How come adventurers never shit themselves when they encounter monsters...

How come adventurers never shit themselves when they encounter monsters? To think about it their lives are generally speaking very stressful how do they avoid PTSD?

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Sphincters are muscles so stopping yourself from shitting yourself is just a simple STR roll, which most adventurers can make easily.

By not being little bitches, for one.

maybe they do, that's for you to decide user.

most people probably considered adventurers a little insane from the outset. the normal people stay at home.

Entirely depends on the setting.

In a heroic fantasy context, that sort of thing just doesn't happen within the genre conventions outside of very specific scenarios.

In darker and grittier settings, it is a factor. Just look at the older WHFRP rulesets and things along the lines of Darkest Dungeon.

>How come adventurers never shit themselves when they encounter monsters?

Many games actually have fear mechanics, including various editions of D&D. Adventurers do literally freak out and run away from monsters like dragons because holy fuck that thing is like way way fucking bigger than my house.

PTSD: Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

In other words, you have to be post-trauma to have it.

I like to imagine that adventurers are people who are, deep down, horribly broken. Consider this: with several thousand gold coins you can build a keep and be a relatively wealthy ruler, be influential enough that the king pretty much has to okay your land grant, or you can get another +1 for your sword. Most adventurers will get the +1 because being an adventurer means a neverending chase for asymmetric power. It's utterly selfish, self-centered, and laser-focused. You might do good deeds along the way, that might even be your focus, but you'll do whatever you have to do in order to eke out that extra bit of power so that you can do greater deeds.

Being an adventurer means risking everything for power, up to and including your life and more. Rather than being a farmer or clerk or whatever, you chose to do something that could kill you, if not worse. And it never gets safer. At the very start of your career you're in danger from goddamn everything, from housecats to an orc with an axe. The orc with an axe doesn't stop being a danger until level 4 no matter how much armor you pile on, because who knows, today he might get lucky.

I think adventurers are too goddamn crazy to begin with to express emotions and fear normally. Adventurers don't need to say they'll get rich or die trying; that much is obvious from their chosen profession.

Because you do not use Insanity rules, OP. It is your fault, and you have no reason to complain.

Desensitization. They have faced so much shit, almost died so many times that they don't feel anything anymore.

Yeah I got into a big-ass argument with my friensd when we did a Zombie campaign in Savage Worlds, gritty damage, NO bennies so they could not soak any wounds, and any injury they got left a permanent debuff to them, basically.

I also forced them to make Fear checks just to kill other people or even zombies. They got pissy because they think that average every day people would have no issue beating humans to death despite the fact that the noises of beating a zombie to death would be pretty traumatizing in itself let alone killing humans.

I ended up kicking all of them out of my house after I gave one of them a hammer and shouted "WELL IF IT'S SO EASY TO KILL PEOPLE WHY DON'T YOU START WITH ME, PUSSYBOY???"

The neighbors called the landlord to complain which is why I am thinking of inviting them to dinner and ejaculating into the food.

>how do they avoid PTSD?
They don't. They just get very good at hiding it. There's a reason taverns are so popular with adventurers.

wew

Good games usually have rules for fear and sanity loss. You're probably just used to playing EnD, where it is pretty much ignored.

Most adventurer's are of a particular type of mindset ( insane ) in order to pursue their line of work. That being said, plenty of them do, players just don't usually role-play cowardice, thinking they have to be heroic most of the time.

because convenience and suspension of disbelief and rule of cool and also shut up

>how do they avoid PTSD
but fantasy games don't have twitter OP. And we all know the only way to get PTSD is through online harrassment.

/feminism

Because they are not millenials.

They don't. I had a game I ran where the party was part of a colonization effort to a new continent, and were responsible for ensuring the colony's survival. The new continent was a mix of Jurassic Park, Island of the Flies, and colonial americas.
Half the player characters were mentally scarred by their experiences within the first three months, one through exploring an Eldrich set of ruins, several others were traumatized when a player - character got burned to ash by a not-Deathwing the natives had tamed, yet another discovered the natives were doing human sacrifices Aztec-style...
And the poor shmuck who wanted to play as town mayor, who had to deal with all the shit this craziness was creating among the settlers.
That was a really fun campaign.

