Insanity, Despair, and the like

[Prak]

Is there any game with a good system along these lines? Obviously the codifier of this sort of system is Cthulhu and it's various ...variations, but also, those systems are kind of shit. And Frank has mentioned before that what it's really trying to model is despair which... yeah, that's just a better concept all around.

A system for modelling a growing despair also suggests and inverse, Resolve, or, like, zeal, or hope, or something, which I really like, conceptually. It suggests a scale, with resolve on one end and despair on the other. Then you can have things that not only trigger a Despair roll, but also things that trigger a Resolve roll. And, maybe, if you fail your resolve roll, failing to find hope in the face of what has provoked it, you move towards Despair, and maybe if you succeed at your Despair roll, you move towards Resolve, throwing off the feeling of hopelessness and deciding, hey, maybe things aren't hopeless!

Thoughts? Examples?

[virgil]

Most fresh example in mind is Humanity from the Red Markets RPG, but it's deeply tied to the overall poverty simulation, so I'm not 100% certain how well it can be translated into other systems.

[Harshax]

And Frank has mentioned before that what it's really trying to model is despair which... yeah, that's just a better concept all around

That’s bullshit. possibly not what he meant, either.

Despair can be any combinations of fear or adversity. Despair can be mechanically inhibiting specific actions for someone while not affecting others.

You can not want to get out of bed but still be capable of solving other problems without penalty.

CoC is the benchmark of insanity rules simply because they listed so many kinds of diagnosed conditions. triskadecaphobia being a favorite of a friend of mine. Fear of 13.

A mental attack hit point system would best be served by temporary penalties to skill attempts or more severely against a broad range of activities for differing amounts of time.

If it’s just a number between OK! And out of the players autonomy, you’re just recreating hit points.

[Prak]

And Frank has mentioned before that what it's really trying to model is despair which... yeah, that's just a better concept all around

That’s bullshit. possibly not what he meant, either.

While Chaosium products do have Mythos monsters cause "sanity loss", that's not really how things go in the books. You don't look at a bunch of Shoggoths and suddenly decide that you need to start counting spiderwebs to make sure they add up to even numbers. The actual enemy, as it is in TTGL, is despair. You are constantly running into things older and vaster than you could possibly imagine and encouraged to give up your quest. Again, just like in TTGL. In classic Mythos material, you are supposed to run into ancient plans that you have no means of altering, and that causes you not to become agoraphobic or some shit, but to fall into despair and hopelessness.

(From a thread where I was trying to weld together Gurren Lagann and mythos horror)

[Harshax]

Thinking about this in D&D saving throw styles.

A low level spell affect might cause fear, penalizing an opponent with -1 to attacks.

A mid-level affect might debilitate your Strength it Dexterity, affecting all checks of that type and their skills.

Honestly, there are plenty of ways to mechanically describe one form of despair or another. The only new idea from this paradigm is that the penalty is permanent and a different rest and healing mechanic needs to be described.

[Harshax]

Thinking about this in D&D saving throw styles.

A low level spell affect might cause fear, penalizing an opponent with -1 to attacks.

A mid-level affect might debilitate your Strength it Dexterity, affecting all checks of that type and their skills.

Honestly, there are plenty of ways to mechanically describe one form of despair or another. The only new idea from this paradigm is that the penalty is permanent and a different rest and healing mechanic needs to be described.

[deaddmwalking]

If the character is supposed to be playable then they need a way to recover from 'permanent disability'. In a short story - in an anthology of short stories - it's not a problem to have different protagonists, but a cooperative story game requires a certain level of continuity.

When discussing fear/terror for our heartbreaker, we wanted to generally avoid PCs being required to take a particular action, but we wanted to strongly encourage them to avoid combat with the thing that they're afraid of. In our system, a -4 is a significant penalty; a -8 is a prohibitive penalty. We have two levels of fear (-4/-8) and those penalties can stack with other debuffs. It's not perfect, but it tends to make 'staying in combat' pointless, and instead encourages breaking contact and regrouping after recovering.

[OgreBattle]

I think it should fit around what moving parts you already have in your game.

Like if you have some kind of magic system that can be affected by state of mind, so being in a state of 'despair' affects the magic system.

