Bruce Baugh is a roleplaying game designer with a rather impressive pedigree. As well as working on one of my favourite roleplaying games, Feng Shui, his body of work includes the D20 version of Gamma World, Nexus: The Infinite City, and a truly astounding amount of writing and development for White Wolf. A good list of his accomplishments is found here. I want to say up front that I have a great deal of respect for him as a game designer (I don't know him personally, other than having read some of his posts on rec.games.frp.misc).

On January 1, 2004, Baugh posted an essay to his blog titled "Gaming Reflections, 1: Call of Cthulhu". You can find it here (start at the bottom of the page and work up). The essay is a pretty scathing attack on Call of Cthulhu, a game he characterizes as having outlived its usefulness. To use his own words, Baugh begins the essay, "Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu is a pretty good game that's been superseded on every significant point and no longer deserves to be any more active or respected a venture than the vast majority of games from the early '80s."

Although he makes some good points, for the most part I disagree with his assessment. This essay is a rebuttal of some of the points Baugh makes in his article. I quote parts of his essay for clarity when agreeing with, or refuting, his remarks. His quotes are © 2004 Bruce Baugh. I strongly recommend that you go to his site and read his essay, for the totality of his argument and to see if I've taken him out of context. Baugh's quotes will appear in "blockquote" format.

Obviously I'm a fan of the Call of Cthulhu system, also sometimes called the Chaosium Basic Role Play (BRP) system. Call of Cthulhu is a specific implementation of the BRP for use in Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. I've been playing Call of Cthulhu since 1984, though I also used the Chaosium BRP prior to that in a couple of RuneQuest campaigns. I can run a Call of Cthulhu game with very little need for accessing the rule book. I thought, for the purposes of full disclosure, that I should mention my bias up front. Bruce Baugh has done a lot of work on White Wolf's Vampire: The Masquerade, the top competitor to Call of Cthulhu in terms of horror roleplaying games. Baugh doesn't try to hide his involvement in White Wolf, but I also thought — for the purposes of full disclosure — that this should be mentioned up front, as it's hard to find this information if all you do is read Baugh's essay.

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Near the beginning of his essay, Bruce Baugh wrote the following:

There has never been a good explanation of how skill levels [in Call of Cthulhu] measure real-world competence, and what explanations there are jibe poorly with play experience. 30%, the alleged "general competence" level, doesn't work that way: in both real-life and genre inspirations, people who are considered reliably good at what they do don't suddenly fail 7 times out of 10 in moments of stress and crisis.

The "30% competence" is actually 25%, and it's derived from the original Call of Cthulhu rules where you had to have 25% skill in order to drive a car. Baugh is right in that this was never properly explained, but I never believed — and can't find a citation — for 25% or 30% being "considered reliably good". I always thought that the 25% drive skill meant that the character got his license in the 1920s. It didn't make the driver "reliably good", it just meant that the character could just drive a car in normal driving conditions. In times of stress, or difficult roads, the character was likely to drive off the road, spin out, etc. For actual competence, the skill had to be much higher. Pagan Publishing's out-of-print Weapons Compendium by John H. Crowe, III has a much better break down of competence and skill percentages, with the 60% range being "reliably good". This isn't in the actual Call of Cthulhu rules, though the Keeper's Companion 1 considers someone to be a professional or an expert in a field when they reach 60% (note that this compendium also introduces difficulty levels, so that 60% could go as high as 120% for an easy task). Nowhere is 25% listed as "reliably good". Since it's a percentage game, it's easy for players to realize that 25% is hardly "reliably good".

I've done enough studying of military history to disagree with his comments about failing seven times out of ten in moments of stress being an error. I'm reading Brent Nosworthy's Bloody Crucible of Courage about the American Civil War. During combat, the chance of hitting a man with a bullet from a rifled musket was between 0.6% and 1.5%. This is at engagement ranges well within the effective range of the weapon. Even competent shooters were hitting at closer to 10%. By comparison, modern black powder weapon enthusiasts with the same weapons but not in the stressful environment of combat can hit targets at the same range well over 50% of the time. That's roughly 30 to 80 times better than average soldiers and 5 times better than marksmen during actual Civil War battles. Even well trained police officers tend to hit at rates far, far below their ability on a gun range. A cursory viewing of one of those "video surveillance camera" TV shows can tell you just how likely it is for a competent shooter to hit something at close range in times of stress. If anything, the BRP percentages under very stressful situations, for combat anyway, are too high!

