Breaking Character Creation

After looking at skills and sanity checks, it should be fairly apparent that Cthulhu's system isn't particularly balanced for party play in the same way that other games aspire to be.  Character Creation, the very thing that determines all of these, is also easily exploitable.  We continue our look at Cthulhu as we move forward into 7th Edition.
Random statistics are a core part of Cthulhu. 5 stats are based on a 3D6 roll (including the most important stat, willpower). 2 are based on 2D6+6, and the second most important stat, education, is based on 3D6+3. These are hard rolls, meaning you don't manipulate them with any decisions. They are, ultimately, entirely random, and determine what your character is capable of far more than any decision you may make in the process. This means that there is no incentive to do anything other than continue re-creating characters until you have an 18 Willpower and a 21 Education. Spreadsheets have made this previously arduous process accessible: in less than five minutes, I created a spreadsheet that would generate a new character each time you typed a name.

 

Name:	Firstname Lastname
Statistics
STR	=RANDBETWEEN(1,6)+RANDBETWEEN(1,6)+RANDBETWEEN(1,6)
CON	=RANDBETWEEN(1,6)+RANDBETWEEN(1,6)+RANDBETWEEN(1,6)
POW	=RANDBETWEEN(1,6)+RANDBETWEEN(1,6)+RANDBETWEEN(1,6)
DEX	=RANDBETWEEN(1,6)+RANDBETWEEN(1,6)+RANDBETWEEN(1,6)
APP	=RANDBETWEEN(1,6)+RANDBETWEEN(1,6)+RANDBETWEEN(1,6)
SIZ	=RANDBETWEEN(1,6)+RANDBETWEEN(1,6)+6
INT	=RANDBETWEEN(1,6)+RANDBETWEEN(1,6)+6
EDU	=RANDBETWEEN(1,6)+RANDBETWEEN(1,6)+RANDBETWEEN(1,6)+3
Derived Statistics
SAN	=B5*5

Or, you can alter it to what you're actually using it for:

Statistics
STR	18
CON	18
POW	18
DEX	18
APP	18
SIZ	18
INT	18
EDU	21

After all, there's not much difference between the two. It's simply a matter of efficiency. This maximizes every possible aspect of character creation. But wait -- we're not done. There's another sneaky way to manipulate stats -- one that's also not particularly obvious. The aging rules. Essentially, your minimum age is your education score+6 (In this case, 27). If you notice, for each 10 years you choose to age your character, you get +1 EDU, which grants you +20 Occupation Points. I'm choosing to use rules as intended here, since the written rule is a bit broken even for this series (+1 EDU *and* +20 Occupation Points, or +40 Occupation Points). There's a catch: for every 10 years you go above 40, you get -1 to a physical statistic. This is only really important for characters that don't have maxed statistics, but since we're all maxed out, you can afford to take a hit of, say, 6 Appearance points. 12 Appearance won't have a huge effect -- you look pretty average, which is still awesome for a 107 year old that is in the physical shape of Muhammad Ali at his physical peak. You could even choose to look like you were run over by a truck, and I'd be comfortable enough to go as low as 6 APP. You'd be the best looking guy alive who was born in 1760.
If you want to drop STR and SIZ below 6 as well, you can have been alive to have chilled with Da Vinci while still having better stats than most of your party members. You can take this character to have been born in 1197, with the character dying on their 730th birthday with a total of 91 points of Education (and thus 1820 skill points to spend).  For the purposes of this character, though, we're just dropping to 11 APP to be that 107 year old. Much older, and there's a chance a Keeper might drop me with a stroke straight out of character creation. Here are our statistics:

STR	18
CON	18
POW	18
DEX	18
APP	11
SIZ	19
INT	18
EDU	29

This leaves us with perfect statistics except for an above average appearance, and gives us 580 Occupational Points and 180 Hobby Points. Not very shabby -- especially given the minimal points necessary to be significant over time.  Looking back at our skill statistics, here's how we're spending those 580/180. Note that I'm using a Cthulhu 5.0 character generator, because that's what I have floating around, so a few skills will be 1% off. Now we consider occupations.  Ideally, I want an occupation that gives me a large number of essential skills, and Police Detective stands out at me.  They've got Bargain, Fast Talk, Persuade, Psychology, and Spot Hidden -- and a free slot, which I slot Dodge in.    I start with the 50% that gives me a good chance of succeeding over the course of 4-5 checks.  In actuality, because we've got more points than we can actually spend in this area, we're bringing everything up to 80%, with 90 in Dodge, Fast Talk, Persuade, Psychology, and Spot, and 86 in Bargain.  Now we're going to get Drive Auto, Mechanical Repair, Hide, Credit Rating, Navigate, Sneak, Submachine Gun, and Occult, Martial Arts, Library Use, and Listen and Rifle to 30.  Here, for your viewing, is Thomas Brokenchar.  If you try to use him in any game I run, I will make sure he has a nasty stroke within the first five minutes.