[capnzapp]

Let me first say I enjoyed much of d20 CoC, and found the review well written.

Obviously its great for the CoC community to be able to offer the game to the (much) wider audience. Having to relearn a ruleset just for the sake of it is a very weak argument in my book.

That said, I'm surprised the six pages of discussion hasn't mentioned (except fleetingly) the game's true achilles heel.

As a level system, it associates experience with higher survivability. That simply does not do in a game where you have a boatload of frail old professors that have incredible skill scores within their fields of study but will keel over as soon as a fly lands on them.

Furthermore, the game absolutely must support such characters as starting characters.

In essence, the inability of d20 to provide for level 1 characters with lots of ranks (say 20+) in skills, totally ruins the atmosphere of the game.

(Things already mentioned, like having as many hit points as Cthulhu himself is much more easily remedied. Most simply by handing out very little XP, keeping a low-level game, assuming you could still improve your skills somehow*)

To me, this rendered the game unplayable (despite its general gorgeousness).

Zapp

*) And before you start, I did experiment with some houserules to get rid of the skill-level connection. Couldn't get satisfying results, and besides: such a rule should definitely be part of the core rules (not a variant) of the rulebook, so it gets full support from adventures and other secondary products!