He makes a very good point, though, that the game system does not cover non-stressful jobs very well, and that people have added their own modifiers to something that's not written in the game system. Chaosium did add difficulty modifiers to Call of Cthulhu in Keeper's Companion 1, but perhaps Baugh hasn't read that volume.

He also mentions the high fumble percent, and that is a concern. I never liked the gun malfunction rate being as high as 1%, from a realism point of view. From a Murphy's Law/shit happens standpoint it's a lot of fun, but it's not realistic. (As an aside, few game systems have fumble percentages below 1%. Phoenix Command did. Harnmaster has 5% as a "critical failure", but Bill Gant's firearms rules have guns jam 1/6 of the time when there's a critical failure, giving a percentage of 0.83%. Most games have some form of fumble occur in the 1% to 5% range.)

First, a few skills are so crucially important to the game as presented in the core book and adventures, such as Library Use, that character concepts need to be deformed to include them for characters to have a reasonable chance.

This is entirely dependent on the Keeper. If a character doesn't have the "core skills" to find out information necessary to propel the game forward, it behooves the Keeper to find a way of imparting that information. For one thing, the Keeper doesn't have to require something like a Library Use skill. If a player says, "I'm going to the library and research everything I can about the haunted house", a Keeper could require a Library Use roll, or he could simply give the information to the player. A successful Library Use roll could mean the character found the information in under an hour, while a failure meant that it took all day. (This breaks the written rules in at least one of the editions of the game. The rule book is quite clear that Keeper common sense should always over ride the written rule. This is a basic concept in virtually all roleplaying games. Baugh does have a good point, though, if a rule only works as long as the gamemaster/Keeper breaks it.)

Library Use isn't all that central a skill, anyway. None of the players in my Delta Green campaign have particularly high Library Use, and I have no problem running scenarios and campaigns.

Since the 1920s game is essentially a mystery-solving game, it stands to reason that characters would definitely find certain core skills to be helpful in that environment. Not all the characters need them, but a party with at least one or two practitioners of that skill is definitely useful. Saying that a skill like Library Use is necessary in order to have a reasonable chance is like saying a magic use skill is necessary in a fantasy game in order for the character to have a reasonable chance. No, it's not necessary, but it certainly helps the party if they have a character that's good at it.

Second, there are enough skills that it's easy to end up with a character who turns out not to have something that would suit the concept at a crucial moment in play. It's not nearly as bad a problem as with GURPS (apart from GURPS Lite and the games derived from it) and other, later skill-based games, but it's present often enough to be a recurring: "Whoops, I can't do this thing after all."

There are essentially two popular schools of thought on skills in RPGs: the "we need lots of skills" crowd and the "we don't need lots of skills" crowd. Each has its strengths and weaknesses. Baugh, from the games he's written or developed, is firmly a believer in the "small skill list". The advantage of this type of system is exactly what he says: if you have a small set of skills that cover a larger area of endeavor, a character is likely to have the skill that would suit his character concept. If you have one "medicine" skill, then your surgeon doctor is going to be able to diagnose diseases, do first aid, and even operate on other characters. In Call of Cthulhu it's entirely possible to have a doctor who doesn't have the Pharmacy skill, for instance. Feng Shui, Vampire: The Masquerade, and a host of others are on the "small skill list" side of the street. Most of the more "modern" RPGs have small skill lists. It also helps that a small skill list is simpler to referee and requires fewer pages (thus dropping the cost of producing the book, or leaving more room for background information).

Baugh doesn't mention the weaknesses of the small skill list. In particular, you end up with overly competent generalist characters. A pediatrician in real life is not going to know the tattooing pattern of a close range gun blast, nor will he be able to tell the height of an assailant based on the marks on a victim's neck. If all your system has is a "medicine" skill (or "medicine" and "first aid"), a competent pediatrician will be able to double as a competent medical examiner, optometrist, dentist, and surgeon. A large skill list also allows players to differentiate their characters. One doctor may specialize as a surgeon, another may specialize in forensic science, and another may specialize in first aid. This allows for the concept of three doctor characters investigating the supernatural without each one looking pretty much like a clone of the others in their key areas of expertise.

Is there a way of handling both situations? Yes. Some game systems have skill trees. You put points in a generalist skill and then specialize once you got to a certain level of ability. Every doctor has some medical training, but a medical examiner would have to specialize in forensics after achieving a certain base level of competence. Skill tree systems have had varying degrees of success. Ringworld, which used the BRP system, was not very successful, in spite of — or, perhaps, because of — its skill trees.

