Extended Rant #1, Part III

In my previous posts, I talked about taking dice out of character creation. Now, I'm going to go into a few other systems here in this blog. These games are the intellectual property of the various companies that have produced them, and my discussing them should in no way present a challenge to those copyrights.

This time, let's talk about Call of Cthulhu, shall we? This is a horror RPG based on the writings of H.P. Lovecraft and his fellows from the early 20th century. The game is produced by Chaosium Inc.

Now, the creators of the game followed D&D's basic example and has the players rolling a number of d6's for each stat. In the latest edition I have seen, five stats get 3d6, while two others get 2d6+6 and another one gets 3d6+3. The most important stat in the game (Sanity) is a derived stat based on the results in another normally rolled.

So, in all we figure that there are 22 d6's involved with a potential total of 132 points. Now, unlike the Palladium system, I would recommend applying our multiplier of .65 to this total rather than including the modifiers first. This is because of the nature of CoC games. The modified attributes are so to emphasize their importance and use in the game.

So, with the multiplier, players would get 86 points. I would round that up to 90, but others might instead round it down to 85. I prefer the former since, after all, it's a Call of Cthulhu game; the PCs need every possible advantage they can get to fight off the otherworldly nasties that inhabit that particular universe.

In this case, I wouldn't impose any maximums on any stats (well, in retrospect perhaps Size should have some sort of upper limit...), but I would insist on the base minimums. For the three stats that have modifiers I would then apply them after spending points.

I was also going to cover GURPS and In Nomine in this series of articles, but these already use point-based systems for character creation, so it would be pointless to do so. Never fear, I am looking at Fantasy Flight Games Dark Heresy setting for my next such rambling, it and all the other Warhammer 40,000 inspired settings they put out, as well as Cyberpunk (which I have never played).


If my readers can think of yet another RPG system that could use treatment like this let me know, and I will see what I can do for you.

Look for more soon! I realize this has been a short one this time, and I have not been as prolific as I had hoped, but there will be more coming soon!