Aha! They've actually run the numbers, then! CthulhuTECH has botches if "half or more of your d10 (rounded up) is 1", so going from d10 to 2d10 takes crits from 10% to 19% (similarly for each odd n to n+1 dice).
I obviously half-remembered this conversation because I just read CthulhuTech and had a look-see for this post to mention it as a followup to our conversation about Vampire.
The CT system does better than that; a Critical Failure can also be a success. With enough dice, a Critical Failure can even also be a Critical Success.
They seem to have been inspired by Vampire's wrong-headedness all over the shop: a wanky name for the gamesmaster, five levels of skill proficiency agonisingly described for each skill in case you haven't caught on that 1 is minimal proficiency and 5 is superb (and, ha, some bags on the side for skills that don't work like that), each character has two descriptive words (in this case a Virtue and Flaw that are _totally disconnected_ from the formal advantages and disadvantages system), general aura of teenage emo...
... and frankly they seem to have missed the point completely. A mashup of everything from Lovecraft to _Evangelion_ is going to be extremely hard to take seriously, so why try? If you want Call of Cthulhu, try Call of Cthulhu - the whole lingering menace and hopelessness is a lot easier to convey if you don't have giant robots! I wanted _Gekiganger III_ and the big C whaling the crap out of each other with beam sabres.
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The CT system does better than that; a Critical Failure can also be a success. With enough dice, a Critical Failure can even also be a Critical Success.
They seem to have been inspired by Vampire's wrong-headedness all over the shop: a wanky name for the gamesmaster, five levels of skill proficiency agonisingly described for each skill in case you haven't caught on that 1 is minimal proficiency and 5 is superb (and, ha, some bags on the side for skills that don't work like that), each character has two descriptive words (in this case a Virtue and Flaw that are _totally disconnected_ from the formal advantages and disadvantages system), general aura of teenage emo...
... and frankly they seem to have missed the point completely. A mashup of everything from Lovecraft to _Evangelion_ is going to be extremely hard to take seriously, so why try? If you want Call of Cthulhu, try Call of Cthulhu - the whole lingering menace and hopelessness is a lot easier to convey if you don't have giant robots! I wanted _Gekiganger III_ and the big C whaling the crap out of each other with beam sabres.