7e Questions

[MysteryHand]

Hi all:

First off, I want to say I hadn't played CoC since 4th edition and I've been so impressed with the quality of 7th edition products.

Having said that, I have some questions.  I'm looking at bringing new players into the game.  As I look at the 7th edition rules, I see lots of places where I will need to be a 'rules apologist' during character creation.  Or I see places where I will need to explain counter-intuitive or overly-complex items to the players. I think that starts the experience of playing CoC off on a sour note.  So I'm asking these questions because I'm thinking of making changes and I want to know if there's a good reason not to.

Why do Listen and Spot Hidden still exist as separate skills?  Could they be combined into a skill called Awareness, Situational Awareness or Perception?

Why is Education not related to occupation?  Shouldn't they have ranges, like Credit Rating?  Or at least a minimum threshold?  I can see a PhD working as a cook (especially in a Modern Setting -- ha ha) but I can't imagine someone with an Education of 20 as Physician.

Why do we still have Size as 'an average of height and weight'?  Doesn't that automatically create a disadvantage for female characters?  It's not STR, it's purely a measure of bulk.  Although there certainly are tall and muscular women, if I want to create an 'average' woman, she will automatically have disadvantages in combat (HP + Damage Bonus).  Has there been any talk of reskinning this attribute as something else? Like Body (muscle tone, athleticism, etc...) or does that mess up some other aspect of the Size attribute?

The attribute Appearance is described in 7th edition as general charisma.  I don't know why the name bothers me, but it does.  If the name of the attribute requires explanation ('oh it's not just your physical appearance, it's also...") then I think it's not a good name.  I can make changes on the fly when reading published campaigns, but is there another reason I need to keep the name the same for players?  Is it referenced in player-facing material that I need to consider? Can we call it 'Social' without breaking anything?

Psychology is really 'Detect Motives' or 'Assess Person' or 'Social Awareness', right?  It isn't used for psychological healing.  Is it ever used as a knowledge skill? I think calling it Psychology really 'buries the lead'. It's a crucially important skill in an investigative game and new players might not understand its importance. If you don't highlight the importance of the skill to new players, I think you'd likely end up with a bunch of characters that have Aspergers.  the 10% baseline also feels very low for the description of a skill that 'everyone has'. Would it break anything to have it related to the Social attribute (APP)? Say SOC/2.

Again, I understand the motives behind leaving a lot of this stuff the same in each edition of CoC.  I think that it's admirable, really.  And I'm honestly asking these questions because I know I don't know the nuts and bolts of the system as well as I should before I start changing things.

Thanks in advance to all for their feedback!

 

Edited April 8, 2018 by MysteryHand

[TrippyHippy]

We-eee-ll, this might get tricky fast but here goes....

I agree that a number of skills could have been pruned or merged from the current list. Listen and Spot Hidden are a good example of this. There has always been issues in the game of a skill list including narrow and broad skill entrees. I felt they could have done a bit more to deal with that in this most recent edition, but I cannot account for the feedback of others during play testing. 

Education used to be exclusively used to determine the number of skill points that could be spent from a selection of about 8 or so Professional Skills - the higher your Education the more points you had to distribute. This was deemed unrealistic for some professions (like Actors for example) and so the skill points distribution was levied out to other Characteristics, where deemed appropriate to certain Professions, in the 7th edition. You could argue for a minimal Education for some Professions, but it's assumed that players can make these sort of appropriate decisions for themselves. If you have a low Education, you probably would not be much worth as a Doctor - so you'd pick other professions accordingly to fit. Do we need hard/assertive rules to enforce this more? I dunno - it's not really been a problem in the games I've played.  

Size ought to have applications in the game in more aspects than just combat. Hiding, or squeezing through a tight hole for example. Unfortunately, combat gets more focus. In terms of fairness between sexes, it's possibly Un-PC to suggest that a women's comparable lack of size to men, in the real world, does indeed put them at a disadvantage in combat. However, in the game rules there is no such penalty or differentiation made in character generation. If you want a bigger woman, built for fighting, go ahead and pick a good size. Of course, if you want to play to more traditional notions of female strengths, then pick Appearance, or maybe Constitution and Dexterity (women live longer on average and are much more supple in things like yoga on the whole).