I don't see the number of skills in Call of Cthulhu to be good or bad, just different from the games that Baugh personally designs.

[The Call of Cthulhu sanity system] provides no help for matters of resolve versus cowardice, passion versus apathy, conflicting desires, loves and duties. In horror fiction as in other kinds, it is very often the ability to call on one's deeper drives for the strength to stand firm and advance in the face of horror. Conversely, some of the best horror deals with the eroding of one's soul and the ways that one's deeper drives can be turned into weapons. Pendragon, Unknown Armies, Vampire: The Masquerade and Wraith: The Oblivion, Exalted, Paladin, and other games since have all addressed these matters in various ways beyond just "oh, play it out."

First of all, I thought "playing it out" was the whole point of roleplaying. Second, not everyone likes the character generation system to interfere with this level of their character concept. Many folks will play cowards or heroes based on their own internal conception of the character. They don't need, nor want, the game to dictate this level of detail.

This gets into different schools of roleplaying. There are those who can take any character and play it. There are others that are just not that good at acting, or who are only comfortable with a certain type of character. The former type of player often likes games where these lower levels of characterization are dictated for them. The latter type of player doesn't like this kind of system or ignores it. I suspect that Baugh plays with some very good roleplayers, and doesn't game a lot with novices or those with limited roleplaying skills.

I've been in convention games where I've had to roleplay characters that I couldn't quite click with. I did an okay job, but I wasn't very fond of it. I couldn't imagine playing an entire campaign stuck with a character with whom I couldn't connect. My point is that good roleplayers will introduce these elements themselves and don't need the game system to create them. New and limited roleplayers (and I have played with a number of each) don't want this kind of system. I suppose you could always say, "Add the system in, and those that don't like it will take it out," but you could say the same thing about Call of Cthulhu's lengthy skill system.

As an aside, the BRP rules did have something to handle this type of character trait. It was a variant rule that appeared in the Avalon Hill support magazine for RuneQuest, when Avalon Hill owned the rights to the fantasy version of BRP. It worked well, but I found most players threw it away or tweaked the numbers to fit how they saw their own character anyway.

CoC has systemic support for such action, but no narrative help at all for handling either period or contemporary science (apart from forensics, a field that CoC has always provided great coverage for), and there's a persistent editorial bias away from the action side of the available canon.

This attitude, at least on the part of fans and champions of the game, showed up repeatedly in arguments over d20 Call of Cthulhu. Monte Cook and John Tynes provided both system and narrative support for pulp-ish adventure and various intermediate conditions, and this deeply offends many CoC stalwarts. But it's truer to the totality of what's in Lovecraft, and CoC has never said anything like "We're only supporting a particular aesthetic subset of the Cthulhu stories and discarding the others which, although they share the same cosmological framework, are in a tone we prefer not to handle." CoC discussion too often degenerates into chest-beating about who can be most manly in regarding anything but ghastly death and degradation as wimping out.

He has a point. Quite a few adventures and campaigns stress the "horror" element of the Mythos at the expense of the "action" element in Lovecraft's writing. He overstates the case, though. I guess he never read either of the Blood Brothers books. These books included scenarios based on 1950s horror and science fiction films, as well as well as 1970s and 1980s slasher flicks. I distinctly remember one of the scenarios having stats for the comedians Abbott and Costello. So it's not like Chaosium didn't support a different aesthetic. I take it that Baugh never played the Masks of Nyarlathotep campaign, either. It ends in a "Fu Manchu meets You Only Live Twice" climactic event that would be best filmed in glorious Technicolor.

As he quite clearly states, there's systemic support for action. I disagree that there's a distinct editorial bias against such action in the modules produced for the game. If anything, I got tired of the way so many Chaosium products ended with the big "action sequence" at the end, where the players take on the evil cultists in a cinematic climax. Masks of Nyarlathotep ended this way. The Fungi from Yoggoth ended this way. Pagan Publishing's Walker in the Wastes ends several chapters this way. One of the best Chaosium campaigns, Horror on the Orient Express, has plenty of pulp action throughout, otherwise it wouldn't have supplied a schematic of an entire train. I ran a Call of Cthulhu campaign for more than 8 years — most of the time using published scenarios — and more than half the scenarios, campaigns, campaign chapters ended with just the sort of action that Baugh claims Chaosium is biased against.

You can't just look at Call of Cthulhu as strictly a Chaosium product anymore. You also have to include Delta Green, which is as much Call of Cthulhu as the Dreamlands supplement. There's definitely no bias against action in Delta Green, what with undead Nazis, Majestic-12, and mythos gangsters in the mix.