If you get bonuses to sword an orc for the holy order, then violating the tenants of said holy order affect a [mental] penalty to sword those dirty orcs or something.


You can also pick just one of the many ways to categorize emotion and assign some mechanics to it

[SlyJohnny]

Legend of 5 Rings does Strife. You get strife from certain environmental factors or hostile action, but also dice rolls you choose to keep and use that have strife symbols on them. Once your strife exceeds your Composure (a derived attribute), you become Compromised, which makes you more susceptible to certain attacks, subterfuge, and social abilities opposed by your Vigilance, and means you can no longer keep dice rolls with strife symbols on them; this makes it harder to succeed at stuff, particularly tasks where you were relying on a high number of Ring dice/natural attribute to compensate for a lack of training/low number of skill dice. In the context of a duel it also means your opponent immediately gets to make a free attack to attempt to hit you with a 2x damage crit, which will end most duels.

You can Unmask once a scene to lose all your strife and stop being compromised, with various options with different costs. It's centred around the setting conceit of you being expected to act as a completely stoic samurai who conducts themselves with perfect decorum at all times in public, where losing your shit in the face of subtle provocation and shouting at someone is a horrifying scandal that people will talk about forever and will cost you Glory points. So you have all these powerful feelings that you must keep bottled up. At least until it's worth it.

I think it strikes a very good balance between player agency and the player not having complete control over it. It creates engaging scenes and interactions in real time. All the ways you can "game" the system have strong thematic underpinnings. Seems like it could be easily adapted for longer term stress accumulation or a madness mechanic.

[Grek]

And Frank has mentioned before that what it's really trying to model is despair which... yeah, that's just a better concept all around.

As you might recall, that was in response to this exchange:

---

Sanity score. Everyone needs one. There are at least two ways to do this.

One is to have SANITY WOUND BOXES where every 10 boxes worth of SANITY WOUNDS you pick up an appropriate derangement or something. This has the advantage of sort of working on the same scale as other wounds. You can soak sanity wounds with Willpower if you're okay with the idea that mages handle weird shit better than other people (which is sort of logical). Or you can base them on some other attribute or an advantage or whatever you want and assume that everyone who wants to remain sane will buy it. It also has the advantage of not being game over until you pick up too many derangements for your character to be functional (or taken seriously).

Another is to have sanity be some fixed value (say 100 points) that degrades when you take sanity damage. At 100 points you are a functional human being. At 0 points you are catatonic. You can graduate this into 10 or 20-point steps or whatever where at 90 you're starting to fray, at 80 you have at least one moderately disabling mental illness, and so on. This creates a nice progression from sane to essentially unplayable and therefore basically dead. You can even make it possible to restore sanity in this system in a straight-out numerical sense instead of "remove a specific derangement."

You can probably devise an infinite number of other ways to handle sanity.

I object to how Archmage wants to do sanity. Sanity wound boxes, percentile sanity scores, anything where your sanity is a number that ticks down and then at 0 you go insane is not how it works in the source material. Seriously, I cannot stress that enough. In the source material, people go crazy in one of three ways: A] they see a cosmic horror and escape from it with their life, but are traumatized by the experience and develop an acute but highly specific phobia of stuff that reminds them of it, B] they discover some hidden truth about their personal origins, the origins of life on Earth and/or the relative significance of Earth in the cosmos and start to suffer from depression and maybe try to kill themselves, or C] they discover a mythos thing, try to tell others and get committed to a mental asylum because nobody believes them about what they saw. At no point does anyone go catatonic in terror, develop OCD or start masturbating over coma victims (side note: WTF, Koumei?).

Obviously #3 is not going to happen in this game - Everyone knows that Deep Ones exist, so if you show up and start talking about frogmen people are going to think you're racist, not crazy. So we're left wanting two different sanity tracks: a Terror track, which fills up whenever monsters do horrible things to the people around you and results in you being too terrified to confront that specific enemy if it gets full, but in the mean time gives you rage bonuses to fighting the enemy, and a Despair track which goes up for being an alien, casting magic and hearing the villain monologue and which makes you take morale penalties as it gets higher and cease to be a PC if it gets full because you gave up the fight, killed yourself or joined Team Monster.