Because your average adventuerer is already somewhat degranged to begin with. These are people that remorselesly torch villages and topple nations if you can convince them that they're sufficiently evil.

I'm not really sure if terrifying monsters would cause PTSD.

We have pretty good historical knowledge that just killing a lot of people and having a lot of friends die didn't really give PTSD until the invention of modern firearms and modern stigma's against war heroes when it made it impersonal.

I don't think PTSD has anything to do with the gut-wrenching horror they would feel seeing that monstrosity, and honestly, I don't think it would be traumatizing for them. Just as a horrific nightmare doesn't scar you for life unless you're a small child at the time.

>PTSD didn't exist until firearms
Uh, no. Just because we didn't have a medical diagnosis for it doesn't mean it didn't exist. Plenty of historical people had symptoms that could indicate PTSD from a traumatic event, such as constant nightmares about said event and irrational phobias.

>argument against shit no one said
Obviously it existed, it was just extremely uncommon.

There's even historical accounts of PTSD, but it was VERY rare compared to WWI or WWII or modern warfare.

Yeah, this illustration of the generally unheard of "sin" of "acedia" has lots of symbolism for depression but there's also a mania and chaotic element, like people are phasing out and dissassociating in the middle of stuff that could be symbolic for anxiety conditions like PTSD.

Ah yes I remember learning about how the western front and vietnam were stuffed with millenials

Though honestly ww1 wasn't particularly different in methods or means from a lot of 19th century conflicts like the US civil war, or the taipei rebellion, so honestly it's more that an increase in the spread and recording of personal accounts of war increased, which in turn made it a more known about thing, rather than something dismissed as cowardice and cured with suicide as it would have been previously.

Unless you dumpstat STR

Suddenly the wizard is even more horrifying

It was SERIOUSLY different.

There were planes dropping bombs from the goddamn sky, guns and tanks and artillery that had range to the point where you could no longer identify whether it was friendly fire or your enemies, bullet fire that made the death toll -insane-.

Even discounting the cultural shift, it was a lot more brutal. The U.S. Civil War was a good precursor to both of those aspects.

Whoa man. Serious disrespect.

>The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs estimates that PTSD afflicts: Almost 31 percent of Vietnam veterans. As many as 10 percent of Gulf War (Desert Storm) veterans. 11 percent of veterans of the war in Afghanistan.
>medlineplus.gov/magazine/issues/winter09/articles/winter09pg10-14.html

The numbers for ancient and medieval wars are estimated to be even lower, only about 5-6%. The idea that every soldier gets PTSD is a meme, and one you'd know was false if you had any family or friends in the military. If humanity got traumatized every time it got into a scuffle it never would have survived.

Can you imagine Cro-Magnon and hunter-gatherers getting attacked by a big cat or enemy tribe, and then all the men are suddenly pussy-baby manginas? Other species like wolves and lions would be laughing at us, and we'd go back to the trees in shame.

Most people who get PTSD do so because either they're pussies, or far more often, because some really, really fucked up shit happened to them. Another factor is how often you rotate out. Being in a war situation is perfectly fine, its when you're out there for months or even years that you start to crack. Its part of the reason the PTSD rates for WW1 and Vietnam are so much higher than the PTSD for Iraq/Afghanistan/etc is because the latter wars rotate out troops with much higher frequency.

So to answer the OP, adventurers in high fantasy would have very, very low rates of PTSD, because most adventures only last a few days or weeks at time, before taking considerable offtime to unwind and assimilate to normal life, letting their minds return to 'base level' before having to go back out into the field.

First post best post

Sure.

So if we go those statistics, it would seem that massively conscripting citizens increase the number of PTSD cases, simply due to the large number of schmucks/pussies.

Neat.

I think its less that ww1+ gave rise to ptsd, and more along the lines more people know about it and bothered to write it down.

Like people think crime is worse
Now than ever nowadays whereas its more broadcasted to people.

>We have pretty good historical knowledge that just killing a lot of people and having a lot of friends die didn't really give PTSD until the invention of modern firearms and modern stigma's against war heroes when it made it impersonal.

That's not true at all, dude.

The reason PTSD is more of a modern phenomenon is because:

A. Historians did not write such things down about people who would likely have experienced it. Discussing the routine nightmares and triggered flashbacks of a traumatic event would make a person look weak, therefore it wasn't done.