CoC's publication history includes a lot of the worst gaming adventures ever.

That's a bit over the top. Granted there have been some less than stellar Call of Cthulhu supplements and adventures, but he hasn't seen a lot of the old D&D modules that came out in the late 70s and early 80s if he firmly believes this.

While the trend in RPG production has been to produce supporting rules and background supplements instead of canned adventure modules, Chaosium has done the reverse with Call of Cthulhu. One of the things that I love about Call of Cthulhu is that I don't have to keep buying mountains of supplements to keep up with it (the same can not be said of Vampire: The Masquerade). For Chaosium to survive, it needs to release new Call of Cthulhu products. This has been overwhelmingly in the form of campaign and adventure supplements, or area source books with included adventures. Adventures are harder to write than source books, so it's not surprising that some of the adventures are of inferior quality.

Railroading, like the other vices, should be one style among many, rather than presented as a recurring norm, and it shouldn't garner such unqualified praise.

Railroading is definitely an issue in the published adventures. What Baugh doesn't acknowledge is the difficulty in avoiding railroading in a game that's essentially about murder mysteries. How do you avoid railroading when you are following a "clue A leads to clue B leads to clue C" structure? I guess this goes back to his pulp comments. If the game stressed more of Lovecraft's pulp side, the railroading wouldn't be as noticeable. Okay, I'll grant him this point. However, if the structure of the game is based around the murder mystery formula, railroading is going to be a big part of it. Is there an over-reliance on the "murder mystery"? Yes, there is... except that's what Call of Cthulhu is famous for, and thats what players of the game like. Baugh complains that this is bad, and players shouldn't praise the game for it. I contend that Call of Cthulhu gets its praise precisely because there are so few pen-and-paper RPGs that follow the horror-as-murder-mystery formula, and fewer still that have so much support material in the form of published adventures.

The main game has gone through a whole lot more "editions" than just about anything else that's not published purely as a joke, and to substantially less criticism.

This is really unfair, and the comment that gave me the impetus to write this essay in the first place. There is a difference between "editions" and "versions" of a game. Call of Cthulhu is in it's sixth edition (seven, really, as 5.5 is different than 5; there was also a 20th anniversary edition that is pretty much identical to sixth edition). In actuality, there have only been three distinct versions of the game. 2nd edition is really 1st edition with a little bit of extra background material. 3rd edition is 2nd edition bound into one book. 4th edition is a hardback version of 3rd edition with some colour plates added. 5th edition is where the rules changed drastically, and 5.5 added some extra changes to the mechanics. 6th edition is essentially 5.5, with a couple of small changes and in hardback.

The different editions are in the manner of a book that sells out a print run. Chaosium chose to make each new edition different in some respect from the previous one, while keeping the core rule set virtually untouched. The rules haven't changed much at all between versions. There is no expectation that players will collect — let alone have to collect — the different editions. The rules are virtually identical from 1st through 4th edition. 5th edition streamlined the system in a number of places and introduced some changes, but these were definitely evolutionary, not revolutionary. There are so few differences, in fact, that someone playing with 1st edition rules could run a campaign written for 6th edition with only minor changes (the only noticeable changes are slightly different stats for guns, and the removal of the "spell multiplier" for tomes in later editions).

(As an aside, I personally think Chaosium was too conservative with 5th edition, which is why they came out with version 5.5. 5.5 has some changes that were needed in the system — such as fixing the problem of characters accumulating too much Power — that should have been incorporated into 5th edition. That having been said, there really isn't a lot of difference between 5 and 5.5.)

So that's six different editions for a 20+ year old game. More impressive is that it's more than 8 different printings in the same time frame. The fact that these print runs keep selling out must indicate something of the game's popularity. In spite of the number of editions and printings, there have only been 2 or 3 actual versions of the rules. With Call of Cthulhu, if your rule book wore out and you had to buy a new one, you got something a little different for your money (even though the core rules hadn't changed at all). 5th edition came out in 1992. That meant that there were 5 different editions in about a decade, but only two different versions of the rules. 5.5 came out in 1998, so the main rule book had been completely stable for about 6 years. 6th edition comes out in 2004, again 6 years between editions.

Baugh doesn't mention that since the very early 1990s there have been as many editions of Call of Cthulhu as there have been of Vampire: The Masquerade. He also doesn't mention that Call of Cthulhu's changes are less substantive than those in other game systems, where whole versions have been deemed obsolete. One of his main arguments, in fact, is that the core Call of Cthulhu system hasn't changed much at all. So he's criticizing it for not having changed enough... and for having changed too much?

