I can think of many worse systems.
Message:Starting with D&D which, if we're honest, is a total mess which was compromised from the start by being rewritten for too many dice because Gary and Dave had to order poly dice from Japan as full sets of platonic solids. Rather than eat the other dice they screwed up the syste6. Yeah D&D is the granddaddy and everyone knows of it, but it's a shit system. Every revision makes it worse.
Dave Hargrave's early Arduin stuff fixes many of the issues, but adds new ones. Still, Hargrave's HP and magic systems were superior.
Space Opera sucked. Bushido sucked. All the Palladium Games sucked. Toon is a mess, Champions spawned the "36 pack of 6-siders" for its "two hours per combat round" slog (And Champions jas a rules section about how the Ref shouldn't actually play by the rules because the core design is so unbalanced any starting character can rule the world. The rulebook example is putting all your points into followers which grants you 10 billion followers, thus you are Emperor of Earth. If your rules have a section on how your rules are totally unbalanced, your rules are bad). Amber was a bad joke. BTRC's Timelords had so many great ideas, but the mechanics were a mess - the system attempted to scale die rolls so a "Difficulty 10"task actually required a different roll for a " Skill 10" dude vs a "Skill 5" dude, but the implementation was so clunky . Merc was... Not good.
CoC has high player mortality, but it's Traveller that kills you before you enter play.
CoC is a bit clunky, but the version we just played removed 3d6 Stats and put EVERYTHING on percentile dice for simplicity. Trouble finding things? Unfamiliarity with the character sheet. There are certain Better Games where PCs have 120 Swaggering to manage - if they weren't lettered it would be a nightmare. Yup, one organization trick holds half the game together. Still after years of play we STILL occasionally have delays looking for Swaggering or Skills under their respective Traits. Not to mention modifiers. We're speedy because someone named Mike put all the modifiers on his character sheet to avoid looking at the rule book, which is always a nightmare in PDF.
CoC has a rather elegant method of character advancement. Any skill you successfully use during a mission has a chance to improve afterwards. Learning new skills or improving unused skills is done by forgoing checks on skills used during the mission - trade an advancement check for an advancement check. How does the skill improve? Roll above its current level. Yup, skills get harder to improve as they get better... It's easy for the novice to improve. Masters don't get much better. They're already masters. This is actually one of the best advancement systems going. It's level-less, so a PC just doesn't magically get better at random times, it's tied directly to to the game play. We played a one-off, so advancements were ignored, but there's a system. Ignoble remain the best "Level based" advancement, but I always liked that CoC let me try to improve my PC every mission. Yes, I've played CoC as a Campaign.
The SAN rules aren't 100% effective, but here's the thing - Strength can be quantified. How good a shot someone can be can be quantified. Fear is difficult to quantify, and it's a common issue for any horror game. SAN rolls are imperfect, but so are Buzzwords. CoC has the "kist points, now I'm insane" mechanic, but Where Fools Dare to Tread (and other games) have the "you failed a roll so here's a crippling personality flaw" mechanic. Either way one bad roll assigns a penalty. Oh, completing missions and defeating foes INCREASES SAN between missions. If we'd lived (and there were multiple ways to win Natasha's mission), defeating Vampires and Trotsky would have caused our minds to strengthen as we would have learned evil CAN be defeated. In extended campaigns CoC becomes a back and forth of being driven to madness, then (maybe) emerging stronger.
I think in some ways the base premise behind the Cthulhu Mythos - the Universe is vast and uncaring, and you're a speck of nothing on a speck of nothing in the middle of a sea of nothing among a universe of widely scattered small pockets of nothing, and humans are as ants to the Great Old Ones, keeps it more popular as a con game one off. Enjoy the ride, take it as a victory. Lovecraft only had two recurring characters. Pickman, who became a ghoul, but was rather nice for an undead corpse eater, and Randolph Carter, King of the Dreamlands who used to sit in graveyards and have long chats with Pickman. Carter faced Dholes, Byakhee, Yog-Sothoth, multiple incarnations of Nyarlathotep and Nodens, among other horrors, yet prospered. His mind was strong.
I enjoy Cthulhu - and the last adventure I ran across three Con-Cons SHOULD have been a campaign, not three single sessions a year apart. With a regular group of weekly/bi-weekly play that situation and triple conspiracy could have unfolded slowly over months. The error was mine for trying to cram too much plot into one mission. And it's a shame as I will immodestly say that was a fantastic storyline that actually found something new, different, motivated and interesting to do with a Lovecraft creature no one else has done anything nifty with in a game. I really should put it together as a cogent manuscript and try to sell to Chaosium as a campaign guide.
Yours,
IronMike
08-May-2021