As the characters progress, there’s a chance the skills they’ve been using will improve. If you want to get better at those skills, use them in the adventure! In Call of Cthulhu, each time you successfully make use of a skill during a game, you place a checkmark next to it. Unlike D&D, there aren’t any class abilities or special powers tied to your background. For the most part, however, Occupation just affects what skills your character has access to and how good they are at using those skills. Pilots are better at skills like Repair, Navigation, and Pilot (aircraft). They include things like pilot or librarian. Occupations are kind of like classes, in that they help define who your character is. It’s not entirely freeform, however, as you’ll also be guided by your character’s Occupation. During character creation, you receive a number of points to assign to different skills as you see fit. The Call of Cthulhu RPG dispenses with classes and instead relies on a character’s skills to define them.īut how do you know how you rank in each skill? Well, to a large extent, that’s up to you. Wizards cast spells, rogues sneak around, and fighters excel at combat. In D&D, every player character has a class that determines their role in the game. If your First Aid is 47%, unless things are going against you, that skill will work 47% of the time.Ĭall of Cthulhu doesn’t use character classes, at least not the same way that D&D does. It also means that a player has a pretty good idea how likely they are to succeed at a task. That means that, unlike D&D, rolling low is good in CoC. For example, if your CoC character’s First Aid skill is 47%, that means you need to roll a 47 or less to succeed when using that skill. In CoC, players usually roll percentile dice (d100) and want to roll under a set number. High rolls are good, and a player generally wants to roll above a target number. In D&D, a player usually rolls a d20 and adds a bonus. The main mechanical difference, then, is how the game uses those skills in play. Both games use attributes like Strength and Dexterity, for example, and both use skills to help define what characters can and can’t do. Specifically, we’re going to examine CoC from the point-of-view of a player more familiar with Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition (D&D).Īt first glance, D&D and Call of Cthulhu share a few similarities. Lovecraft: Call of Cthulhu (CoC) by Chaosium. This time around, we’re examining the most famous of the roleplaying games inspired by the works of H.P.

Last month, we took an in depth look at Delta Green. Leave the Dungeon to Heed the Call of Cthulhu

Call of cthulhu old man