Numtini

A very small collective pool of points. Let's not ignore that either. It's much easier to throw points at niche skills in Gumshoe games because you have a lot of points in general as compared to CoC. The concept of CoC has always been characters who aren't extremely competent, but that creates a situation where you want to achieve what competence you can with the few points you have available. In terms of Sanity, my understanding has always been that the big sanity losses aren't because you see a scary monster, but because the scary monster disrupts your really deep understanding of what reality is.

In my experience, you don't get much simply because Keepers are reluctant to close off avenues of exploration simply because of money. Patrons are provided to deal with the extraordinary costs of investigating and it just doesn't take the place it might. The Trail scenario Dying of Saint Margarets has some interesting takes on their version, where its used as a class indicator and some clues will only be available to someone who's working class and others only to someone of the educated classes.

People do want characters that are fun to play and that generally means having useful skills, if for no other reason than you are so short of points to begin with. If there's no obvious use for a skill or the uses are too niche or watered down so there's no value for points (ie, the athletics skills) then in the real world, nobody takes them. Particularly as there are plenty of "useful" skills that create characters that are fully fleshed out characters and more than just spot hidden/social skill/firearms mythos hunters.

I just plain don't like the way it's written up. It calls for yes/no answers and IMHO that is way too specific. When I've given a character a psychic skill, I've gone for clairvoyance or psychometry and narrated a vague and hopefully confusing feeling or vision or whatever. But avoided direct yes/no or details.

I'd probably handle it by putting more emphasis on the sneak. To me, sneaking is usually more standard kinds of hiding in the woods or the shadow of a building or spying at someone from behind a good old fashioned New England stone wall. It's not getting within a few feet with an angle to slit someone's throat or shoot them in the head. I'd have to think about whether I would want multiple sneak rolls or one very difficult roll. I think I'd also take into account what kind of game it was. Standard CoC is very different than playing a commando in a WW2 Cthulhu game. If someone's character was a trained commando and it was all plausible, I'd make it easier. But different than a professor with 30% who walks quietly from their walks in the woods.

For anyone playing the home game, Lightless Beacon was released on roll20 as well as in PDF. They did a pretty nice job. They use the community sheet, which means the critters aren't statted out for rolls which I think is a long-term issue. (Edit to note that there is now a stat option for critters, but they didn't provide them.) But they did a great job with one map having the map on a player layer and the key on a GM layer, plus another indoors map uses advanced fog of war to good effect. I've never liked the presentation of text in roll20, but it works in a short scenario like this. I'd love to see them do The Haunting in a similar fashion and I think it would help drive new players. All the handouts are there and set up well, which is useful.

I'm very glad to hear this. Will there be an official character sheet and/or a script to handle bonus/penalty or will the existing one be made official?

I found a game just going to the roll20 join a game section. We hit 3 years last April, so I guess it worked out. There's also a reddit for non-D&D lfg /r/lfgmisc

This is actually my recommendation to newcomers.

As others have suggested, I think the current "two book set" is confusing, doubly more for D&D players because for D&D the Players Handbook is the "rules" and the GM book is the fluff, where it's opposite for CoC. And I'd love to see an updated layout. I would not make changes to the actual system. Not that I don't want changes. I don't think it went far enough and I'd like to see redundant skill consolidation and another pass at automatic weapons, but there's still enough people who want to chuck the whole thing and go backwards that I just don't see it as being a viable option to move further forward.

OGLs do not expire with the end of a contract. They are perpetual. I believe the correct formulation you're looking for here is that Mongoose did not have the rights release a perpetual OGL under their license from Issaries, therefore any OGL release of licensed material in their publications are void under Section 5 of the OGL, not to mention basic bedrock legal principles. It didn't expire. It never existed because Mongoose didn't have rights to create it.

*raises hand* A load of the stuff you're talking about is something a player deals with and it goes on their character sheet before the game. When I first played RQ, one of the revelations was that virtually the entire game was on your character sheet. That was a huge innovation in 1980 compared to squinting at the endless tables of AD&D. But D&D has caught up. The complexity is not at the table, it's all right there on your character sheet. And for the adjustments that aren't on the character sheet, they tend to be advantage or disadvantage which is easier to deal with than percentage calculations on the skill level which may change the chances of special successes. Having said that, I don't find RQ particularly difficult mechanically and I don't know why someone would think it is. But making out that D&D is still the mess it was 40 years ago is just not fair.

Maybe I'm daft, but I see D&D 5E as making the best use of stats of any game I can think of. Gods know, old D&D they had little or no effect at all. So many rolls in 5E are based on a stat roll plus proficiency if you have it in the skill.

Criticals were one of the things that Gygax railed against in his notorious screed in Dragon 16: Given that this was published the same year RQ was, I'm guessing that criticals were house-ruled pretty often prior to RQ. I'm quite amused by the essay as pretty much everything Gygax rants against in that essay--spell points (slots), criticals, weapon expertise--is now a core part of D&D. Overall, I am with Styopa in thinking RQ:G was a little too slavish to old RQ and missed an opportunity to update the game. When I encountered RQ in the 80s, I completely abandoned D&D as RQ was obviously superior. Now, after all the changes of 40 years, I find that 5E is a quite good game that I'm very happy to play, but RQ:G feels a little dated, a little over complicated, and also seems more a game people talk about than actually play. Part of that is also that the kind of storytelling that early Chaosium pioneered in the industry is now ubiquitous. If you look at a modern 5E scenario, it has far more in common with something like Borderlands or Griffon Mountain than it does to the 16 page folders of stats that made up TSR modules in the 80s.

