Post originally by jnc at 2003-03-22 21:07:47
Converted from Phorums BB System

I fixed the 40 hit points problem pretty easily - I just said that you don't get more hit points when you advance levels. You get more skill points and better attacks and saves, but the only way to get more hit points is to take the Toughness feat.

This makes it way too easy to kill people in a standard fist fight. To balance that I adapted a rule from the Warhammer FRP, and said that every time you get hit while at negative hp, you roll a Con check with DC (hp * -1). So a character with exactly average Con gets 6 worry-free hp, then another 11 where chances are she'll survive, and then another 9 where chances are she won't before she hits -20 and unescapable death.

With this rule things are much more tense. It's still a little strange that characters always get skills and combat abilities at the same time, so you can't make a highly-skilled professor who's terrible in a fight, but when I converted a CoC module (Horror's Heart) it all seemed to work out surprisingly well.

My problem with the d20 conversion is the Sanity rules. They left Sanity at a 1-100 scale, with max at 99-Mythos, but then changed Mythos to a 1-20! As a result, the d20 Necronomicon only gives you a +3 Mythos. It wasn't a problem to switch Mythos back to a 1-100 and make the Mythos check a percentile skill roll - after all, it's supposed to feel alien.

Using these two rules, I actually like d20 CoC more than the original, but only because I know the system better. And I generally hate percentile systems.