It unbalances the game if every PC can hire their own private army. The downside is that characters can become incredibly rich if they choose, up to the level of billionaires. Now, players who want to be wealthy can put points into that skill, and they’re good to go. At the same time, the Credit Rating skill used to be effectively useless, as it didn’t measure a character’s money but rather their ability to get a loan. In previous editions, wealth was the result of a random roll, which put major restrictions on character concepts. Players now have total control over how wealthy their characters are through the Credit Rating skill. But it’s a damned sight better than what we had before. It’s not perfect, as it leaves many characters with a random assortment of back story entries that may or may not ever come up. There’s now a dedicated section for generating your character’s background and connections, which tie into the Sanity rules. Education is less of a god-stat, you can no longer power game your skills by being older, and Appearance actually has rules attached to it! * Without a doubt, 7th Edition addresses many issues that have plagued Call of Cthulhu’s character creation process for years. Character Creation Is B etter but More Complicated It’s hard to imagine the CoC game where knowing the monetary value of an object is so important it needs its own skill. It’s not clear when you would use Charm, as the examples given could easily apply to one of its older cousins. Charm is a new skill that’s somewhere between the existing Fast Talk and Persuade. While 7th Edition got rid of some skills, it added others that don’t seem very useful. Picking a specific language or scientific category is a real crapshoot, as you just have to hope that the GM is planning to make Punjabi or Astrophysics useful. The Science and Language skills have a similar problem. Medicine covers everything from anesthesiology to open heart surgery. This is especially strange because other skills are allowed to be extremely broad in their application. That means you can have a character who is a champion marksman with a rifle but barely knows which end of a revolver to hold.
While Punch and Kick have been combined into Brawl, each type of firearm still requires its own skill. That’s fine, but it’s still a trap for any unsuspecting player who opens the book and thinks one of those skills sounds cool. They’re both labeled as “uncommon” skills, ones that won’t come up much. has been replaced by Diver, which is in the book but not on the character sheet, as is Electronics. For one thing, some of the redundant skills are still there, just hidden. This is without question a good thing, but a few flies are in the ointment. Investigators no longer have to invest in Punch and Kick as separate skills, which was silly beyond the ability of humankind to understand. Hide and Sneak have been combined into Stealth, thank the Old Ones. Then there was the silly stuff, like a character with maximum ranks in S.C.U.B.A but no ranks in Swim.Ī quick glance at the 7th Edition character sheet tells you that some of these problems have been solved. To this day, no one knows exactly where the Electrical Repair skill ends and the Electronics skill begins. In others, multiple skills did exactly the same thing. Hide and Sneak were both required if you wanted get anywhere undetected. In some cases you needed to buy two skills for one task. One issue with previous CoC editions was skill overlap. Not sure what I mean? Well… Redundant Skills Have Been (Mostly) Eliminated While many are positive additions to the game, each seems to come with a bizarre drawback. The 7th Edition brings with it a myriad of changes to unhinge your mind and make you question the nature of reality. You had to go over 6th edition with a fine-toothed comb to see where it was different from 5th. At time of this writing, only the PDFs are available for sale, but hopefully a print run will soon follow.ĬoC’s previous editions have sometimes looked a bit samey. Call of Cthulhu (CoC) 7th Edition is upon us, ready to make our sanity drop like a stone. In all the hubbub about Dungeons and Dragons, some of you might have missed that another venerable roleplaying game spawned a new edition this year.