Expanding sanity mechanics to more general psychology Options

[Wounded Ronin]

As I get older, have more experiences, and reflect back on things, one of the things I have been learning is how people are affected, sometimes profoundly, by day to day experiences, let alone the kind of extreme and terrifying things that role playing game characters routinely deal with, including combat, death of comrades, supernatural horror, torture, and anything else you can think of.

I want to say that I started posting here years ago and now I'm in my 30s. Hard to believe.

To my knowledge the only attempt to address impacts on psychology is the sanity mechanic in CoC games. Where basically you have a certain number of points and as they are depleted you have adverse effects.

What about applying the sanity mechanic to horrific situations, like combat situations, witnessing atrocities, or having friends die?

I see the big flaw as being that if you have X amount of sanity points, you're pretty much going to have a linear progression where combat and its externalities are going to drain that.

What could be a better way to incorporate psychological damage into role playing games? Maybe once Sanity gets low it becomes increasingly difficult to lose? Maybe there is a max sanity loss from certain causes? Would it be weird if someone couldn't become catatonic from years of exposure to combat but all of a sudden a little nudge of supernatural horror pushes you over the edge?

One interesting impact could be player characters trying to avoid killing if possible to minimize sanity loss. Does stuff like that happen in real life, or do people just become increasingly desensitized to killing instead?

Maybe instead of having a pool of sanity points you rather accumulate Psychological Trauma Points. As you accumulate more and more you have a probability of developing certain pathologies, but there's a point of diminishing returns where you can max out Trauma Points gained from a particular activity, e.g. killing. Maybe as you gain more Trauma Points you have repeated chances of developing various pathologies. Therefore there's not a maximum or minimum level you can hit but your character has essentially a certain chance of developing enough pathologies that it becomes debilitating.

Anyone out there studying or practicing psychology who can comment?

[Backgammon]

Actually, I found Eclipse Phased dealt with it in both a "realistic" way as well as a very game-mechanic functional way

[Mach_Ten]

World of Darkness (nWoD, NOT God Machine Chronicle)

I love that system for showing your characters the darker side of personal horror.

kill a guy, roll to lose Morality, lose morality, stand a chance to gain a derangement

lose too much morality, become hardened to the "little Crimes" and begin the path to being a full on Slasher / psycho.

but also, lose dice on social rolls as your new Darker side shows through in everyday life.

you can spend XP to get it back, but at the cost of not being more skillful,

it's an easy slide to becoming a monster ! .. and slippery slope to climb out of that pit,

For some reason, my players like it in the pit !!

they have several psychoses and several personality disorders to add to their "Character"

one even has a full cast of NPC's in his head and manifests them as spirits to aid him,
or at other times one of them takes over control of his meat body,

it's just more hooks for the story teller, and makes a Fantastic game !

[Blade]

First of all, like all ruleset, the question to ask before is "do I want my games to be about that?". In Shadowrun, many players want combat to be cool, not to be a traumatizing experience. It's not realistic,

If you do want to include it, one of the big problems I had when thinking about such a mechanism is that I think experiences affect us very differently depending on who we are. A slum kid raised in a gang culture will probably have less problems to deal with killing someone than other people. Yet, you can't say he's got less morality or sanity. And even two people will the same culture will react very differently to traumatizing experiences.

[Tanegar]

A slum kid raised in a gang culture will probably have less problems to deal with killing someone than other people. Yet, you can't say he's got less morality or sanity.

Not to sidetrack or anything, but I'm pretty sure that you can, in fact, say that he's got less morality.

[X-Kalibur]

You might want to check out the Insanity and Corruption mechanics from Dark Heresy / Rogue Trader / Only War.

[Sixgun_Sage]

I agree with X-Kalibur, the FFG line of Warhammer40k rpg's has a pretty solid system, as does Eclipse Phase, though the latter is more involved and simulationist in it's execution.

[Drace]

You might want to check out the Insanity and Corruption mechanics from Dark Heresy / Rogue Trader / Only War.

Would have to second this. The accumulation of mental illnesses and quirks could easily be transported to shadowrun. As well, even the corruption could be used to represent the degradation of morals among runners and others who do regrettable actions to survive. Could represent the path of an awakened character to becoming Twisted/Toxic.

[binarywraith]

Honestly, it depends on what you're trying to simulate. Call of Cthulhu has sanity mechanics because investigators going irrevocably mad is a major part of that setting, and thus needs a mechanic to determine how soon it happens.

Shadowrun is much more of a world where people do terrible things just to get by. Hell, if you used modern sensibilities, living in the Barrens alone would be enough to give most folks PTSD. The human mind is a very adaptable thing, at the end of the day, and people can live through damn near anything psychologically intact if they're lucky and mentally tough enough.