---

The main thrust is that you don't have a Sanity Counter that counts down to zero and forces you to lose your character and/or roll on the Random Mental Health Issue Chart when the counter gets low enough. That's dumb. Instead, characters have a base level of Resolve as well as various Hopes and Fears. Hopes add to Resolve when you work toward them and subtract from Resolve when you act against them, while Fears subtract from Resolve when you confront them and add to resolve when you avoid them. As long as your (slowly escalating) Horror is less than your modified Resolve, it applies as a bonus to an action - otherwise, it applies as a penalty. Players are allowed and encouraged to abandon Hopes and declare new Fears for their characters at will, but may only kindle new Hopes or overcome Fears after tangible in-character successes related to that Hope or Fear. This has a number of useful effects:

• Horror initially applying as a bonus imparts a sense of momentum and encourages risk taking even when a player might naturally want to play it safe. Continuing on into the dark pit of doom with moderately elevated Horror is (OOCly) safer than retreating and coming back in the daylight, so the players will try to find reasons for their characters to do exactly that.
• Characters who get in over their heads can declare that their character has a Fear of the thing they're facing and probably escape, at the cost of having trouble facing that particular kind of enemy in the future.
• Narratives of Despair (abandoning a Hope) and Recovery (finding a way to regain that Hope) are baked into the system, with a particular emphasis on the power of friendship as a way to overcome fear and despair. (If the other PCs help you overcome your fear or seek out your prospective new Hope, that totally counts as far as the tangible successes requirement goes.)
• Last survivors who refuse to have anything to do with the horrors which they only barely escaped are a natural output of the system's psychological mechanics rather than a way for the DM to nudge the players toward the plot.
• Character with high natural Resolve will tend to suggest in character that people with 'weaker dispositions' or 'an especial fear of <blah>' avert their eyes before opening the door into the corpse filled room or unveiling the blasphemous painting, on the basis that the players of high Resolve characters want to expose themselves to more Horror while sparing other characters who didn't maximize Resolve.

[OgreBattle]

Dang that's a really solid system. I figure some discussion of what's a hope or fear should happen before a game so everyone's on the same page, hopefully.

[Harshax]

I think it should fit around what moving parts you already have in your game.

Like if you have some kind of magic system that can be affected by state of mind, so being in a state of 'despair' affects the magic system.

If you get bonuses to sword an orc for the holy order, then violating the tenants of said holy order affect a [mental] penalty to sword those dirty orcs or something.


You can also pick just one of the many ways to categorize emotion and assign some mechanics to it

This graphic is cool, but I wouldn’t it want on my character sheet unless the game had some specific healing mechanics that needed to be tracked over sessions of play.

But I see no reason to get more complex that a list of conditions and triggers.

“Despair:
—————-
-2 Severe, All DEX Checks.
Description: Jittery. Rickety. Floppies. Tripadeskaphobia.
—————-

[Harshax]

The thing with Call of Cthulhu was that your resistance to Despair was not a zero sum game. Every time you succumbed to despair you get a new type of crazy to add to your list. But, I don’t remember rules that described how you should use those devices in play. I’m good at Scrabble because of The Investigators Handbook.

I would tie The qualities of Joy, or Verve or Blue Hearts to Hit Points or Health or Red Hearts.

[OgreBattle]

On using that graphic... I could see some kind of silly tactical game where you move a character onto different emotional spaces. The deeper you go the stronger the feelings so a big love turns into a big terror or hate with a good emotional sumo toss

[Blade]

A big problem I have with the general Insanity mechanisms or even the basic concept of Insanity as handled in many Mythos works is that it's not how things work.

Generally, people say that what drive people insane when confronted with the Mythos is that they discover that all they believed about the world is wrong and that mankind is helpless against cosmic horrors.

That was more or less the concept behind some Gnosticist faith, and they weren't all lunatics. The human brain can cope with the concept that mankind is helpless against powerful malevolent entities.
It can also cope with being faced with proof that one's core ideas are wrong. Some people will just dismiss the proof and live happy lives without getting insane, some people will accept the proof and call that an "eye-opening experience" they'll be grateful for.

There's also the idea that knowing about the Mythos makes you crazy because you realize that there's an ominous threat that could wipe out mankind at any moment and everyone ignores it. Sounds similar to people working on epidemics, climate change or other similar fields. And while they can get really stressed-out they don't generally go insane.