The problem here is that being realistic, motorcycle should be a separate skill, particularly because you should only be rolling if there's a high speed chase or evasion of some calamity or some other "extraordinary" event. However, if you make it a separate skill, nobody will take it because it's just too niche. CoC already has too many skills that nobody takes because they spread your points out too much.

It's not specified that I can see, probably because worn armor in CoC classic period is really rare. It's almost exclusively an NPC thing. Delta Green is mum on the issue. I think the notion may be that if enough damage is done to the armor, the character will be dead or hospitalized and it won't really be a relevant issue.

All I can say is every character seems to take athletics in Trail or Delta Green and virtually no character takes any of the "athletic" skills in CoC. That right there indicates to me that the system is dissuading people from taking skills that players generally considered useful at a more reasonable cost. I'd completely forgotten the bonus/penalty dice. This was something that really gave me pause when I read the rules, but after a session or two, it had become completely natural both to roll them and to call for them at the appropriate time. That, overall, is my feeling about 7th. Most things that seemed like significant changes at first read became invisible at the table.

The rules are far better and more completely written and organized. This has led to me discovering a lot of rules that despite playing from first edition, I'd never really noticed. We've had several instances in our games where someone objected to "7th edition crap" (and yes, that's a quote) only to have me pull out the 1st edition and show them the same rule that they'd never noticed. (And in some cases, I hadn't either until I read 7th.) The big change I notice at the table is that combat is a bit more streamlined. In addition to your one action, you get a counter-reaction (dodge or fight back) to each attack against you. This is compared to old CoC where if you dodged that was the only thing you did that round (probably the single most ignored rule in 1-6 ed in my experience--it seems everyone let you dodge and let you dodge bullets). This generally means more damage gets done faster and combat ends quicker. The exception, and only thing that's crunchy imho, is automatic weapons fire. Frankly, it's a mess trying to be overly simulative. The old system was a mess trying to make it easy. Delta Green IMHO got it right. I really don't see any real difference with the percentile characteristics positive or negative. Most of the rolls in 1-6 were x5 anyway. And most of us who've gamed can do 5x maths in our head. Luck spends (optional) are convenient for avoiding meaningless death to a mook, but do little to really change the overall outcome--ditto for pushing rolls. IMHO other than the automatic weapons, the other mistake was a lost opportunity IMHO to consolidate some skills. Again, DG did that well.

I have a scoot. It's totally different than driving. But I would include it as driving. All this "realism" stuff is great in theory, but if you divide this stuff too narrowly, it leaves us with a lot of skills that nobody takes, something that is already a problem in Call.

FWIW I'm one of your two players in the 9am session.

A little late, but here's my experience. I GM'd for them a few years ago or more accurately, I didn't. I submitted my game and for weeks didn't hear anything and it didn't get put on the schedule. I dropped them an email and got no reply. I figured "oh well" and figured I'd missed the cut off or something. Then a couple of days before the con, out of morbid curiosity, I poked at the schedule and suddenly my game was there. No notice that it had been listed or what time--and they only let you state a time you prefer so that's kind of a big deal. I had registrations, but they didn't give GMs a list so you could make any arrangements ahead of time. On the day of the game, the only way players had to get to the game was a link from the con website and the link was 404ing, so none of the players could find the game. I had one player who was more enterprising and searched for and found the game on roll20 and dropped me a line. I made arrangements with him and a couple of players in my regular game, recruited a few more on roll20, and ran the session a month later independently.

Back when I was a teenager, I started to pick up Runequest stuff because that's what all the cool kids in the APAs were talking about. The rules were fine, a little confusing, and a little deadly. The next summer I went to I picked up Cults of Prax. It probably kicked around for a few weeks after before I got around to reading it. I remember sitting on my mom's couch just riveted. Suddenly, this world from the rulebook made sense, but all these other things made sense too. I knew it was a fictional world, but suddenly I "got" the way that the connections between mythology and a religion and culture centered around them would actually function. Encountering Glorantha didn't just change my gaming, it changed my life. I explored alternative spirituality. I studied anthropology and world religion. As I thought about his loss today, I am just in awe of exactly how much a simple RPG setting has had on the direction of my life.

I'm going to make a guess that in your home town, the town clerk is still elected. This means they can pretty much do whatever they want. We had one that just stopped coming in and for over a year there was not one thing we could do about it because she was responsible to the voters, not the town administration. After her, they changed the position to an appointed one. My guess is they use an aol account because they get little or no email and don't feel like checking a different account and since they're elected, nobody can force them to.

It should include 2 D20s, numbered 0-9 twice!

Wouldn't it just be a fighting maneuver to restrain them?