Insanity

[GCMorris]

I'm throwing a Lovecraftian style monster at the team soon because ive been reading At the Mountains of Madness (and I'm a sadistic GM) and I was wondering how to do the thing where the monster makes people go insane upon sight. Would youse guys just treat this as a straight up Presence Attack?

[L. Marcus]

Hum ... Mental Transform, perhaps?

[Doc Democracy]

I like to represent madness by pushing psychological complications on the character sheet and so the thing for that is Transform.  I would buy it such that the SFX are variable.  That way you get to push random things onto the characters - one might go schizophrenic, another might become catatonic etc etc.  If you had a decent list you could do it randomly or you could work out with the player which madness most fits the character and recent events...

 

Doc

[mallet]

Here is a link to a random insanity chart:

 

http://letsgetweird.info/?page_id=127

 

or this one (the list is further down the page, table 6-9)

 

http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/campaigns/sanity.htm

 

For just a "one off" adventure I don't know if I would go all out with a transform build, it just seems like a lot of work for something that will not be ongoing (I assume since this doesn't sound like its a Lovecraftian campaign). EGO rolls (with possible modifiers) might work best and keep things simple. 

 

Or give all the PC's a temporary SANITY score at the beginning of the adventure (even if you keep it secret from them) and then have them make EGO checks to avoid losing SAN each time when dealing with the monsters, if they fail the check they lose X amount of SAN. If they reach zero, then give them a temporary insanity.

 

I guess a lot of it might also depend on what genre you are already playing, in a Champions game it would be different then a Fantasy, Star Hero or Urban Fantasy campaign. 

[massey]

One thing I tried in a horror game that worked really well was to leave the stats alone, and just start feeding the players biased information. Then let them make logical choices from there.

 

The whole thing about the Cthulhu mythos is that people go "insane" when they realize the truth of reality. They appear insane to others because they're reacting to information that everyone else doesn't know.

 

The Hounds of Tindalos are monsters that track people across dimensions. They can materialize in our world out of the corners of rooms. Once they start following you, they don't quit. Suppose a character realizes these things are after him. The only safe places would be either an open field, or some room that had no right angles within it. Now how is that going to look to someone who doesn't know about these creatures? The guy runs around ranting about monsters, and if you put him in a psycho ward he just stares at the corner of the room and screams. He will become violent, even murderous to escape the corners. By our conventional understanding, he's crazy as can be. But if the hounds are real, then it's a perfectly sensible reaction.

 

For a game, I'd describe some aspect of the creature that would really freak people out. Let it attack the players in a way to make them paranoid. Maybe as they get closer to its lair, they start having horrible dreams and visions. Run one guy through a short scenario (5 minutes) where the walls are coming alive and eyes start appearing on his equipment. Freak him out with weird crap and then surround him with some sort of awful monsters that crawl out of the shadows. Then he wakes up. He's still in his sleeping bag, with the rest of the party. As they travel further, comment to him about how many shadows there are nearby, about the sensation of being watched, that he hears the sound of clawed footsteps behind him. Have him make perception rolls to notice these things, like they're really there. Do it right and he'll be on edge for the rest of the adventure.

 

I had some players go full murder-hobo after a few sessions. "Of course I have to kill everyone in the hospital! Otherwise something terrible will happen!" (Yes, that really happened in that game.). No sanity rolls required. Just set things up so that the logical response, given what the players know, is totally batcrap crazy to everyone else.

[Lord Liaden]

All of the above is good advice. Just to present another option to consider, shortly after DOJ first took over Hero Games, Steve Long wrote and posted a free PDF document called, "The HERO System Genre By Genre," briefly discussing various game genres and ways to tailor the game system to reflect a genre's common conventions. The section on Horror gaming included a brief suggestion regarding sanity effects:

 

"To represent the long-term problems caused by stress and sustained fear, many Horror Hero GMs come up with a new Figured Characteristic to represent a character’s capacity to withstand the effects of horror. For example, you might create a Sanity (SAN) Figured Characteristic, derived from EGO + (PRE/2) + (CON/2). Characters lose Sanity like they lose STUN, but only from effects that are particularly terrifying, gruesome, or disturbing — the GM assigns a “Sanity Damage” rating (in d6) to each such phenomena. If a character drops to 0 SAN, he snaps and becomes completely insane (and an NPC under the GM’s control) until he recovers his wits. Characters may regain lost SAN with REC, just like STUN, but do not get Post-Segment 12 Recoveries and can only make SAN Recoveries when they are in calming, non-stressful, non-frightening situations (i.e., rarely in the middle of a scenario, but only between adventures). Many other versions of SAN (or the like) are possible; each GM sets it up to represent the feelings of horror he most wants to simulate."

[dsatow]

I liked massey's suggestion best.  I can just imagine that person making rooms which are all round.

 

The Sanity Characteristic works well but has a problem if you are using Hero Designer since its hard to modify the system to show new stats.

 

If you are doing only a short run with cthulhu monsters, you can give cthulhu monsters this power and 6 points of mental defense

 

7 real points - 1d6 mental Illusions, no control on effects. AoE 4m radius, megascale, 0 end, persistent, always on, require sight of creature (-1/4), cumulative (96 points) (+1).

22 active points

 

You could shave a point by linking it to presence attacks (-1/2).

 

I might also do speed drain AVAD (mental defense).  The drain in speed would represent the character doing things like getting distracted, mumbling instead of doing something, or being unsure of themselves.

[zslane]

I have a short PDF of Sanity rules for the Hero System. I will upload them to the download section of this site.

[Armitage]

The 4e book Champions in 3D included an adventure set in a world that had been overrun by Lovecraftian monsters.  The ability to induce insanity was built as a Major Transform, Affects Desolid, Radius, NND (defense is a successful EGO Roll), 0 END, Persistent, Always On, Reduced By Range.  Minor entities had 1d6 and major entities had 1 1/2d6.  A successful EGO provided immunity for the duration of an encounter.  The Transform induced a 25 point Psychological Complication, with the option that the GM could have a character slowly go nuts as points of Transform accumulated.

 

The Transform was part of a "Mind Blasting Powers" package that could pretty excessive when out together.  It included a Radius EGO Drain linked to the Transform, returning 5/week, and extra PRE against anyone who failed the EGO Roll vs. the Transform.  1 1/2d6 Drain and +60 PRE for minor entities and 3d6 Drain and +70 PRE for major entities.

[zslane]

I uploaded my Sanity rules to the download section. Maybe they'll give you some ideas!

[bigdamnhero]

The only time I tried to run a horror game it quickly morphed into more of an urban fantasy/monster hunting game, which turned out to be much better suited to the group. We did use some Stress rules, which were based on the PRE Attack rules. Essentially, the environment had a constant & cumulative PRE Attack based on how weird/scary things were getting. The players called it "the Weird-Shit-O-Meter." For the PCs we treated it mostly as a roleplaying aid; the players were pretty good about deciding how their characters would react based on the current Stress Level, so I never felt the need to enforce it mechanically. For PCs it was a little more mechanical but still had a fair amount of handwavium. In theory at high enough levels it was supposed to induce short/long-term Psych Lims, but I never really pushed that side of it.

 

If you want something more solid, treating it as a Cumulative Transform vs mind/spirit sounds like a good mechanical way to handle it and allows you to adjust the seriousness of various attacks based on how much effect they're having.