B. PTSD was not recognized as an illness (at least, in and of itself, rather than as a part of another issue) so it was almost always attached to another mental issue or just misdiagnosed entirely.

People have always had problems, we're just better at seeing how deep that rabbit hole actually is today.

aerial bombardment was more impressive in london than the western or eastern front.

I should also point out that the taipei rebellion still stands as the bloodiest civil war in human history - more people died in it than in ww1 and the US civil war combined (which is even more impressive given it wa fought with napoleonic war tier gear even though it happened in the 1830s - the chinese used execution by firing squad for the first time, but went a bit japanese with the implementation, so they'd tied up half a town worth of "rebels" or "heathens" and then fire artillery cannons at them. They also took to beheading people with bayonets, possibly the worst way to do a beheading short of using a wheel of cheese)

I imagine that adventurers would have even lower rates of PTSD, just because often Adventurers are the crazy people who chose to go adventuring rather than settle into a more reliable profession.

Because they're real manly men, not pussies.

Underrated and valid post

>ITT: PTSD is for pussies bro just walk it off

PTSD is your endocrine system adapting to combat situations, and not being able to turn it off when you leave a combat zone. Adventurers who've seen some shit, i.e.any adventurer above level two or three in D&D terms, is probably gonna at least have bad dreams and respond to being woken up with stabbing.

>wow monsters are so scary
99% of the "fear factor" in something is how much you don't know about it. But in a world with "monsters", there is nothing unusual about their existence. A dragon is as natural as a lion. Both are scary to face down because you might die, but you're feeling the fear of death, not the fear of a creature.

A large part of why cosmic/Lovecraftian horror is shit is that its subject matter isn't scary to a modern mind. It's because the actual scary part about cosmic horror is supposed to be realizing how "insignificant" man is against the cosmos. That's a very trivial opinion today, since basically everyone recognizes its validity. In addition, the way that is conveyed in the genre is essentially via the description of sapient life that does not care about humanity's well-being. The remaining content of the genre - the fish people and aliens - are really mundane for a modern audience.

So it would be to an adventurer in some half-baked fantasy shitshow: nothing spooky about that creature you dissected in seventh grade.

And then user died
I'll be sure to burn your computer to remove incriminating evidence

Bears are natural but I would shit myself if one attacked me so dumb argument besides undead and demons are never natural so kill yourself faggot.

This. Having PTSD during the trauma is just called having functioning survival instincts.

There's only two kinds of fear: [Fear of the Unknown] and [Fear of Loss]. In your example, you're scared of the bear because you don't know what it's going to do and because it might cause you to lose your life or your health.

If you were well informed as to its abilities and behavior, then you would not feel nearly as afraid. The bear is not what's scary. If you go to a zoo and look at the bear exhibit you will not shit yourself or get PTSD.

What's scary is that you don't know what will happen, and you think you could lose something important to you, and that applies in any dangerous situation.

Disagreeing on the part about the traviaity of the "insignificant" of men. in todays opinion.
Even if todays human realize that cosmos is big and humankind meaningless for space and time, they don't accept that. Everyone sees himself as the main character of his story, the whole point of the story is to follow the main character. The first shock is realizing that the main character is for the mojority of humans a npc. Quite a lot of people don't memorize that.
The next shock is that everything that a human can do in his life will be forgotten someday. He can build the next pyramids, standing long after he is dead, but someday the pyramids will just be pyramids, not Janes Pyramids anymore. His person, his face, he will be forgotten. Meaningless and gone, as if he never exsisted.
The next shock is that this is the fate of the pyramids themselves. They will wither and break. Noone will cry or mourn for them. Just like a builing is just wood and stone and glass, a human is just flesh, bone and blood. Stuff to be used and consumed.
His spirit, his characer, his mind, his emotion, his aura, or whatever you believe in, lost and gone, just ike the crumpled pyramids lost their aura.
Nobody cares about you, the soon to be forgotten npc. Nothing you do can ever resist the time and entropy. Nothing is worth doing it, not your taxes, your car, your familiy. All is dust on a single planet.
The next shock is that this is the fate of earth, of our galaxy even. Things bigger and older and uncomprehendable will perish and no sign will be there. When the sun swallows the earth, when our galaxy crashes in another, noone will cry for earth or even humans, not even the main character.
The next shock is understanding of time and space and the meaning of infinity. We are in a place we can never understand. We are doomed to be blind, as everything our science can show, is our interpretation, which are meaningless to the truth of these things.

