Help me understand Call of Cthulhu

[billd91]

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.

Are they? Depends on how many points they put into some of their combat-relevant skills, doesn't it? Seriously, it's not that hard to build and investigator who is reasonably good at their core field skills AND can contribute effectively in a fight. Coordinate your character development with your fellow players and you can make a pretty competent team of investigators, even if not everyone is as good as everyone else in every relevant skill.

Combat is a lot less forgiving in CoC than D&D, that's true. But if you pick your battles reasonably carefully, you should be able to do OK... at least until the poop is really hitting the propeller. The game's a hell of a lot less hopeless than you seem to think.

 

[500 Toads]

nods New characters will average 130 personal interest points (2x INT, and INT is 2d6+6 x5 for an average INT of 65) to allocate to any skills other than Cthulhu Mythos, so even assuming an Occupation that has no combat skills at all, there's room for buffing Dodge and Fighting (Brawl). You can create a character that invests nothing at all in combat skills, leaving Dodge at DEX/2 and Fighting (Brawl) at 25%, but that's very much a choice.


Groups of pregenerated characters will also often have somebody that is competent at combat, as well.

If one checks the pregens for Masks of Nyarlathotep, for instance:

( in addition to Fighting (Brawl) defaulting to 25%, Firearms (Handgun) to 20%, Firearms (Rifle/Shotgun) at 25%)

• Archibald has Dodge of 35%, Fighting (Brawl) at 70%, Firearms (Handgun) at 60%, Firearms (Rifle/Shotgun) at 50%
• Arthur has Dodge of 35%, , Firearms (Handgun) at 30%
• Eleanor has Dodge of 35%, Fighting (Brawl) at 60%
• Francoise has Dodge of 40%
• Jennifer has Dodge of 45%, Fighting (Brawl) of 30%, Firearms (Rifle/Shotgun) at 40%
• Johan has Dodge of 40%
• Madelyn has Dodge of 30%, Fighting (Brawl) of 30%
• Perry has Dodge of 35%, Fighting (Brawl) at 50%, Firearms (Handgun) at 45%, Firearms (Rifle/Shotgun) at 60%
• Pranit has Dodge of 65%, Fighting (Brawl) at 65%, Fighting (Sword) at 60%, Fighting (War-quoit) at 60%, Firearms (Rifle/Shotgun) at 55%
• Winston has Dodge of 35%, Fighting (Brawl) at 30%, Firearms (Handgun) at 30%

(Edit: I might also mention that Masks of Nyarlathotep also advises the Keeper to grant each player an additional 50 skill points "to help personalize" their characters if they use the pregens; so even those characters that by default aren't particularly good fighters can become rather good at it from the start. Perhaps the whole party met each other at a dojo... ).

 

[Bagpuss]

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.

It really depends on what sort of character you are playing. You don't really expect a professor that rarely leaves his desk to be good a shoot out, but a police character could have Firearms of 75% or more if you get a chance to aim, or the target is large you get a bonus dice, so you are hardly going to be missing all the time.

Also the luck mechanic pretty much means the characters can succeed on any test they feel is important enough, regardless of the dice, if you a sensible you save it for when you need to fight or run away.

The point of CoC is you are playing normal people not superheroes, if you want a more action packed game then Pulp Cthulhu might be a better fit. The appeal of CoC is that you are a normal person fighting against insurmountable impossible odds. Not that you are James Bond or the Ghostbusters.

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

They as competent as you would expect a normal human to be, a skilled professor will be great in his field, but not so good in a field fighting deep ones. Where as you play a police officer or former solider you will probably be much more competent in a fight.

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.

There are other games for that, Pulp Cthulhu for example. But CoC you are a very small fish in a very big sea, and most things are trying to eat you, that's its charm.

 

[Desdichado]

In my experience, there's two kinds of CoC games.

1. One shots where the whole point is flaming out in an entertaining way, so characters die or go insane frequently. If there's not at least two or three that flame out in one 3-4 hour session, you didn't live up to expectations.
2. Campaigns where you don't roll all that often, and you keep characters who are reasonably competent, or at least reasonably alive and sane, for many sessions without worrying too much about them going insane or dying multiple times a session.

