YMMV / Call of Cthulhu

• Adaptation Displacement: Not to the same extent as Yu-Gi-Oh! and GoldenEye but a significance amount of players have not only never read Lovecraft' original writings, some didn't even know it Cthulhu was originally a literary creation for the first good years of their time with the game. Among the Tabletop RPG community, the RPG is what first comes to mind rather than Lovecraft's literature. Furthermore, several elements of the Cthulhu Mythos often assumed to be part of Lovecraft's writings actually originated with the RPG.
• Broken Base:
  • How exactly should one be lethal and/or insanity-destroying to their players? To some, if you're not trying to murder your players, giving too many hints, and it doesn't end in a party wipe, you're being too soft and playing it too much like Dungeons & Dragons. Contrariwise, if you're being too harsh, especially with players who aren't used to CoC's bleakness, you're perpetuating the stereotype that Call of Cthulhu isn't meant to be fun.
  • Sanity checks: fun addition to the game that makes it stand out from other tabletop fare and teaches players to be careful, or offensive and completely immersion-destroying when one bad roll can kill your character and knock you out of the game?
  • How exactly is the game faithful to Lovecraft's universe at large? Either the standard fare of "all investigators die horribly and/or completely insane" is either a mangling of Lovecraft's original stories, where the characters who go insane usually recover (save for something that sounds suspiciously like PTSD) and alien menaces can be fought off, or a distillation of Lovecraft's themes, where success happened by sheer luck or by attracting another Eldritch entity.
• Common Knowledge: No, Great Cthulhu does not eat 1d6 investigators per round, no save, in spite of this being passed around as part of his stat block. He instead ''Scoops 1d3 investigators into his flabby claws to die hideously". Older editions were a bit more accurate to the memetic quote, with him eating 1d4 investigators instead.
• Complete Monster: See here.
• Fan Nickname: Gnarly (Nyarlathotep), Buzz (any individual Mi-Go), ETs (Elder Things), etc.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff:
  • Call of Cthulhu has a long-standing status the most popular Tabletop RPG in Japan. The Japanese version is such a bestseller that it has received quite a few exclusive splatbooks and expansions. Manga and anime series have been written inspired by the game and the setting as the result of the boom of Call of Cthulhu in the country.
  • A French RPG publisher is re-translating sourcebooks and modules and publishing them as premium quality hardcovers with reworked interior art and layout, including several long out-of-print in English, for both Call and Delta Green, and is quite successful at it. The consensus among several English-speaking fan communities is that anyone literate in French should get these books, especially the 30th anniversary edition core book.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Sandy Petersen, the creator of the game, was also one of the Doom developers. Decades later, someone made a Cthulhu Mythos-themed mod for Doom (it's named Strange Aeons).
• Memetic Mutation:
  • SAN check.
  • "Cthulhu eats 1d4 adventurers per round."
  • "You're dead. And crazy."
  • IA IA CTHULHU FHTAGN!!!
  • ARGH, MY EYES
  • MAN THE HARPOONS
  • Old Man Henderson, the man who "won" Call of Cthulhu.^NoteA later, more detailed writeup from a witness to these events pointed out that it didn't happen in Call of Cthulhu, but actually Trail of Cthulhu
  • Cthulhu comes back radioactive. ^ExplanationA statement in Cthulhu Now about what happens if you nuke Cthulhu. Somewhat divisive in the general Cthulhu Mythos fandom.
  • Y'golonac. "YOU FOOL, YOU'VE KILLED US ALL!"
• My Real Daddy: Sandy Petersen has claimed sole creatorship of the Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath, which other sources like Daniel Harms' The Cthulhu Mythos Encyclopedia attribute to Robert Bloch due to them being based on the "shoggoths" from his 1951 short story "Notebook Found In a Deserted House".
• Retroactive Recognition: Created by Sandy Petersen, as in, DOOM's level designer Sandy Petersen. A lot of Quake's lovecraftian atmosphere and some of the most horrific monster designs came from his love of all things Lovecraft.
• Slow-Paced Beginning: The Beyond the Mountains of Madness campaign is infamous for this, as it styles itself an epic Antarctic campaign and it means it. It can take well over a dozen play sessions, if not longer, before the group reaches Antartica, let alone the City of the Elder Things. And that's assuming the Keeper doesn't add any side adventures in Kingsport or Arkham as the source book suggests. It's very common to hear stories of groups giving up on Beyond due its sheer length and lack of Mythos encounters in the early to mid game.
• "Stop Having Fun" Guys: Many people view inevitable death or insanity to be the only way in which the game can be played. Notably, vlogger Seth Skorkowsky, well known for his reviews of CoC modules, considers this view nonsense. -
• Unintentional Period Piece: The adventure Fractal Gods of the book The Stars Are Right was released in the 90s and it shows. The titular "Fractal Gods" is a fanzine that sends CDs with fractal-based screensavers, one of which is infected by a virus coded by a Yog-Sothoth cultist, which makes the computer summon fractal-based creatures and Yog-Sothoth's fractal form. A free PDF later tried to "update" the scenarios from The Stars are right and the CDs and screensavers become a Youtube channel that streams EDM music with a fractal background, which does sound more modern and plausible, however, a Youtube video can somehow infect a computer with virus.

---