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.

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 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!

Depends on if you normalize it or not.

Privacy badger/possum were welcome sights for me personally.

E

Granted, but you don’t have a redo option. Once you’ve undone something, you can never redo it.

I did something similar to what you’re describing recently using Wireguard, and it’s working pretty well. The only difference in my setup is that I didn’t want to route internet traffic through the VPS, just get access to my local network (Site-to-Site VPN). I did accidentally route all of my traffic through my Wireguard VPS at one point during set up though, which seems promising based on what you want to do.

If you’re comfortable with using Docker, I used this guide from linuxserver.io to get setup: https://docs.linuxserver.io/images/docker-wireguard

linuxserver.io refers to terms such as “client” and “server” which don’t actually exist in Wireguard (all devices are just peers), but it’s useful as a way to visualize how you’d like to set everything up. I’m thinking all you’d have to do is setup your VPS in “Server” mode and define your peers, I don’t remember having to do anything special to get the routing to the internet set up.

The other part of the equation is setting up Wireguard on the target device. If you’re using an Android device, I can attest that the Wireguard app works great and is easy to setup. I unfortunately haven’t tried setting it up on a PC or laptop yet, but it looks like you could use the same linuxserver.io docker image in “Client” mode to get connected if you wanted to.