[tasti man LH]

Could represent the path of an awakened character to becoming Twisted/Toxic.

...speaking of which, I myself have been working on something like for Sanity mechanics regarding Awakened.

Not quite ready to share it with DS just yet, but I'm basing mine off the idea of Awakened seeing stuff where there's often no proper analog in the meat world to base off of what they see in the Astral, Metaplanes, and beyond.

Another fun idea being witnessing this crazy shit causing their beliefs and metaphors surrounding their tradition breaking down...but one thing at a time.

[Sixgun_Sage]

...speaking of which, I myself have been working on something like for Sanity mechanics regarding Awakened.

Not quite ready to share it with DS just yet, but I'm basing mine off the idea of Awakened seeing stuff where there's often no proper analog in the meat world to base off of what they see in the Astral, Metaplanes, and beyond.

Another fun idea being witnessing this crazy shit causing their beliefs and metaphors surrounding their tradition breaking down...but one thing at a time.

Sounds like it could be a lot of fun for more serious games, going in to the psychology of belief and how it affects magic is something that doesn't happen often enough in the games I've seen.

[Godwyn]

Dark Heresy certainly has a well rounded system for it.

One of the key components of the system that keeps it from being just a linear decrease towards insanity, is that at certain thresholds things that used to cause insanity stop affecting the character. So you get insane/jaded enough that regular killing and general life of a shadowrunner stops being traumatic. Being possessed by a bug spirit though, that would probably drop some more.

What about the mechanic being tied into essence as well? As losing it is supposed to dehumanize a metahuman, having an extremely low essence could automatically grant some resistance to insanity, or direct points in it. For a Dark Heresy one, I could see each point of essence loss giving a character a step up on the scale. Since I think it was every 10 points, but I could be wrong. It has been some time since I played a Dark Heresy campaign.

[Sixgun_Sage]

Dark Heresy certainly has a well rounded system for it.

One of the key components of the system that keeps it from being just a linear decrease towards insanity, is that at certain thresholds things that used to cause insanity stop affecting the character. So you get insane/jaded enough that regular killing and general life of a shadowrunner stops being traumatic. Being possessed by a bug spirit though, that would probably drop some more.

What about the mechanic being tied into essence as well? As losing it is supposed to dehumanize a metahuman, having an extremely low essence could automatically grant some resistance to insanity, or direct points in it. For a Dark Heresy one, I could see each point of essence loss giving a character a step up on the scale. Since I think it was every 10 points, but I could be wrong. It has been some time since I played a Dark Heresy campaign.

You are remembering correctly, at least in part. There is also the random chart for mental disorders, which is thankfully fairly general. The biggest issue is picking the specific elements that grant insanity points and how to handle the save against mental disorders. The simplest method of saving would seem to be a composure test with Trauma modifiers acting as dice pool modifiers and the severity of the disorder providing a threshold but such a conversion would be imprecise.

I would handle Stable as being a -0 dice pool modifier with each step along the progression being a -1. The threshold for minor trauma would like be a 3, as it represents a significant progression along the loss of psychological stability, witch moderate trauma holding a threshold of 4 and severe trauma holding a threshold of 5. In this case it is important to remember that in Dark Heresy your degree of insanity provides some protection against fear effects. Essence loss could very easily provide insanity points but the degree of posthumanism at your table should probably dictate the benchmark. I for example prefer to let my players flirt with the bleeding edge of the tech curve so I might start assigning points at a rate of 1 insanity per .1E below the average of the characters mental attributes.

It has also been suggested that magic could have a similar degenerative effect and while I hate to push the Magerun theme some complain about my opinion is that each grade of initiation should provide insanity points, not each point of magic. The fluff is pretty clear that every life form has some magical potential, especially as the mana cycle ticks higher. With that in mind magic itself isn't the issue but pushing beyond natural limitations, which dovetails nicely with one of the justifications for essence loss causing mental degeneration. I would suggest 10 minus composure test hits at every grade of initiation. I might suggest doubling or even tripling that amount in the case of a mage following a warped tradition like a toxic or blood magic practitioner and perhaps have them gain insanity from the practice of the metamagics native to those traditions.

As to removing insanity points that is a trickier issue. One could simply have players lose a set amount for every interval in which they do not gain further insanity points, and have their recovery increased by mental health care. I would suggest 1 insanity point healed per interval of 1 week, with a Medicine+Intuition extended test with an average difficulty and a month long interval healing an additional point of insanity. Intensive therapy with greater access to the patient could shorten the interval to a week.

These suggested rules might be a bit gritty and simulationist, but they are what I would suggest for games that want to explore the concept of what the shadowrunner's lifestyle can do to their mind. I feel they treat the subject with a modicum of respect and if anyone uses them, let me know what you think.