At worst, and discounting any power that magically drive you insane, you could expect survivors of traumatic Mythos-related events to suffer PTSD, but you don't need the Mythos for this.

[Thaluikhain]

Also, isn't it usually an all or nothing sort of thing? Either the character somehow doesn't notice (or doesn't care) that something is going on, or they freak out? There's no sliding scale or one thing after another.

[Harshax]

Also, isn't it usually an all or nothing sort of thing? Either the character somehow doesn't notice (or doesn't care) that something is going on, or they freak out? There's no sliding scale or one thing after another.

As someone with diagnosed anxiety and depressions issues, that is emphatically not the case, ever.

You might start being agitated at parties. Your conscious brain tries to correlate that agitation with observable reality. You tell yourself, "I'm shy." Or, "I'm just socially awkward." You try to be a wall flower. Your conversation is strained or words tumble out of you like a spilled basket of ideas.

Then you notice you're agitated in situations that don't match those social settings. Again, you're brain tells you, "I'm just being hyper vigilant." You make sure you're always wearing headphones and sunglasses in public. You nervously bob your knees on the train. You ignore or fail to respond to fellow commuters.

Then you start every social engagement with a couple glasses of alcohol, to loosen your inhibitions and embolden your self-esteem. Yeah, that's all you need right?

Then you have trouble commuting to work, unless you can fall asleep during the entire commute. You get more agitated on crowded commuter trains, to the point where you're you start taking other transit options. Choosing less crowded options, walking or riding your bike or taking cabs.

Then you start obsessing about the distance and time between moments where you're able to choose whether to stay on the train or get off at the next stop. Time dilates. Your vision narrows. You lose your balance.

Then you start having anxious thoughts about taking the elevator and start using the stairs. You consume alcohol before commuting. It worked in social situations, it should work here too, yes?

Now you start getting anxious knowing the commute is ahead of you. You start working from home, becoming more and more isolated. You're having trouble meeting actual friends in comfortable, well known settings. Every time you do manage to arrive, you drink to excess. You're putting on weight. Smoking too much. Drinking yourself to sleep. Skipping invitations to celebrations.

This scenario is empirically not, "All or Nothing."

Given the above scenario, did you get some clinical case of claustrophobia instantly? Or is it possible, meeting a Mythos horror filled you will doubt or caused you to fixate on a seemingly minor trauma. Left un-diagnosed and untreated, did Claustrophobia bloom into a full disorder or did you pile up more neurosis, that superficially have similar penalties to actions, because your brain's inability to correlate the observable world and the perceived world caused cognitive dissonance that you incapable to observe objectively?

This is why Sane-to-Crazy Scales don't work and are frankly insulting. This is why rolling Claustrophobia on a table of Lingering Mental Injuries is dissatisfying. While academically interesting, few players know what a psychological term means. It was fun to do this in Call of Cthulhu, because the writers bothered to compile long catalogues of mental disorder. Many of which are outdated in modern circles of psychological and therapeutic professionals.

Finally, all that word count spent proving your Psychology 101 attendance does little for players sitting down to roll dice. CoC makes them a way for the Keeper to dick with players. There might be some minor game effects attributed to failed rolls, but it's been a while since I read those rules.

A Despair, or Shadow or Sanity mechanic should work just like lingering physical injuries. You can have a static penalty to some type of action that can be compelled by the GM for some kind of currency. You can have a severe penalty that applies to broad categories of situations that don't require a compel. Or you can have a straight up -2 DEX check, because you suffer a serious mental illness that causes you to evacuate your bowels every time a DEX roll is called for.

When you have the mechanical effect, you can call it Shadow or Despair or Blue Hearts. Along with a healing mechanic involving, "Hope or Crystals or Mindfulness or Medical Attention," and a defense mechanic like, "Rituals, Cleansing, or Amulets." Now you have enough information to move on so you can get down to rolling dice.

Anything more complicated than that seems akin to games that tried to make A v B martial arts charts or specific Weapon Attack Penalties against ACs. It's pointless geekery, wastes pages and will be ignored most of the time for something a little more streamlined.

[Thaluikhain]

Also, isn't it usually an all or nothing sort of thing? Either the character somehow doesn't notice (or doesn't care) that something is going on, or they freak out? There's no sliding scale or one thing after another.

