How does Veeky Forums generally feel about Insanity rules that are formalized into the rule mechanics of the game?

How does Veeky Forums generally feel about Insanity rules that are formalized into the rule mechanics of the game?

The two most popular examples that spring to mind are Call of Cthulhu and Dark Heresy.

They are perfect

I like them, at least the Kult and Warhammer Fantasy one.

I usually find them fun. I like roleplaying that sort of descent into crazy.

Best form of Insanity is Agent Mulder Insanity, where you just become so desensitized other people genuinely start thinking you're a mandroid.

Isn't that just being David Duchovny?

I enjoy them, but one problem I have is that constantly rolling for sanity checks can sometimes ruin the horror mood.
>You wander into the house, each step resounding in an overly loud creak. As you round the corner, you come upon a corpse cut up in intricate and ritualistic ways-roll sanity
Kinda kills the mood, so I tend to have players roll AFTER the horror scene is over, unless it’s a major shock. Gives a bigger idea of how it affected them in a lasting sense.

I'm fine with having insanity mechanically grounded in the system. Would feel uncomfortable roleplaying it "free form" mostly because I might start to self-insert

Of course, but don't think for a second he and by extension Mulder isn't legitimately Insane.

You gotta be pretty broken if you can go from watching deformed hillbillies beat a cop to death to plowing a slutty witch all while wearing the exact same poker face.

>mostly because I might start to self-insert

The insanity as hitpoints mechanics normally kind of suck.
Unknown Armies has the greatest insanity mechanics.

CoC's is okay I guess, but it does tend to take away from the story. I never bothered with insanity in the 40k games, they're already buried under a hundred pounds of rules as-is.

I'd appreciate it more if insanity mechanics more accurately reflected trauma. Less fishmalk / Lovecraft bullshit (inb4 MUH LOVECRAFT i like him too but my nigga didn't know how to do anybody else's crazy) and more ptsd, anxiety, etc.

ALSO as another poster mentioned, Feels Points are the worst.

I just fold it into a generic stress mechanic. It's one of those things that comes better through roleplay than mechanics.

I prefer the way Trail of Cthulhu does it, by having the GM and other players mess with the affected player's head. For example, if a character gets hit with Paranoia the player is made to leave the room for a moment. The others and GM decide together one fact that is no longer true about that character, and will vehemently deny it ever existed if mentioned from that moment on.

90's and 00's scifi tv really relied on questionably sane male protagonists
>Mulder
>Oneil
>Adama
>What's his face from eureka
>Giles, Wesley, spike, angel
>Last but certainly not least crichton

I'd love an insanity system that worked akin to Darkest Dungeon's stress and virtue/vice systems, but adapted to tabletop instead of a roguelike

I've never been a fan of mechanics that tell me how I should be feeling.
"You gained 5 fear points, meaning you are precisely this scared of the monster"
It breaks flow and is pretty much guaranteed to ruin the impact of whatever was supposed to be causing the fear or madness.
Fear and insanity are better off coming naturally through RP.
I'm not one of those "Roleplay not Roll-Play" assailed, I understand the need for mechanics to facilitate rp and character growth, I've just yet to find an insanity system that does so naturally.

That's... A really good idea I think i'm going to steal.

That's fun sometimes but it's better imo when the player can actually roleplay the insanity.

The best insanity rules are in Unknown Armies.

I've heard of games where the GM establishes that you roll sanity when you see freaky shit, then subtly stops asking for the rolls and lets the players determine when they think they're getting spooked. Seems like it'd be effective with the right group, less the GM saying "YOU'RE SCARED" and more the players being like "Fuck, shit's fucked up I'm probably freaking out!"

I like your idea, anyway, though I think "shock tables" are very useful, especially in games like Dark Heresy where panicking in a combat scenario is part of the fun.

I like 'em alright. I prefer when the game is clear about this being "MADNESS!" as opposed to a serious take on actual mental health issues. I've seen some games take the latter, more clinical approach, and frankly I think it's a bit wrong-headed. Mental illness in real life is no fun, but roleplaying a Lovecraft-style character who picks up weird nervous tics from fighting monsters is a nice way of showing how experiencing horrible shit affects a character. I also think they can be useful as a means of showing how fear can affect a character's behavior. As I said above, one of the most fun things about DH is when the party's heavy hitters are all screaming and throwing up and it's up to the nerdy scholar to try and hold off the monsters long enough for them to rally.

> Less fishmalk / Lovecraft bullshit (inb4 MUH LOVECRAFT i like him too but my nigga didn't know how to do anybody else's crazy)

Have you actually read his works? Almost none of the characters actually went crazy. They just came to believe the hidden truths of the world that made other people *think* they were crazy, along the lines of how normies think conspiracy theorists are crazy.

For instance, there was that one story where a guy got sent to a mental asylum because he shot his friend dead after he realized that said friend's wife had used magic to transfer their souls between their bodies, and then murdered her old body with his soul trapped inside it.

Insanity mechanics are usually arbitrary and lame. The GM basically gets to tell you when the PCs go nuts. So literally any mundane action you do can drive your character insane.

Walk into a room? It's haunted! Lose sanity.
Read a book? It's filled with Secrets Man Was Not Meant to Know! Lose sanity.
Talk to somebody? He speaks in the language of the Old Ones! Lose sanity.
Eat a meal? It's been corrupted by magic! Lose sanity.
Listen to the radio? Suddenly, the signal is garbled and you hear alien noises! Lose sanity.
Take a photograph? When the picture develops, you see an Old One! Lose sanity.
Go to sleep? You have a nightmare! Lose sanity.

Every single one of those examples actually happened to me, mostly in Call of Cthulhu but other games featuring Insanity mechanics, too. Insanity mechanics suck, and should be kept as something strictly to be roleplayed out with no rules attached to them.

