Hello everyone, Slick Dungeon here. I’m finally back to do the next entry in my How to play Call of Cthulhu series. This time we’re talking Skills. I’ll go over what they are and how they are used in the game. If you’re new to this game or haven’t seen my earlier posts, start here.
There is an extensive list of skills in the Keeper Rulebook so I won’t be talking about each one individually here. Rather we’re going to talk about the idea of what skills are, some ways they come up in game play, and some things to keep in mind when choosing skills for your investigator.
Skills defined
This will probably sound obvious but a skill is something your character can do. They will have some skills they excel at and others they are very limited in. A taxi driver in New York City might have excellent skill at Drive Auto but would be unlikely to have great skill in Pharmacy. It could happen but it’s just not likely. And it will depend on the background of your character and the circumstances of your campaign.
The skills in the game are represented by a percentage. The higher your investigator’s percentage is in a certain skill, the more likely they are to succeed at any checks made involving that skill. You are limited by the game rules as to how many skills and to what percentage your investigator can have. And you will want to think carefully about what skills would be best to cultivate not only for your investigator but for the era, location, and circumstances of the scenario you are playing in.
Below I will give you the example from the book so you know what skill points mean.
Skill points
On page 54 of the Keeper Rulebook they have a handy chart you can reference if you are not sure how skilled your character is.
As you can see, it’s advantageous to be higher in any skill you might want to use in the game. But it’s very difficult to be higher than 89% in any particular skill. This wouldn’t be just someone who spent a lifetime honing a skill, they would also be someone who is more of an expert than almost anyone else.
On the opposite end, anyone with 01%-05% has no skill to speak of. When you have a skill this low, you are sometimes able to increase the skill during the game but you have low odds of succeeding on a skill check involving this skill.
The majority of your skills are going to fall somewhere in the middle of this range. There are differing degrees to which you can be successful with these skills. If your skill is above 50% you could make a living at it but you’re not considered a true expert here.
One thing to keep in mind as you are looking at your skills (and that I tended to forget when I first started playing) is that you typically want to roll under your skill percentage to succeed. This is beneficial because the higher percentage you have, the easier it is to succeed. However, progressing in that skill becomes more difficult the higher your percentage is. For example, if you are learning to skateboard and you have never done this before, it’s easy to go from novice to neophyte. But once you become a well known and skilled skateboarder it is much more difficult to go from amateur to professional. And even harder to go from professional to expert.
Skill specializations
Within certain skills there are specializations. For example your investigator might be great at a particular kind of science. Maybe they are a physicist. While a physicist understands science broadly, she isn’t necessarily an expert in biology. The rule book will tell you which group of skills have a specialization. Another example is fighting. You can specialize in certain types of fighting. But if the skill group is specialized you can’t be an expert in that general skill. Our physicist can be an expert in physics but she can’t be an expert in just science in general.
Opposing Skill
For many of the skills listed in the book, there is a section giving guidance about opposing skills and what the difficulty of success is. Let’s go back to our example of the physicist. She wants to conduct an experiment in her lab. She has all of the proper equipment and a hypothesis. She’s up to date on the latest academic research. And she’s got plenty of time to complete the task.
In this situation, the Keeper will likely call for an opposing skill check with a regular difficulty. This means to succeed at her experiment, the player would need to roll equal to or below the skill value of the investigator.
This is a normal experiment where things go well.
Now, let’s take that same example and add some complications. Instead of doing the experiment in her lab, our scientist has found a strange substance in the woods. It’s an area where people have been disappearing and there is no explanation for it. She goes back to her lab but it has burned down. She has some equipment at home and can use her small kitchen for the experiment. This is going to be far more difficult than the first example. This will likely be considered a Hard check by the Keeper. In this case, our investigator has to roll equal to or below half of her skill value. If her skill is 80%, instead of rolling equal to or under 80, she must roll equal to or under 40 to succeed.
Finally, there is an Extreme difficulty. For this, let’s use our example above but add more complications. Now, she’s in her house conducting her experiment but someone set a fire to her house and she has to work fast. In this case the player must roll under one-fifth of her skill value. She has to roll a 16 or less to succeed. Not impossible but very difficult.
Pushing and combining Skills
We’ll get more into this as I dive deeper into game mechanics in a future post but there are sometimes chances to “push” a roll. Basically what it gets down to is when you fail a check there may be circumstances which allow you to roll again. However, as nice as that sounds, there are risks. If you push a roll and then fail again, something even worse than your first failure is likely to happen. It’s a balance knowing when you should push a roll and when you should take the loss. And it’s one of the things that makes the game fun!
Another type of roll you might be asked to make is a combined skill roll. There are two ways this can happen. In the first situation you will roll once but compare your result against two skills. For this result to succeed you have to roll under both skills. If you have a skill with an 80% and one with a 60% and you roll 70 you do not succeed. The second way this can happen is the Keeper may allow you to use one roll and compare the result to either skill. In this example, if you have an 80% in one and a 60% in the other and you roll a 70 you do succeed because you rolled under 80.
This can feel a little awkward at first but as you play it will start to come naturally. And we’ll talk about it more in a later post.
Optional rules
There are some optional rules in the end of chapter on skills in the Keeper Rulebook. These have to do with transferable skills in the specializations and languages. I’m not really going to go into those here. These rules are optional so it’s up to the discretion of the Keeper. What they boil down to is when you become more of an expert in one particular part of your specialization, this might transfer into the skills in the rest of that skill group. It does make sense that someone who already speaks three languages might have less difficulty in understanding a fourth than someone who is monolingual learning a second language. But we’ll leave that up to your Keeper.
In conclusion
Skills in Call of Cthulhu are a huge part of the game and integral to how an investigator operates in the game world. The chapter on skills has a ton of options so it does help to know what the background of your investigator is before even looking in that part of the book. We’ll get more into how they are used as I continue this series.
In the next post I’ll get into some specifics about game play rules, not including combat, chases, sanity, or magic. I’ll touch on each of those subjects with later posts. For now, I hope this helps you to understand skills a bit and I’ll see you next time!
