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I played a one-shot of Call of Cthulhu where the DM had you roll an intelligence check if you saw a horror. If you rolled over your intelligence, you had no idea what you were looking at and were unaffected. If you rolled under your intelligence, you knew exactly what you were looking at and had to roll against your sanity to see if it drove you insane.
In other words, you could have no idea what you're looking at, know what you're looking at but handle it, or know what you're looking at and not like it!
I like your DM
I thought those were just the rules?
It could be, I only ever played the system once and I'm not really familiar with the rules. At a glance, it looks like the intelligence roll usually happens after losing a certain amount of sanity?
I like the concept, I guess I'm just confused at why a higher intelligence roll would mean a "lower intelligence" as in you don't know what you're looking at, but I guess it's so that a lower intelligence roll is more potentially punishing?
The thought was that the higher your intelligence, the higher the chance you know what you're seeing. So if you have a high intelligence of say 19, then you need to design the check such that it's very likely you'll "succeed" in recognizing it, so with a D20 that means rolling under 19 (a 90% chance). A lower intelligence would actually be a good thing in this case, someone with an intelligence of 2 only has a 5% chance of "succeeding" and rolling under a 2.
Probably the confusing part here is that you still want to roll high, but it's strange that a high roll, in some way, isn't a success; you don't successfully recognize what you're looking at and that's a good thing. Even writing this comment I kept getting it mixed up, but I think mechanically it fits the theme well.
Oh that makes way more sense thank you.