As someone with diagnosed anxiety and depressions issues, that is emphatically not the case, ever.

Sorry, I meant in Lovecraft's writings. His characters (IIRC and for the most part) have no mental health problems until suddenly they get crippling mental health problems.

[angelfromanotherpin]

My recollection is vague, but a lot of them seemed to me to have mental health problems. But they might just have had a bad case of the 1920s.

[Harshax]

Fair.

Let's remember that being declared insane in the 20's had more to do with justifying the medication, lobotomization or incarceration of unwanted spouses, rivals and criminals and less to do with psychology. Phrenology is still kind of a thing and psychology is in its infancy.

Sanity is a perfectly good term for a 20's era setting, but that term is no longer recognized as a medical diagnosis today. And, even in a Mythos setting, Sanity shouldn't work as an all or nothing mechanic. Lovecraft didn't write long prose about the decent into madness. His stories didn't garner that kind of attention. That his characters are "crazy" and get crazier or "sane" and get crazy, when exposed to mythos, is more a pacing decision to accommodate a limited page count for his stories and the size of publications at the time.

[JigokuBosatsu]

A good Lovecraft example is Detective Malone, protagonist of "The Horror at Red Hook". The story really seems to want us to think that Malone's pre-existing mental health condition is "being Irish."

[Chamomile]

The presence of insanity in Lovecraft's work has been drastically exaggerated by his fanbase, and even in his own writings a lot of it comes down to expecting his own neuroses to be ubiquitous. He could get away with that in the 1920s when society was shitty enough that you could lose face for saying that you're not actually particularly scared of race-mixing, but a hundred years later it comes across as pathetic. Like, imagine someone is reduced to gibbering by learning that they secretly have some kind of racial minority heritage. That person isn't just demonstrating their terrible morals, they're also extremely mentally fragile. If they weren't such a bad person, you'd feel bad for them.

In any case, the reason why I like Grek's approach is because it's a not-bad PTSD simulator that emulates enough of both the Evangelion and Lovecraft genres, while ditching the myopic neruoticism of the latter. The mechanical effects aren't all-or-nothing because your Horror bonus/penalty is equal to your actual Horror, depending on whether it's higher or lower than your resolve, so that's neat, - it allows you to get traumatized on the schedule of a long-running anime TV show instead of a twenty-page short story. Provided your system is something granular like d20 rollover or d6 TN 5 dicepools or whatever, the addition of a single extra point of Horror has a barely noticeable effect, but the addition of three is likely to start modifying actual results significantly (especially if it tips you over your Resolve threshold, but even if not).

[MGuy]

Grek's proposal reminds me of darkest dungeon with building stress over time and having to manage it. There are camping actions you can take to reduce the stress but the primary way you're going to do it is by going to certain spots in the village. You use faith or carouse to relieve the stress over time. It wouldn't fit for a proper dnd game and has the threshold into random mental ailment issue. But I liked the idea of having to observe what your character does for 'fun' and relaxation. So then it isn't easy being just a wandering murder hobo because civilization or at least other people are necessary to keep you sane and functioning.

I like this one better. Allowing players to dictate their own fears. Making immediate and long term use of hopes and fears that can change dynamicaly and organically. I'll definitely be adding this bit to my notes.

[erik]

Setting specific but I’d prefer rather than aping actual insanities to instead have stuff like exposure to mythos make it so you are more easily able to see the otherworldly elements. So you get what anyone else would call hallucinations but they are actually astral echoes or something. Think like in Perfect Dark when your sanity meter gets low and you start seeing creepy shot.

As for making Despair a mechanic, I’d probably just make that a debuff condition with a penalty to rolls. Maybe if there is a botch mechanic you lose your action as you wallow for some time or until someone snaps you in it of it.

[Thaluikhain]

Setting specific but I’d prefer rather than aping actual insanities to instead have stuff like exposure to mythos make it so you are more easily able to see the otherworldly elements. So you get what anyone else would call hallucinations but they are actually astral echoes or something. Think like in Perfect Dark when your sanity meter gets low and you start seeing creepy shot.

That has the advantage of replacing serious and complicated issues with random magic you made up and so can't get wrong, yeah.