Appearance vs Charisma has been an ongoing debate for decades in BRP games. RuneQuest used Charisma originally, but Appearance was preferred in the making of Call of Cthulhu. I think that the advantage/argument for Appearance is that it is an innate, fixed and measurable thing (one can rank beauty in Appearance and there are measures of facial symmetry, idealised body proportions, etc) whereas Charisma is more nebulous and often as much a factor of what the external audience wants to hear in a particular circumstance (hence it's it isn't 100% a personal characteristic). In the real world, Appearance is a massive factor in terms of career and general social power. Play it up that way. 

Psychology and Mental illness was very well (re)written and explained in the Unseen Masters scenario collection by Bruce Ballon about 20 years ago. I would advise that you seek out this book if you want to get a good write up about this sort of thing. The current edition seeks to interpret Psychology and Mental illness a little more cinematically. In the real world, a Psychologist wouldn't, in fact, necessarily have any ability in psychological healing but would be skilled in collating and statistically analysing data about behaviour in a scientific way. The medically trained 'healers' are Psychiatrists who have a grounding in medicine and can prescribe drugs and other treatments. In the game, Psychology is used in a layman's fashion which does involve personal insight and detecting motives, etc. Psychoanalysis, which is actually quite a specific Freudian technique largely dismissed by modern medicine, is used for 'psychological healing'.

I'm not sure if these are the answers you are looking for, but it's the best I can suggest at the moment. The Call of Cthulhu rules aren't perfect. And this is with me not even mentioning why on earth anybody thought Luck should become disassociated with POW in this edition...rather than separating Sanity instead to make a Characteristic SAN score.....aw shoot...I just did! 

 

 

 

 

Edited April 9, 2018 by TrippyHippy

[Numtini]

On 4/8/2018 at 9:18 AM, MysteryHand said:

Why do Listen and Spot Hidden still exist as separate skills? 

If I could have one wish for 7.1 or 8, it would be skill consolidation.  Spot/Listen to detect, rifle/handgun to firearms, jump/throw/climb to athletics, and social skills to persuade.

Few people take the athletic skills because there's too many to cover, so many GMs defacto combine the social and search skills, and there is nothing more frustrating than having a decent firearm skill in one, then needing the opposite skill.

[MysteryHand]

Thank you so much for your replies. These were exactly the kinds of responses I was hoping for.  It gives me another perspective against which to compare my ideas.

It's not so much the rules I object to, it's the thought of trying to explain them to a new player.

TrippyHippy: Your point about a larger Size having disadvantages is a good one. I think it gives some balance to that trait.  Previously I had thought that there are a lot really tough women that aren't very large and therefore Size would put them at a disadvantage.  But then I thought: no, they just have high STR and a high Brawl. 

I think EDU makes sense if you frame it as a measure of how much you hit the books.  So you could be a physician that skated by and did virtually no studying. I think I was getting hung up on the description of 40= high school, or whatever it is.  If I abstract the trait a little in my mind, it makes more sense to me.

I'm not buying the empirical nature of Appearance as a rationale for using that over charisma.  After all there's a stat called Power that's pretty abstract.  But I appreciate your perspective.

Numtini: I completely agree.  I think the optional rule of setting a base of 10% in related firearms skills once 50% is reached in one is a good start but I don't think it goes far enough.  I think I'd be tempted to say: buy your skill points in the one firearm you want to specialize in.  Then your score in the other firearms is 1/2 of your specialized skill.  You can then buy points to boost the other firearm skills.

Thanks again to both of you for your responses.

[TrippyHippy]

Power could be measured in Watts! 

:

[klecser]

As an educator, I can tell you that listening and observing are very different brain processes.  It really depends upon what flavor of an investigative game you want to play.  I can justify playing separate.  Others will prefer combined for Listen and Spot Hidden.

The long and short of all of your questions is this:  it's your game. House rule anything you want, so long as your players agree.

Edited April 11, 2018 by klecser

[Tolemykus]

Role-play versus roll-play comes to mind when talking about spot/listen vs. awareness. Listening at a door, the Keeper tells you to roll Awareness. Looking across the field, the Keeper tells you to roll Awareness. Not exactly characterful.... but then again, you could say that about a lot of things. Choice are made in game design.