Beyond the Veil uses the Cthulhu Live rules from Chaosium. But nobody ever uses a set of rules straight from the rulebook without any modifications, and we're no different. This page describes our house rules. If it's not described here, you can be pretty sure that we're running it as they wrote it. As with any game, check with a referee if you're not sure.
One of the really nice things about Cthulhu Live is that all of the rules are handled by the referee, leaving the players free to get on with their game and preventing all but the must rudimentary forms of powergaming. This means that if you're a player, you needn't remember any of these rules changes - the referee will just implement them as appropriate.
Combat - Structure of the Combat Rounds
The round order presented in Cthulhu Live is a bit odd. In close quarters, a character with a ready pistol can have his opponent close on him and beat him to death before he gets his shot off! (In fact something very like this took place in our playtest, and it struck referee and players alike as being a bit ridiculous) To fix this, we have altered the round structure.
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Cthulhu Live
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Beyond the Veil
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Declaration
Movement
Melee
Missile
Resolution
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Declaration
Movement
Missile
Melee
Resolution
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This change means that a character with a ready weapon can get his shot off before their opponent delivers a blow - which we feel is more realistic.
Combat - Levels of Damage in Melee Combat
The standard Cthulhu Live combat rules state that when you hit someone, you do an amount of damage equal to the difference between your attack score and their defence score. Big weapons are represented by having a offensive bonus which adds to their attack score. This works fine for weapons, but falls down when it is applied to unarmed combat. It is easy to kill someone with a single blow, and not just when a martial-arts expert is attacking a granny. To fix this, we use the following:
- No unarmed or unskilled blow may do more than four points of damage. However, if the attacker beats the defender by more than half of the defender's CON (i.e., he delivers a blow that would have done lots of damage if the four-point cap was not in place), then the victim falls unconscious.
Example: Feargal O'Malley takes a swing at Dr. Swift. He decides to commit 16 points to the attack. The good doctor is a clumsy oaf with only 7 DEX, and since he was doing something else this round, only defends with half DEX - which is 3 points! Feargal's fist comes slamming home. The difference between the attack and defence scores is 16-3=13 points, which would normally do 13 points of damage. Since Dr. Swift's CON=12, this would effectively kill him. With the damage cap in place, he instead takes 4 points of damage, and is knocked unconscious (since 13 is greater than half of 12). He sees a bright flash and hears little tweety birds...
- An attacking character may opt to 'pull' an unarmed blow, deliberately limiting any damage caused to one point only. A pulled blow cannot knock someone unconscious, unless it takes them to 2 or fewer remaining Wound Points. This is commonly used when you don't want to kill your opponent - for example, when slapping a cad around the face or beating recalcitrant servants.
Movement Rates
In out-of-the-box Cthulhu Live, every human has the same rate of movement: they are all allowed eight steps in the movement (and optional flee) phase.
This makes sense when comparing man and monster - what investigator, however physically endowed, could hope to outrun an airborne eldritch horror fifty times his size? But the system fails when presented with human, or humanoid, opponents. There are a lot of such opponents: cultists, misguided law enforcers, insane players - the list goes on. We identified three scenarios in which the uniform movement rate failed:
- The Infinite Chase - There is no way to resolve a chase between humans when everyone moves at the same speed.
- The Unimpressive Athlete - A character with awe-inspiring physical stats is no faster, nor can he run any farther, than his average companions.
- The Agile Cripple - Characters who have been reduced to very low DEX and CON scores can still scamper around with the best of them.
We decided to replace the existing movement rate with a variable scale which takes into account a character's DEX (her agility and quickness) and CON (her strength adn stamina). The formula is simple:
| Movement Rate | = | DEX + CON |
| | 3 |
Rounding should be mathematical (we're feeling generous). This gives a range from 2 to 20 - a fairly large range, but most players average 7-10. Extreme cases - the quadraplegic and Roger Bannister - seem to justify the extreme high and low scores. Needless to say, we'll be keepnig our eyes on how this new rule works, and changing things if we don't like it.
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