>things exist and things happen and that scares me a lot!
I mean this might work on some woefully uneducated hillfolk, but modern humans aren't going to be scared of physics, let alone metaphysics. We're too culturally and intellectually mature/cynical to believe in intrinsic meaning anymore. God is dead, and has been for a long ass time.

One thing about ptsd too is that it's defined by how long symptoms persist.
If a person sees some really fucked up shit or is in a horrible situation, it's a pretty normal reaction to have nightmares, fear and anxiety about the situation for a couple months. Say if you watch a guy you know get brutally murdered. If someone wasn't hardcore shaken up by that, then there's something off about them. It's if the symptoms don't go away within 3 to 6 months that it starts to become a serious problem.

>PTSD is a modern invention
>f-f-feminism a-and millenials a-are ruining muh warfare

Mental illness was hardly diagnosed or recorded up until the early-modern period in Western history. You are an absolute fucking retard if you think mental illness like post-traumatic stress disorder sidn't exist in humans until 100 years ago.

Ancient Roman legionaires would retire together in their own villas as a cohort apart from society because they couldn't readjust to normal lifestyles. This shit is documented.

Because adventurers are controlled by players and players generally don't care about fear or PTSD, but when they DO care they take it to the extreme and become extremely annoying.

Speaking as someone who served in the armed forces, you'd be surprised how quickly you can get used to some pretty gnarly shit pretty fast. Like, not even within days or hours.
Maybe within a few seconds of seeing it for the first time.

The Thing, despite the understated reactions from the characters in the film, is actually pretty spot on to how military personnel act and react to shit on duty, even weirder stuff; dull surprise and confusion before the brain just defaults right to "kill it with fire".

I am not sure if you are trying to misunderstand my point (i.e. trolling), just misunderstand my point or just belong to the people not experiencing the first shock. So if I seem rude, I need and want to apolice for that in advance.

Modern humans are still subject to believe, awe and irrational thoughts. Even in the technological advanced western culture people people are to scare and scam by gurus and demagoges. Take away the electricity, the lights at night, the pulse of digital data around us, and you find a scared person.
Experience the first sleep paralysis, when people see or make up demons and aliens, and wonder how many people beg for gods whom might not exist or care at all.
Experience the catastroph, the horror of mankind which leads scared humans to faiths.
It happens not only to the uneducated but also to educated members of society.The two kinds of fear, as listet are not a fault of education or uprising, they are fundamental. Fear can even happen through education, as some aspects of physic and philosophy can show.
If people, like you wrote, aren't going to be scared of physics, I presume that they aren't that educated in that matter. It is quite easy to not be scared of things you don't kow exist or don't want to think about. That is part of the problem with some people, too. Living in their tiny safe space bubble, not thinking about existence at all.
We know very little about the existence at all. Thinking and learning about it opens the way for the fear of the unknown.
Try thinking about multiple dimensions, about objects with additional dimensions, which we can't comprehend, just interpret.
Try thinking about about the aspects of perception closed to us, which we can never take part in.
Try thinking about the canging of time, of your definition of time, and how time can be experienced in other ways.
It doesn't even have to scare you at first, but after the fascination will come a point where you get your personal shock.

You served in KFC you fat fuck.

also more people are affected because people don't die by the truckloads and combat situations can last for weeks which overloads your stress mechanics

It's frustrating to try and explain this to people because the language isn't really equipped to explain it very well.
I've several friends with PTSD who've never even been in proper combat, but are so geared psychologically towards combat situations and military conditioning that in effect that mindset is always "on"; they act like they're on military patrol in Afghanistan even when they're in the supermarket because they can't really turn it off anymore.

At least part of it is how extreme the psychological conditioning the American military puts you through is and it's tendency to more or prey on directionless young men for their biggest recruitment base and then give them direction and purpose in life before taking it away when their service term is up. Everything when you're on duty is defined and directed, and you ALWAYS know at least a little bit what to do next because they spell that shit out for you in detail pretty much the entirety of boot and during every single deployment. Removal of these guidelines from guys who never had the time to develop their own leaves them fucked up pretty bad.

