I started running the 1984 archetypal Call of Cthulhu campaign, Masks of Nyarlathotep. The version we’re playing is the 2014 “remaster”, the fifth edition, written for the current 7th edition ruleset, which adds a whole introductory adventure and generally tidies up things.
Call of Cthulhu, 7th edition
We have played a lot of Call of Cthulhu, 5.1 edition, from 1993. The game system has changed remarkably little since the 1981 original, with the seventh edition bringing the most sweeping changes, if we ignore the d20 version in 2002. I was curious to see how my group and myself would take to it, as we’re now very used to story games, and this sort of “how would it work in real life”, simulationist approach feels decidedly yesteryear.
Getting into character creation, we were frankly shocked. Aside from the archaic, very cumbersome and out of place automatic gunfire rules, the character creation is where the age of the underlying system shows the most. You’ll be juggling several very large point pools and buying dozens of skills, percentage point by percentage point. There is multiplication, cross referencing tables, calculating half and fifth values of skills, and so forth – it’s a lot, and for a contemporary player without a history of these games from the 80s-90s