Cthulhu isn't a game particularly well suited to a campaign. Most scenarios end in four possible scenarios, each quite likely: your player succeeds in pushing back the end of a world for a day, your player fails and the world ends, your player dies, or your player goes horribly, hopelessly insane. Should your character manage to survive, they become more and more grizzled, and more effective at a wide variety of skills.
To succeed in a single session, the best array of player characters will have tailored themselves so that at least one character in the group is decently skilled at each critical skill. This particular variety of balance does poorly once a single player dies or becomes otherwise unplayable, leaving the group with a significant handicap. The player that I'm expecting has managed to identify this pattern, and also identified that a group full of generalists can actually be more successful based on redundancy in mediocrity. Provided each skill check can be attempted by every single player in the party, such as when researching, attempting to translate, or otherwise doing non-time-critical things outside of combat, even a low percentage chance can be used to succeed as a group. When 4 players with 35% in a skill make an attempt at the same check, there's an 82.1% chance to succeed. Similarly, some skills can be attempted multiple times per action, such as using firearms. Here's a table of success chances over multiple attempts.
| Attempts | ||||||
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | ||
| Skill Value | 5 | 5.0% | 9.8% | 14.3% | 18.5% | 22.6% |
| 10 | 10.0% | 19.0% | 27.1% | 34.4% | 41.0% | |
| 15 | 15.0% | 27.8% | 38.6% | 47.8% | 55.6% | |
| 20 | 20.0% | 36.0% | 48.8% | 59.0% | 67.2% | |
| 25 | 25.0% | 43.8% | 57.8% | 68.4% | 76.3% | |
| 30 | 30.0% | 51.0% | 65.7% | 76.0% | 83.2% | |
| 35 | 35.0% | 57.8% | 72.5% | 82.1% | 88.4% | |
| 40 | 40.0% | 64.0% | 78.4% | 87.0% | 92.2% | |
| 45 | 45.0% | 69.8% | 83.4% | 90.8% | 95.0% | |
| 50 | 50.0% | 75.0% | 87.5% | 93.8% | 96.9% | |
| 55 | 55.0% | 79.8% | 90.9% | 95.9% | 98.2% | |
| 60 | 60.0% | 84.0% | 93.6% | 97.4% | 99.0% | |
| 65 | 65.0% | 87.8% | 95.7% | 98.5% | 99.5% | |
| 70 | 70.0% | 91.0% | 97.3% | 99.2% | 99.8% | |
There are a number of skills that are commonly used by a party commonly. Spot, Library Use, Listen, Occult, Language skills, First Aid, Locksmith, and Navigate. Each of them is generally used out of combat in a no-pressure situation, and can be rolled by the whole party over the course of multiple attempts, sacrificing only time. Provided there is no more time-critical skill attached, that the entire party will be rolling together, and there are rarely any modifiers, the threshold you want for each one is 35%. This also has the side effect of giving a 65% for each party member to skill up in a campaign. Offensive combat skills have a similar threshold, but defensive ones (Dodge) are important to specialize in.
There are also a number of skills that have critical results that keep a player out of jeopardy, but that are easily manipulable. Firearms skills are the most likely to be manipulated, especially handguns, as they fire multiple attempts per round. Players can choose the highest damage at the highest volume of fire, with little tradeoff. For example, the .32 in 1929 Cthulhu deals d10 damage and gets 3 attacks per round, while a Glock in a modern setting gets 3 and has a slightly higher range. Firearms also double their chance of hitting at close (half) range in 6th Edition Cthulhu (7 yards, for those handguns above). For a good rate of fire at a larger range, go with an assault rifle, where you can get 3 attacks at a doubled skill within 60 yards at 2d6 damage apiece off the Beretta M70. Cthulhu breaks down once players learn to draw a new weapon multiple times during combat, garnering as many skill checks as possible at this doubled hit chance. Suddenly, after tossing shotguns and pistols away instead of reloading, you're getting 8 skill checks in a matter of 3 rounds with the rules as written. Given the threshold of 2 attacks per round in a handgun and doubling your percentage, you've got an 84% chance of hitting in a single round at 30 points in a skill; with an assault rifle or submachine gun, you hit 87.5% of the time with only 20. If you want to move it up to a 99%, that's 40 points with a rifle or 45 with a handgun/shotgun. Not a terrible deal at all.
In a campaign, manipulating skills is the key to survival. It's also the key to making a single character into a powerhouse. Keeping skill checks in mind, you take the common skills not likely to kill you if you fail a single check, and bring them up to around 35%. You'll continually get better with these skills, increasing your odds of success. Spend your remaining points on skills essential to survival -- Dodge, Hide, and the such. From there, bring the non-essential skills up to around 50%, noting that if everyone in your party does it, your group has a 93.8% chance of succeeding at a single task. And hey -- if all else fails, you're getting a lot of free skill ups. Incidentally, here's the table of the chance of getting 1 success when skill values are doubled. Note that it gets completely borked after 50.
| Attempts: | ||||||
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | ||
| Skill Value | 5 | 10.0% | 19.0% | 27.1% | 34.4% | 41.0% |
| 10 | 20.0% | 36.0% | 48.8% | 59.0% | 67.2% | |
| 15 | 30.0% | 51.0% | 65.7% | 76.0% | 83.2% | |
| 20 | 40.0% | 64.0% | 78.4% | 87.0% | 92.2% | |
| 25 | 50.0% | 75.0% | 87.5% | 93.8% | 96.9% | |
| 30 | 60.0% | 84.0% | 93.6% | 97.4% | 99.0% | |
| 35 | 70.0% | 91.0% | 97.3% | 99.2% | 99.8% | |
| 40 | 80.0% | 96.0% | 99.2% | 99.8% | 100.0% | |
| 45 | 90.0% | 99.0% | 99.9% | 100.0% | 100.0% | |
| 50 | 100.0% | 100.0% | 100.0% | 100.0% | 100.0% | |
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