Strange Behavior in FGU with Pulp Cthulhu

[osarusan]

I started a new campaign this weekend, using the Pulp Cthulhu Ruleset in FGU.

During character creation, things got wonky. I'm not sure if it was a ruleset error or an FGU error, or what, but I'll describe what happened:

While allocating skill points, the number of available skill points started fluctuating wildly. Like jumping between 200 and 100 2-3 times per second. The ruleset was automatically giving points to Credit Rating (this seems like a normal behavior, since it automatically bumps CR to the minimum for your occupation), however it kept jumping back and forth between 0 points and {minimum number} points too.

Then, players found that their occupations had reset. The bonus skills that they had chosen when selecting their occupation vanished. The boxes which calculate professional skill points also changed from what they were supposed to be. (For example, some occupations receive EDU x4. This somehow changed from a single box saying EDU x4 to four boxes, one saying EDU x1 and three blank, or two boxes, one saying EDU x2 the other blank.) Essentially everything the players chose got reset, and numbers just started fluctuating wildly and seemingly at random.

We tried delete the occupations and re-choosing them, which worked at first, but then shortly afterwards everything began to get scrambled again.

Eventually FGU crashed for me and some of the players, but not all.

We gave up and switched back to Classic after that, but I just wanted to mention this extremely bizarre bug in case anyone knew what it was.

[Moon Wizard]

Can you walk me through the steps to do that in CoC? I'm not familiar with the system; but hopefully I can recreate the scenario with some steps to follow.

Thanks,
JPG

[osarusan]

Sure! (Sorry I didn't see your reply until just now.)

Just as a disclaimer, I don't seem to be able to reliably recreate these steps on my own. It happened when 8 players were logged in and doing character creation simultaneously so it's hard to say what action in particular might have triggered the weird behavior.

So we started by making a new character sheet as normal with any ruleset. Make sure to load the Call of Cthulhu modules from the library.

Then we did the ability scores. Cthulhu scores are all 3d6x5 or 2d6+6x5, so if you're just putting in dummy numbers you can put it any multiple of 5 between 15 and 90. 55 or so is a fairly average stat.

Next, choose an Occupation from the sidebar menu. These are in the core rulebook module. You would choose it by dragging it from the list into your Occupation part of the Personal tab.

The Occupation is where things started getting screwy. When you pick an occupation it does a number of automatic things. Each occupation gets a different number of skill points based on your stats. Some are EDUx4, some are EDUx2, some are EDUx2 + DEXx2 and so on. But once you have your stats in, it should calculate these automatically. It will also ask you to choose 1-4 bonus skills depending on the Occupation.

One you've made those choices, you go over the skills tab. You should see 3 columns of skill points: Occ (occupation), Pers (personal), and Spent. The Occ part is what was automatically calculated from your Occupation. Normally, once this number is calculated, you should be able to click on the brown slash mark (/) and start allotting those occupation points to your occupation skills. However, while doing this, the point totals began acting screwy. They were randomly fluctuating as if it was recalculating the skill points, but since we weren't changing the player's stats or anything it was very bizarre. For example, they would jump between 100 and 200 3 times per second or so.

When I tried to investigate what was going wrong, the first thing I did was go to the Personal tab and check the Occupation entry. Somehow, that entry got changed after being added to the character sheet. For example, where it should have said 4xEDU, it now said (blank)xEDU. On another player's sheet, instead of 4xEDU it had for separate slots for 1x(blank). It also had forgotten the bonus skill choices the players had made.

At first I thought it was just a new player making a mistake on the (somewhat complicated) way the ruleset works. However, it happened to all of the players, not just one. Everyone's sheets were fluctuating numbers, and forgotten chosen skills, and deleting the proper stats and stat multipliers from the occupations.

After trying for about 1 hour to make things work, FGU crashed, and then we just went and re-rolled characters using FG classic. The Occupation issues do not exist in FG classic, for whatever reason.

Let me know if you need any more clarification!