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I am planning on running a CoC game using SWADE aiming for a 70% purist and 30% pulp flavor. I suspect the players will lean heavily into pulp fora a probable %0/50 mix of play styles. I have ROC, but wonder if there any SWADE conversions. No worries because I can wing. I am planning a home brew sanity mechanic. A new mental trauma injury track: 3 mental injuries and the 4th makes you insane, You make a modified Spirit roll to avoid a mental trauma injury. Each mental trauma wound injury causes a -1 penalty to all smarts and spirit rolls and based skills. Once in a safe place the character can try a mental soak by making a smarts roll to rationalize the encounter, modified negatively by the level of mental trauma suffered and by -2 for each level of Mythos lore (-2 for d4, -4 for d6, etc.) If that fails then psychotherapy, etc ( a variant of healing for mental injuries can try a healing roll to reduce the level one effect, two with raise.) failing that it takes 30 days of time to attempt to remove each level of the trauma, negatives for shitty treatment environment and bonuses for good safe environment a treatment. A fumble on a Spirit roll to avoid mental trauma causes short term insanity. Going to incapacitated causing long term insanity. This requires long term treatment with a mental health professional in a controlled environment, if you life that long. Any thoughts?
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Sounds punishing. If the goal is spend half the game in a mental ward, this will accomplish that.
In my opinion, a Sanity rule should capture the flavor of the character's mind slipping away without taking them out of the game unless they become truly lost. -
What about the mental trauma levels only counting as a penalty on the roll to naturally recover from the mental trauma? Perhaps also as a penalty to the role to resist further mental trauma? That way it is not so punishing but leads to a slippery slope towards mental trauma incapacitation via insanity.Comment
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Honestly my suggestion is to ditch the rolling and tracking of sanity and go for the trade-off route. The character can gain a "free" advance (or half an advance) in exchange for Hindrances and other game mechanic drawbacks. This way characters can learn the Rituals skill, which is linked to losing sanity in the Cthulhu setting, and gain other gifts, and it has player buy-in and they help shape how nuts their character goes. Rolling and tracking sanity has never been fun when I have tried it in the past, and becomes a tedious chore that detracts from the game.Comment
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Require fewer rolls and lessen both the value and source of penalties. The way you have it now, a character with just basic Mythos knowledge (d6) is rolling at -4, which means they will fail more often than succeed. And since failure worsens the penalty for next time, you're just encouraging your players to never raise Mythos lore beyond d4... if they bother taking it at all. Since Sanity is crippling to Smarts and Smarts-linked rolls, players of brainy characters will try to avoid it, meaning the character that should (theoretically) have obscure knowledge, is actively not taking it.
Try to make the Sanity rules more engaging for players, where it might be fun to play a loon for a while, but ultimately the character would need to seek help or crack completely.Comment
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The best "corruption" rules I have ever seen (i.e. the only fun corruption rules I have ever seen) are the rules for Harrowed in Deadlands the Weird West. Specifically the rules about Dominion, when Harrowed characters "Let the Devil Out".
When a player chooses to "Let the Devil Out", their character adds +d6 to all Trait and Damage rolls for the next five (5) Rounds. They also have to roll on a secret table. Table results range from "You and all your allies get magical help, getting +2 on Trait and damage rolls for the next 5 rounds, all AB characters recover 10 PP, and you are 1 step further from being an NPC villain" to "You go psycho and murder someone, preferably a close ally; also you are 1 step closer to becoming a NPC villain".
The player agency to trigger corruption, the beneficial power spike of doing so, and the unpredictable variability of the consequences combine to make the rules for Dominion an actually fun corruption system.
Adapting the concept to your Mythos campaign could be a lot of fun. If a character "opens themselves to Terrible Insights", gaining +d6 to all Trait and Damage rolls for a time, but has to immediately roll on a "Derangement Table" to see how those insights also affect their psyche (a table that has one or two healthy results, a few neutral results, and a few bad results) then that could be fun. Especially if those insights can then be used to understand some of the supernatural goings-on. (Possibly only allow a character to increase their Mythos Knowledge with results from the Derangement Table. An effect added to all but the worst possible result.)
And then you could have a new monster special ability, for the especially exotic and reality-breaking monsters, that can force a character to roll on the Derangement Table. Used sparingly (less than ten times in the campaign), that could be a fun way to remind everyone that humans are a trivial and misguided gnat in an uncaring and incomprehensible multi-verse.
Good luck!I hope you find the above post useful. And not insulting, because I was trying to be helpful, not insulting; being a pedantic jerk, that isn't always clear.Comment
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