And he was a fucking Colonel motherfucker! By god man, you may not respect the institution but by god you'll respect the uniform!

I love how people think Army doesn't do D&D ever.
We stand out in third world countries with no friends, no phones, no TV, no internet, no videogames, bad food, and frequently shitty weather. These conditions last for literally days without relent. During these days, nothing ever happens. You just do your duty while loaded down with gear and nothing happens even once and it is the most boring fucking thing on planet Earth.
Roleplaying is easy to teach and requires a lot less then everything else (certainly doesn't require electricity or running water) and after your first month of doing absolutely fucking nothing you're willing to try ANYTHING to be not bored, even if you got told it was for nerds back in high school.

When people don't do roleplaying in the military it's usually because nobody they know knows how to play. If someone does, a lot are willing to learn because they don't have fuck-all else to do anyway.

Dark Heresy handles mental trauma very well in my opinion.

>Seeing certain things can cause insanity points
>If you get enough they can develop into long term conditions and quirks like kleptomania, obsession, insomnia
>As you lose more and more of your mind, you become more and more resistant to fear as you're used to seeing hell

There's a pretty good video on the subject:
youtube.com/watch?v=FDNyU1TQUXg

As Mr. Rage eloquently put it,

"ADVENTURERS ARE MONSTERS THAT HUNT OTHER MONSTERS."

I miss that guy.
Despite his perpetually broken caps lock, he was a rational and thoughtful user. Well, semi-user.

Please also bare in mind that PTSD rates increased alongside medical science. During the first world war it was just seen as cowardice rather than a mental disorder. Even earlier you were unlikely to survive if injured (a major cause of PTSD) so you'd obviously not be in a state to suffer from it. Also, most people getting killed/dealing with the gritty shit in historical wars were the lower classes who were often uneducated, leading to less reportings.

Sure thing lmao nerd.

>Lindy 'Pikemen advanced towards the enemy pike formations and raised their pikes as they came together because they were scared' beige
>Lindy 'Bayonets were only used in urban situations' Beige

No offense, but this all sounds horrid. Why even join if subjecting yourself to that awful shit is literally always a part of the deal?

I mentioned the whole "directionless young men" up here already I believe?
But actually for me I was just getting a college degree. My grades were good enough to get into Westpoint and I figure I'll serve my country a bit so I can be self-righteous to regular folks AND get a college education all at the same time and have the government pay for it.

Officers get considerably better support structures for becoming functional human beings after their tours, though they get even more annoyed then if you're enlisted and you don't come back.

So how many % goof is he?

He tends to have this ''if it happened once then it must represent the whole picture'' attitude but he can still be enjoyable.

/k/ said that for most it usually comes in from the constant threat of dying at any second during the day or night, never knowing when you or the guy next to you might suddenly have their head pop, and having that feeling 24/7 for months / years consistently. Then when you go back to civilian life, you keep the feeling.

That's good to know. I will remember to pay attention to the questionable bits.

sieges went on for months, years even

PTSD doesn't make you a pussy-baby, it makes you unable to relax. You get stuck in fight or flight mode. If anything that might be beneficial in an environment where danger is an everyday concern. Cro-Magnons would love Ogg the Sabertooth killer who spends everyday on sentry duty but doesn't talk much and has a crazy-eyed stare

you probably didn't have to be afraid of bombs dropping on you or you head being riveted the moment you raise your head. those long sieges were there to starve and reduce the moral of the enemy because they couldn't crack the city/castle

A catapult might launch a dead cow into your roof though

Adventurers don't have a base level. They're fucked people before even having to hunt dragons for a living. Killing things is likely their unwinding process

After the inital two or three times you invest in a butt plug spell, it's hard to clean shit off a full plate

>we're just better at seeing how deep that rabbit hole actually is today.

No, we're just better making non-issues into problems and stuff people with expensive medicines.

It's a real problem, but if the army and the society dealt with it better we wouldn't need expensive medicines.

We deal with it only because it involves expensive medicines

>PTSD
>non issue
annon i dont know how to tell you this, but you are retarded

Well, considering how many DM's like to run an easy stroll through a dungeon full of "balanced encounters", the PC's aren't in much danger at all. They've got the hitpoints, items, and spells to take care of anything they can reasonably expect to run across.

It's more like big game hunting.