Where Worlds Collide

In a comment against Down with Cthulhu, Bruce Baugh asks me how I did a conversion from Call of Cthulhu to Fudge.

This wasn’t intended as a generic CoC to Fudge conversion, more a quick and dirty one-off conversion of a specific published scenario; all I converted were the six pre-generated PCs, and some human-scale opponents. I must point out that I haven’t tested these conversions under the stresses of a long-running campaign, or their scalability with regards to some of the more powerful monsters in the game. I guess that Great Cthulhu himself would still do 1d3 player characters damage a turn.

Attributes I handled by converting them on the basis of 2 CoC levels = 1 Fudge level, with 10-11 defined Mediocre, 12-13 being Fair, 14-15 Good, and so on. Anything 7 or lower is just Terrible, while 20+ is either Legendary or on a different scale.

Skills I handled in a similar way. At first, I tried using the percentage equivalents using the chart in the Fudge rules, but the pregen PCs came out with just about all skills at Fair, which seemed a bit bland. So I just converted them with the flat rate of 15 percentiles = 1 Fudge level, with 50% being Fair, 65% Good, 80% Great, and so on. This felt “right”, and covered the whole of the 100% range with the seven Fudge levels. It won’t work with some other BRP-derived systems that have skills going way about 100%, such as Stormbringer.

Sanity was simply a second wound track, labelled “Uneasy”, “Shaken”, “Very Shaken” and “Wibble”. Sanity rolls were against Willpower (POW in CoC), Shaken or Very Shaken characters get a penalty to the roll.

And that’s basically all there was to it.

Iä! Bruce Baugh disses Chaosium’s version of Call of Cthulhu, and puts forward the loathsome, blasphemous idea that d20 Cthulhu is actually an improvement.

Actually, he does have a point; I feel the old Chaosium rules, although groundbreaking in their time, are getting a bit dated now. But I’m far from convinced that the d20 rules are really an appropriate replacement; d20 is just a bit rules-heavy, and I have yet to see any evidence that d20 can do any style other than cinematic. The last time I ran a (non Mythos) scenario written for CoC, I converted the game to Fudge, which seemed a far better way to go.

This week’s Game WISH asks:

What do you think is the best cast size for the games you’ve played? What are the factors that go into your answer: genre, play group, gaming system, etc.?

In face to face play, I find a party of four players plus the GM to be the optimal number for just about any genre that I regularly play.

If four is the optimum, I find anything from two to six is perfectly playable. I’ve played in lengthy campaigns with just two player characters, which can work very well provided both PCs have a sufficiently wide range of abilities. For example, in the Kalyr campaign I GMed, using GURPS, the two PCs were a powerful telepath and a multi-skilled soldier of fortune type. Between the two of them they could handle most situations I threw at them, although they relied heavily on a pair of NPC combat grunts in fight scenes. The campaign may well have benefited from third PC as a combat specialist.

My practical upper limit is six; I strongly dislike large FtF parties of seven or eight PCs, something I’ve experienced in quite a few convention-style one-shots. I find there are two big problems with a group of that size: First, it’s hard to ensure that everybody gets enough spotlight time in a session, and second, combat seems to take forever.

On the third tentacle, the optimum number for one-shots is probably the size the scenario was written for. As a GM I find it hard to retool on the fly a scenario I’d written for six 75-point GURPS characters when find I’ve got to run it for only three, especially when it’s hard to make up any balanced party from three out of the six pre-generated PCs I’d prepared! The last two games I GMed had five and three players respectively; both exactly the number I’d expected.

For online games things are somewhat different; since games often split into multiple semi-independent threads, the number of PCs has less to do with group dynamics and more to do with the number of PCs the GM can handle. In many cases this allows much larger casts than are practical in face to face gaming. For example, I’ve currently got nine players in my Kalyr PbeM. There’s one party of six, one party of two, and one lone wolf. I’m playing in two games on Dreamlyrics with large casts; one, STD, has a large number of one- or two-player threads, while the other, EOH, currently has one huge ensemble thread with a lot of inter-PC interaction, something that’s easier in a big game.