gaslight adventure, we arrived in the area where we thought the cultists were planning their ritual the day before it was due. We weren't sure we were in the right place, bit they kindly confirmed that with an attempted drive-by shooting in a horse and cart.

Encouraged, we went up on the moor and found their elaborately stacked ritual bonfire, not yet lit. We considered the matter, then pushed the pile over and lit it, ruining all their efforts.

 

[Tigris]

It is. Page 194 on the Chapter 10: Playing the Game, which is basically advice for Keepers.

Rolling the Dice:

1: The Keeper decides when to call for a skill roll. Literally says don't roll for routine task, or if there is no drama involved. It also says you should avoid adding complications through dice rolls, when you want to keep the pace moving, even allowing players to do something difficult.

2: Dice don't tell stories people do. Says when a player succeeds a roll they achieve their goal but when they fail the Keeper decides what happens.

3: Losing the roll doesn't necessarily mean failing the goal. "It is important to realize that losing a dice roll does not automatically lead to failing a task." The italics is a direct quote.

There are a few more things but it is codified in the main rules, just in the section that is advice for the Keeper. Dice determine who gets to narrate, success and the players get to describe how they achieve what they set out to do. Lose the roll and the Keeper gets to decide what happens. It doesn't need to be a failure, in fact it warns against things that block play, like not finding a vital clue.

I really dont get why today in 2026 games still do "advice" instead of just making things actual mechanics/rules (which both players and GM know).

This just makrs books longet chances smaller that people read it, chances bigger that people ignore it and make games even more GM dependant.

 

[Bae'zel]

I will say that combat in Call of Cthulhu does tend to be difficult -- not terribly common, but difficult when it happens.

If you're dealing with an actual Mythos horror, some of them are quite difficult to put down through a combination of features like very high resistance to conventional attacks -- it's difficult to shoot something that's constantly phasing in and out of reality, and bludgeoning an amorphous blob of protoplasm might not accomplish much -- and very high lethality, and your party may not even be in full control of themselves due to some losing enough SAN to trigger bouts of madness.

I get that, makes sense, however, the monsters are already in luck because odds are the PCs would be missing most of the time anyway.

Fighting goons in an alleyway? Same dice rolls, even without supernatural resilience and phasing in and out of reality.

And that's my issue with the system's foundational difficulty. The protagonists barely seem competent against mundane challenges, let alone Mythos ones.

Sure, there's advice in the GM book on how to handle success and failure, but in the RAW it's: roll under your skill, if the DM feels it's harder, here's how to make these checks even harder. Done. Probably not even a sidebar saying "hey DMs, check out the advice on pg.XX in the Keeper's Guide on how to interpret success and failure").

As I said, I understand that CoC protagonists are "average joes" and far more squishy than the PCs in most RPGs (except for maybe the grittier OSR games, hence my initial comparison). I just find it more entertaining when the PCs have some degree of mechanical competence established BEFORE they meet the Horrors that Cannot be Punched or Reasoned With.

It's like, CoC already comes across as on "Hard mode" by default, RAW, and when they meet the Mythos baddies, it becomes "ULTRA DEATH MODE". Some relish that , which is what I wanted to better understand.

 

[payn]

I get that, makes sense, however, the monsters are already in luck because odds are the PCs would be missing most of the time anyway.

Fighting goons in an alleyway? Same dice rolls, even without supernatural resilience and phasing in and out of reality.

And that's my issue with the system's foundational difficulty. The protagonists barely seem competent against mundane challenges, let alone Mythos ones.

Sure, there's advice in the GM book on how to handle success and failure, but in the RAW it's: roll under your skill, if the DM feels it's harder, here's how to make these checks even harder. Done. Probably not even a sidebar saying "hey DMs, check out the advice on pg.XX in the Keeper's Guide on how to interpret success and failure").

As I said, I understand that CoC protagonists are "average joes" and far more squishy than the PCs in most RPGs (except for maybe the grittier OSR games, hence my initial comparison). I just find it more entertaining when the PCs have some degree of mechanical competence established BEFORE they meet the Horrors that Cannot be Punched or Reasoned With.

It's like, CoC already comes across as on "Hard mode" by default, RAW, and when they meet the Mythos baddies, it becomes "ULTRA DEATH MODE". Some relish that , which is what I wanted to better understand.

