Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 8693283" data-attributes="member: 4937">So the professions above are balanced against the original core professions like Antiquarian, Professor, Detective, etc. that tend to show up in the CoC core rule book.  That is they tend to offer about the same amount of access to professional skills, they tend to offer the same theoretical amount of skills points to work with, and they lack any special bonuses or powers specific to being a member of that profession.  Any professional abilities not covered by skills are expressly assumed to be part of what should be straight Knowledge roles for your character.   And that I think makes all the professions viable, although of course some may make more sense than others for a CoC style investigator or a particular campaign (an Aviator might be very useful in a 1920's wilderness campaign, but less so in a game that never leaves downtown Boston).  I don't think that balancing the professions as I have harms simulating 1920's history at all.  Granted, you could always make a character that is an unusual member of their profession, for example a wealthy drifter but putting your hobby points into skills that seem out of place for the characters social standing and profession but I think all of that could be explained by background and I'd rather have professions sufficiently unconstrained to allow for unusual (but not impossible) backgrounds than have the system tell players exactly what they had to play because that would invariably just be a list of stereotypes.  The one area that you could quibble on the realism I think is base credit rating, which is an area that existing published CoC professions tend to modify a lot out of a desire to realistically make Doctors wealthier than Drifters (for example).   And while I can see that, I think that just offering Credit Rating as a professional skill is enough to allow characters of a particular profession to on average be wealthier than characters that lack Credit Rating as a professional skill without making it impossible to be a poor down on your luck doctor or a drifter that inherited or has otherwise come into significant wealth.  In practice, between the above professions and my house rules, I feel that the player characters I've had are believable 1920's characters and I'm a stickler for historical accuracy in my CoC games.  In fact, I tend to really get annoyed with published works that claim to be 1920's but actually have culture and technology that is more indicative of the early 1930s (usually because their perception of the 1920's is based on Hollywood movies which tend to use 1930's era props and clothing for the 1920's because they are more impressive on screen).</blockquote>

Verification