[...]Chaosium has a history when it comes to supplements of missed deadlines almost unrivaled among long-time publishers - unrivaled in part because other companies facing such delays took steps to improve both their publication reliability and their styles and timing of announcements. Chaosium has roused as many unsatisfied hopes as any company out there, and with a lot less sign of actual regret about it.

This criticism is listed to add credence to his theory that Chaosium, and Call of Cthulhu have an undeserved "halo of respect". In other words the game is flawed and the fans of the game are too forgiving. Whether or not this is true, a criticism of Chaosium's production schedule does not belong in a criticism of the game system itself.

What's interesting about Baugh's article is that while he complains about production schedules and editions, he actually misses some true problem areas in Call of Cthulhu.

A biggie is the combat system. The system is too slow for those wanting fast, pulp hero narratives, but it's not detailed enough for the closet wargamers. Pistol damage and rifle damage don't really "jive" with one another, which is why BTRC refused to produce Call of Cthulhu weapon stats in their supplement Guns! Guns! Guns! You can potentially do more damage with martial arts than you can with a pistol. Automatic weapon use is an ugly exercise in min/maxing, with players able to calculate the exact number of bullets necessary to increase their odds of hitting and produce nasty amounts of damage. If a target is hit, the number of bullets is completely random; if you fired 20 bullets, you roll a 1D20 to hit, regardless of the accuracy of the weapon or the character's ability. The hit location system introduced in Cthulhu Now and the 1990s Handbook was bolted on. A three round burst at point blank range against a stationary target standing upright could end with a bullet hitting each of the target's legs and the target's head, regardless of the weapon's inherent accuracy.

Another area I've never much liked is the calculation of critical success, impale, and fumble percentages. These come from the old RuneQuest system, which at least gave space for all three values on the character sheet. A critical success is 5% of the skill's percentage. An impale is the old RuneQuest "special success", applying only to certain weapons. It is 20% of the skill's percentage. I can't remember, off the top of my head, what the fumble percentage is. For some reason I have to keep looking it up. In RuneQuest it was 5% of the failure chance, and applied at the top end of the roll. 5th edition simplified this, but it's interesting to note that I can't remember precisely what it is (though rolling 100% is always a fumble, and sometimes 98% and 99% are fumbles). Quick, what's 5% of 37%? What's 20% of 63%? You rolled 18, is that an impale or just a success? Harnmaster did a much better job of this, though it's critical failure percentages are much higher than Call of Cthulhu's.

There are other warts in the system. The First Aid skill is too forgiving and is too often something that is applied after combat and not during it. (Godlike handles first aid much better.) There are no rules for determining who wins a running race. Some monsters have different movement rates than humans but all humans (and some human-like monsters) have the same movement rate. There are no rules for determining if a character manages to outrun a monster over a short distance, or if a character is able to catch up to an NPC in a foot race. The rules for hiding, sneaking and spotting don't include modifiers for the environment (darkness, cover, taking your time) in spite of sneaking being an important part of the game.

Baugh picks at various shortcomings in Call of Cthulhu to show that the system is no longer worthy of respect or support. He misses the point that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. He forgets what it's like to have novice players who want a clean game system that just does the job. And he doesn't count the fact that the central mechanic in the system is Call of Cthulhu's sanity subsystem. I have yet to find any game system that can duplicate it. Unknown Armies comes close, but it's "hardening" effect — while arguably realistic — takes away from the terror of seeing something awful. In contrast, there is never anything good about having to do a Sanity roll in Call of Cthulhu. This mechanic, alone, gives players the impetus to have their characters act fearfully. No other system does as good a job. GURPS' Fright Check and Mythos Fright Check mechanics can give players the same sort of foreboding when encountering terror, but these mechanics are too combat oriented. In GURPS a "standing in place, stunned for a minute or two" result is a "worse" and less common outcome on the Fright Table than a character receiving a personality-altering Quirk. Simply put, GURPS Mythos Fright Check system is not as good as Call of Cthulhu's Sanity system.

Because of Call of Cthulhu's actual weaknesses, I have tried other game systems. The Sanity system always pulled me back. The D100 Sanity system meshes well with a D100 skill system. Adding Call of Cthulhu's Sanity to other game systems always seems a bolted-on kludge instead of an integrated whole. I continue to look for a better system but, until I find it, I will continue to use — and respect — Call of Cthulhu, Bruce Baugh's comments not withstanding.

January 16, 2004