In Call of Cthulhu you are an investigator, living in the world of H.P. Lovecraft's books. Throughout the time you play in this world, you will have to face many horrors, which will slowly and surely drive you mad. Unlike many RPG's (Role Playing Games) you are not guaranteed to survive an adventure and your character will eventually turn mad, or die…One of the biggest advantages of Call of Cthulhu is the games system is relatively simple. If you want to do something, you have to roll two percentile dice (which gives you the numbers 1-100) and check if the total is under your corresponding skill. If you roll under your skill you succeed!
The adventures set you as investigators, following clues and interrogating people until you realise that
the world is not as safe as you thought, and your childhood nightmares live next door. The horror world of H.P. Lovecraft is brought further into the game by the use of a sanity score. When you see something horrible (and let me tell you, you will), you have to make a check as described above. If you succeed, well then you'll probably be ok - depending on how scary the situation is - but if you fail then you will lose sanity points (or at least a lot more than you counterparts who succeeded). If you have no sanity points you become insane, and you effectively loose control of your character!
I really enjoy the investigative aspect of Call of Cthulhu and it is extremely rewarding as you piece together the clues to figure out, for example, what unearthly cult has been kidnapping and sacrificing tourists. It makes a nice change from the more combat orientated systems that we usually play and it also has some of the finest single-sessions adventures around. This means that if you don't have the time or effort to play a long-running campaign then this is the game to go to.
However, this game is definitely not good for children in some cases. My sister and I have been scared and frightened quite a few occasions because even if the Game Master does all they can to make it enjoyable for children, some of the adventures are just inherently scary. The fact that your character is going to die and go insane sooner or later is not going to go down well with many children under the age of twelve. However, this is partly solved by Pulp Cthulhu.
In Pulp Cthulhu, you have some luck, literally, to help your rolls succeed. For example, if you are rolling really badly and you are about to die, you can spend all your luck points and survive to fight another day. In less sticky situations you can spend some luck points just to lower your roll, and succeed when you otherwise might have failed. But you won't want to spend all of your luck points, because you may have to roll a luck test, which means rolling under the number of luck points you
Also the mood of the game is different, there is more emphasise on fighting although it retains its investigative theme. In addition, you are probably not going to go insane as each time you finish an adventure you get a bunch of sanity points back.
Pulp Cthulhu is a lot better for kids, due to the slight change in feel and also how you can escape death with luck points. Overall, I think that I prefer Pulp Cthulhu because it lets slightly more dramatic and cool scenes to unfold by letting people use luck points to do special things. I would however recommend both of these roleplaying games and I really enjoy playing both of them.
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