We don't need no water, let the motherfucker burn.
This is the Flaming Taft t-shirt from our game of Mortal Coil at Gen Con last year. Now bar_sinister has sent me one, I can't not go to Gen Con Indy this year.
I ran a poll on Yog-sothoth.com, the premier Call of Cthulhu website, about how people like to play Call of Cthulhu. These are the results: 4% (0% - 12%) Almost like a LARP, we run around and scream a lot - hardly any dice rolls. 41% (27% - 53%) We talk about our PCs in character but we do roll the dice too. 48% (33% - 60%) We talk about our characters in a mix of first and third person and roll dice quite often. 7% (2% - 17%) We only talk about characters in third person but we hardly ever roll dice. It's like a story. 0% (0% - 5%) Our characters are pretty much playing pieces. We roll dice and then the GM describes what happens to them. Total Votes : 56
That's the percentage followed by the confidence interval (using the hypergeometric distribution don't you know).
What it shows is that around 89% (78%-96%) of Call of Cthulhu players prefer to play the game in one of the two traditional modes. However, at conventions, in my recent experience, it's about 50% LARP style (particularly in the US although more and ore in the UK too) and 50% first person experience.