I think the disconnect people have with the mechanics is that they expect to interact with them more than they actually do. And I think that they also expect campaigns to be like the one-shots, which they usually aren't.

 

[Desdichado]

If I recall, last time I was in a CoC campaign, not a one shot, the more I think about it, we played at least a dozen or a little more sessions, and I think we only got into two or three serious combats, and I only made one or two sanity checks the entire campaign. Like I said, investigation and slow burn are the way those work. You're not actually interacting with the mechanics as much as people tend to think that you do, so the fact that your characters are fragile wrt to those mechanics works exactly as its supposed to... but not necessarily what people expect if they haven't done that kind of game before. In D&D you're reacting with hostile mechanics multiple times every single session, so most people expect characters to be relatively durable vs the checks, saves, etc. that they're going to be making. If you reduce that frequency by an order of magnitude, then that kind of durability makes those checks usually kind of superfluous and there wouldn't be any reason to even have those mechanics at all. It really does work the way that it's supposed to and the way that it's fun. You DO want to have "episodes" from time to time, but yeah, you probably don't want two to three characters flaming out every session. That's what one-shots are for. Which, I'll point out, rarely end of being all that horrifying, because by its nature it ends kind of being done for the lolz.

 

[Gorgon Zee]

If I recall, last time I was in a CoC campaign, not a one shot, the more I think about it, we played at least a dozen or a little more sessions, and I think we only got into two or three serious combats, and I only made one or two sanity checks the entire campaign.

That might be a bit unusual. I've run of the big campaigns, and although each likely had maybe half a dozen serious combats or so (Mask of Nyarlathotep had more, Beyond the Mountyains of Madness fewer), each had a lot of Sanity Checks.

If a player starts with 70 or so Sanity and you are not using the pulp rules, they can lose a lot of sanity and still be very functional. Most of the time the rolls I ask for are low, like 0/1 or 0/d3, so it's more of a slow drain than the on-shot's sudden sharp shock! Something that does d6/d20 would be relatively rare -- maybe 3-4 of those a whole campaign and the "oh look, it's Cthulhu" d100 loss really should be a once-in-campaign thing -- if not for the cost, then for the awkwardness of the response to the above being "yeah, saw him a few weeks ago. Nasty, huh?"

Based on published materials, I'd say looking at 30-60 rolls a campaign (1-2 a session) feels more usual. A lot of them will have no effect, but it's always a concern.

 

[Desdichado]

That might be a bit unusual. I've run of the big campaigns, and although each likely had maybe half a dozen serious combats or so (Mask of Nyarlathotep had more, Beyond the Mountyains of Madness fewer), each had a lot of Sanity Checks.

To be fair, we ended those early and hadn't gotten very close to the finales yet. The point is that early on, relatively little combat and sanity episodes are happening, but it keeps getting worse and worse until near the end everyone's in trouble. You say average later in your post, but the mean and the median aren't the same, if that makes sense. You'll be higher than average later in the campaign and lower than average early in.

 

[Joshua Randall]

There’s nothing to understand: it’s a bad system that lingers on like a nagging cough because of people’s fondness for the source material. It’s “usable” in the sense that a TI-88 is usable, but why would you do that to yourself?

 

[Clint_L]

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.

I agree with you 100%, and I've played it since the first edition, including running a campaign fairly recently. Its mechanics have not kept up with the times, and are particularly ill suited to its genre - horror does not need that much crunch. IMO the Eldritch Horror RPG does a much better job of delivering a story-first Lovecraftian horror vibe.

Edit: I am intrigued to learn that a Lovecraftian horror game is being built using the Daggerheart engine. That strikes me as a very good fit for the genre (frankly, I think DH will work better with horror than it does with fantasy).

 

[Composer99]

Just played Call of Cthulhu in a one-shot as a fundraiser for a local women's shelter. It was fun, even the bad rolls.