Take a look at Cthulhu pulp it powers up the investigators .

 

[SAVeira]

Take a look at Cthulhu pulp it powers up the investigators .

That has made a big different in my games. Preferred way to play Call of Cthulhu currently. A couple of years ago, I was in a group that was play Masks with the Pulp Cthulhu rules and it was a blast. It was the second time the Keeper had run it and he stated it made more enjoyable experience over the first time under the standard rules.

 

[RenleyRenfield]

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.

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".

For me.... CoC has never been a fun system to play. I have been playing and running it for 20+ years, and the rules... the rules are always miserable!

I run for conventions and at other tables I hear 100% of the time from new players

• too many skills
• too many failed rolls
• GM can't finish a module unless they fudge or fake rolls

Like... this is always always, every single game.

But... BUT.....

The adventures, and premise and general shenanigans that characters get up to, the print outs, the plots, the read-aloud texts... SO GOOD!

CoC is great because of its content, its story, and its immersion. Some of the best modules in ttrpgs.

it's rules are faff.

I played Cthulhu Dark once, and played Tremulus and was like "oh, this is what its like to play CoC AND have fun rules."

 

[Staffan]

Cthulhutech is a science fiction version, but I'm not familiar with it.

Cthulhutech can be described as "Mythos & Mecha". The world has overtly been invaded by forces aligned with various Great Old Ones, and are defended by people in mechas or biological equivalents. It has some interesting ideas, like realizing that dealing with the arcane tends to have negative effects on people's wellbeing, and thus enforce periodic trips to the shrink for those that do. It also has some rather unsavory world-building details.

Another interesting Mythos-based RPG is Fate of Cthulhu. As can be guessed from the name, this is a FATE-based game, and it is basically Cthulhu meets Terminator/Twelve Monkeys. Basically, a Great Old One has risen and more-or-less wiped humanity out, but a small number of survivors have figured out how to use magic to send people back in time via the out-of-time-and-space body of Yog-Sothoth in order to stop what's happening. They will know that there are four major causes of the disaster, and need to stop them. But they don't know everything, so they'll have to deal with various twists in order to succeed. E.g. maybe they know that a particular cult leader is responsible for carrying out a ritual, so they set out to stop them. But it turns out that the cult leader is only a figurehead and the real culprit is someone else. The game presents a number of variants on the same theme (different apocalypses based on different Great Old Ones), with rules for adjudicating the overall effects on the timeline based on the PCs' efforts, suggesting that each Fate of Cthulhu campaign would likely be a short one, but you could play several of them.

 

[Gorgon Zee]

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

• 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...

Most of the time you just want to roll under your skill to succeed. A character who is good at something has a skill of 70. They succeed 70% of the time if nothing is changing the odds. And a critical failure is quite often no worse than a regular failure.
CoC is also a degrees of success system soil your skill is 70% you have a 35% chance to succeed VERY well and 17% chance to succeed EXTREMELY well. Much better than your 5% grit fail chance.

• 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.

Yes, there are.

• You can get an bonus dice for anything that will give you an advantage. That changes your 70% success rate to a 91% success rate (or your bad skill off 40% to a 64% success chance).
• You can spend luck to give you a post-roll boost.
• You can push your luck to try a re-roll at heightened risk.

If you are thinking of modifiers as purely a numerical addition to your skills, then no, they are not a feature of the system. But with 6 levels of success outcomes and three different modification techniques, they are really not needed.

• 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 its rating WITH disadvantage too. Ouch.

Every system in the world allows GMs to modify skill checks and be a dick. My experience is that CoC GMs do this a lot less than in other systems I have played in. If you don;t trust your GM not to be a dick, then the system isnoty your main problem, tbh.

• 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%).

Rarely used skills are hard to level up by this method, true, but for skills in the 25-75 range, assuming you try them three times in a night, you have about a 40% chance of increase.

Trust me, your 40% dodge skill WILL be rolled a lot. Your spot hidden WILL be rolled as lot. It will get better fast.

What am I missing?

Honestly, I think you are just missing the experience of playing it. You are used to a system that rewards roleplaying with bonuses to skills, not one that rewards with re-rolls and bonus dice mechanisms. It's just a different way to play.