Augmented Skills

[Grimmshade]

I really like the Insane Talents Augmented Skills from Pulp Cthulhu. 

I can totally see Augmented Stealth working for something like The Shadow's power to cloud men's minds. 

Anyone got some other ideas they have used in games?

[Grimmshade]

Augmented Psychology could see "what evil lurks in the hearts of men "

[Grimmshade]

Looking more at Augmented Skills, does anyone have any suggestions how Augmented Firearms would actually work? To use an Augmented Skill you need to roll under either an Extreme success or your Cthulhu Mythos skill for even partial success. This carries over fairly poorly for firearms in combat, unless you roll at the beginning of combat to try to activate it, separately from actual rolls to hit targets.

This also touches on a bit of disappointment I have in the Augmented Skills, in that they are so difficult to actually put to use (5% of skill and/or CM skill).

[AlHazred]

The Avenger (the pulp character) had the firearm skill to "crease" an enemy; which is to say, he shot them in the head, but at an angle so that the bullet grazed the skull and knocked the foe unconscious instead of killing them.

[EricW]

There are examples in HP Lovecraft stories, of people who performed incredible feats while in the delirium of temporary insanity. One of my favourites is "Under the Pyramids", which Lovecraft co-wrote with the famous stage magician Harry Houdini, about a supernatural being who takes offence at a stage magician character's mockery of his art. 

The main character sees something which sends him temporarily insane, and in his delirium he does the impossible, finds his way out of the horrific catacomb in which he has been imprisoned, hundreds of feet beneath the Sphinx in Egypt.

The point is, the characters who perform these feats are not in their right mind when they do these things, and rarely retain a clear memory of what happened. So arguably the player should not be fully in control of their character in such circumstances. 

Edited April 23, 2022 by EricW

[tendentious]

In a game of Masks that I ran, the investigators "found" a book on mysticism, philosophy and higher dimensional mathematics. This gave the ability to intuit the relation between four-dimensional space and the manifested Hound of Tindalos that had tracked down one of the investigators. Basically, without the augmented mathematics skill the Hound would have been effectively impossible to defeat in combat. As it was, while all the other investigators ran away, one of the investigators managed to shotgun the Hound out of curved space/time by firing along the vertices of angular space/time.

[Grimmshade]

44 minutes ago, tendentious said:

In a game of Masks that I ran, the investigators "found" a book on mysticism, philosophy and higher dimensional mathematics. This gave the ability to intuit the relation between four-dimensional space and the manifested Hound of Tindalos that had tracked down one of the investigators. Basically, without the augmented mathematics skill the Hound would have been effectively impossible to defeat in combat. As it was, while all the other investigators ran away, one of the investigators managed to shotgun the Hound out of curved space/time by firing along the vertices of angular space/time.

Did you make the Investigator/Hero roll for Augmentation (Extreme Skill roll combined with Cthulhu Mythos roll) each shot, or did you have them roll to Augment and then allow all the shots to use the Augmentation? It's not explained great in the book for things like Firearms. 

[tendentious]

24 minutes ago, Grimmshade said:

Did you make the Investigator/Hero roll for Augmentation (Extreme Skill roll combined with Cthulhu Mythos roll) each shot, or did you have them roll to Augment and then allow all the shots to use the Augmentation? It's not explained great in the book for things like Firearms. 

It was a while ago now, and I can't remember if I even required a roll. I know that I had the character spend a point of SAN every time they wanted to use the ability, so every shot they took they spent SAN. If I had them roll the Augmentation it was only initially. Or they may have been suffering indefinite insanity so I felt that just spending SAN was enough.