Unearthed Arcana Sanity

RobbyPants · Post by **RobbyPants** » Fri Jun 22, 2012 12:52 pm

I'm curious about your opinions on the optionl d20 Sanity rules found in Unearthed Arcana. Have you used them? How did they work out?

I was toying with using them in a campaign I'm working on, and I'm curious if there are any pitfalls I should avoid, or if they're so terrible that I shouldn't bother.

Ancient History · Post by **Ancient History** » Fri Jun 22, 2012 1:04 pm

That was basically ripped from d20 Cthulhu (or d20C ripped from UA? Too lazy to check pubdates), but is basically Chaosium's Sanity Check stolen wholesale. I used them in my Conan/CoC d20variant one-shot game. Worked okay except for the SAN loss for casting spells - which works okay for Mythos magic, but cripples regular mages.

hogarth · Post by **hogarth** » Fri Jun 22, 2012 1:20 pm

I haven't used the d20 version, but it's very similar to the CoC version.

In Call of Cthulhu, I thought it was a lot of fun for one-shot games where you can fully enjoy going cuckoo-bananas and dying, but it was fairly tedious for campaigns (where it's becomes just another type of hit points that you have to heal up between encounters).

virgil · Post by **virgil** » Fri Jun 22, 2012 1:27 pm

I personally really prefer the idea of changing it to Despair and working it like that. I doubt it would truly work, because Sanity has been such a mainstay of the meta-culture. But I'm more of a purist; what book resulted in someone seeing a river of slime and immediately trying to kill the nearest person, then becoming terrified about being too fat (developing anorexia or bulimia) after seeing a giant severed head fall from the sky?

RobbyPants · Post by **RobbyPants** » Fri Jun 22, 2012 2:08 pm

hogarth wrote:In Call of Cthulhu, I thought it was a lot of fun for one-shot games where you can fully enjoy going cuckoo-bananas and dying, but it was fairly tedious for campaigns (where it's becomes just another type of hit points that you have to heal up between encounters).

Yeah, I don't think I want to introduce in a form of mental HP. Making healing sanity too easy will likely end with this. If I make it harder to heal, then I'd not want to use the casting/san-loss variant, because then casters would be totally screwed.

Thematically, it seems like a cool idea, but I'm not sure I can pull it off for a long-term campaign.

I wanted the world to start out mostly "normal" for the first few levels, with increasing exposure to alien influences. I may just want to describe what's happening rather than try to force a mechanic into the game to create the same effect.

RadiantPhoenix · Post by **RadiantPhoenix** » Fri Jun 22, 2012 7:25 pm

Couldn't you just make sanity a second HP-like stat and use will saves to resist sanity loss?

EDIT: Oops, I misread the previous post as having the opposite meaning.

hogarth · Post by **hogarth** » Fri Jun 22, 2012 7:32 pm

RobbyPants wrote:Yeah, I don't think I want to introduce in a form of mental HP.

RadiantPhoenix wrote:Couldn't you just make sanity a second HP-like stat and use will saves to resist sanity loss?

RadiantPhoenix · Post by **RadiantPhoenix** » Fri Jun 22, 2012 10:18 pm

hogarth wrote:
RobbyPants wrote:Yeah, I don't think I want to introduce in a form of mental HP.

RadiantPhoenix wrote:Couldn't you just make sanity a second HP-like stat and use will saves to resist sanity loss?

I misread it.

RobbyPants · Post by **RobbyPants** » Fri Jun 22, 2012 11:38 pm

Heh. I looked from the forum menu and thought "Oh boy! Three new posts!"

Korgan0 · Post by **Korgan0** » Sat Jun 23, 2012 1:22 am

My group used it in a 16th level one-shot along with a homebrew thing which was identical except you took Con damage when things went bad (or something, it's been a while), and I decided to play a straight-up wizard. By the end of the one-shot (three encounters or so) I was only able to cast third and fourth level spells as anything else would have tipped me over the brink into literal insanity and would have killed me, since I was playing a little old lady.

I definitely thought that it was far too restrictive for regular mages, like Ancient History said, as it essentially cripples you the moment you fail a SAN check- if you're going to be casting 3-8 spells per encounter your sanity will plummet faster than something that plummets really fast. Other than that, I think it's mostly solid.

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Mon Jun 25, 2012 4:12 pm

Well, Mind Blank makes you immune to sanity loss, apparently, so you find a hat which does that and forget that torrid little subsystem even exists.

NineInchNall · Post by **NineInchNall** » Mon Jun 25, 2012 5:40 pm

CoC characters are expected to actively avoid encountering the things that cause sanity loss.

D&D characters are expected to seek out the things that cause sanity loss, stab them in the face, and take their stuff.

The fundamental difference here is insurmountable.