Preach

Kult yes I like it too. The idea that in an insane world you need to go through insanity to achieve actual sanity

>The idea that in an insane world you need to go through insanity to achieve actual sanity

That sounds like some navel-gazing wankery right there.

I think the rules pretty much say that you can only reach 2/5 of the way with that method

I quite like the stress mechanic in "Blades in the Dark", then again that's less a role play game and more a collaborative story.

For context; stress is your super power, lets you add dice, do flashbacks, avoid damage. If you spend too much you wig out and drop out of that adventure

>that fucking digital spider tattoo
>clearly wearing a fedora
>twisted fucking psychopath has nicely combed hair, nice guy does not
>whatever the fuck is going on with his left eye
>bbq lighter
That image will never not make me laugh.

Good God, you have an awful GM. The way to properly do things like San-loss books is to get a word scrambler, makes that something the and let scramble into write sense, it incoherent garbage program.

Your GM is shit, I can make every single example better.

>Walk into a room? The walls are bowed into an unearthly fisheye, and you can see a distinct section of the floor pulsating for a brief moment. Lose sanity, will you investigate the floor?
>Read a book? As you peel back the cover and skim the first few pages, you notice the following phrase: Arur in rgo eesta ges valdeuoootarm d“nne ,lc ,aufd ye vblid”lh iuhr,e.t tnobe rto tat qtlmcst ehlna ly eoenow ml ie,nsiu. Loose sanity. Will you roll to unscramble?
>Eat a meal? As you're chewing, you feel an odd popping sensation. Digging through your food, you notice small black pustules, and upon inspection, they release a bloodlike substance. Lose sanity. Roll to investigate?
>Listen to the radio? Suddenly you start to have very clear pictures in your mind's eye of what's being described. The longer you listen, the more intense the visions become until you seem *plot point* and *maguffin*. Lose sanity.

Okay, fine. Your descriptions are top notch.

But my point was that in games with insanity mechanics like these, your character basically gets fucked no matter what they do. And while I understand that many would argue that's the whole point of the game, I'm trying to point out that this is why I don't play Call of Cthulhu and other games with Insanity in them anymore. It basically encourages me to re-roll a brand new character every session to start with a clean slate of Sanity instead of playing with progressively damaged goods that hardly ever improves.

O'neil was irreverent, not insane

Crichton got his share of insanity

Again, that's poor GM.

See, I love Lovecraft. I've read all his work, even that shitty vaudeville romance short story, and I've studied what makes it effective. The problem with CoC versus a short story is that the context is expanded, and to fix that, you need ebb and flow. I try to provide binary choices on where you can regain sanity, or lose even more sanity. Using my previous examples, if you roll to investigate the floor, you find a note talking about a plot point that restores sanity, or the opposite, you find something horrible and lose more sanity, but soon after you can meet a character that can help you restore sanity. I often have "mystic" characters that have methods of restoring sanity until endgame of the campaign where they're inevitably corrupted into gibbering monsters, but the point is, it just takes some tact and some improve.

You don't use sanity as a scripted loss mechanic, you use it as a dynamic mechanic to communicate the plot. Sometimes as the GM you need to shoehorn in some sanity gain or sanity loss to make emphasis on a plot point, but a shit GM will just try to railroad you with it.

You seem to have missed some points about CoC. If you don't like the game, that's fine. I'm not one to argue about personal tastes. But CoC's entire shtick is that you are, or will become, damaged goods.
The pulp-heroes are in the other game over there.

The GUMSHOE games have one of the better sanity systems I've seen, where sanity is a stat you can spend against to improve sanity rolls but can also be lost as a consequence of failing sanity rolls.

I lost sanity trying to read that

This will be unpopular on Veeky Forums, but I prefer the madness track used by Unknown Armies. I also like how a characters sanity also affects their base skills in 3e.
I can also see why people would dislike it, because it does seem a little gimmicky at first look.

>a roguelike
wat

Fear can be useful sometimes, it is a survival mechanism afterall. >group sees a shoggoth. All characters but one fail sanity rolls, DM forces us to scream and run away. Remaining player laughs and takes the piss out of those who failed, then drawing pistol and boot knife proceeds to fight the Shoggoth. He dies.

Yeah, corruption of champions sanity system felt tacked on.

Wait what episode did Mulder fuck a witch?

I'd play a darkest dungeon tabletop in a heartbeat.

Darkest Dungeon is pretty much a sidescrolling roguelike

Torchbearer?

Since when does Veeky Forums dislike UA?

Maybe after the last edition? I haven't read it, but word on the street is it took a nosedive.
Regardless, the original Madness Meters were brilliant.

Do you know a good scrambler? Google provided me with only trash.

UA 3e was a pretty big disappointment in every aspect when you hold it up to glorious 2e. The madness meters are still intact but they have a direct effect on your main skill profile that looks pretty cool on paper but is pretty clumsy and weird in practice.

eh

>uses a grill lighter

But that's not what sanity is supposed to represent. San isn't "how your character feels" anymore than HP is.

Sorry I forgot it wasn't a witch.

It was a vampire.

Another issue with games like that are a bunch of GM's will dish out sanity loss for things that are mildly bothering but otherwise forgettable on the whole.

If it's actually going to be enough to damage the character, the GM should make sure it's something notable.

I had a GM who made me roll Sanity checks when my character had a colony of rats surgically removed from under her skin.

And when she witnessed her mother vomiting razor blades until she died.

I generally assume that's the sort of shit which causes San Loss.

>Insanity rules that are formalized into the rule mechanics
They're sort of a crutch for DMs who can't drive their players to insanity through the strength of their own ability.

But not many DMs can pull that off properly, so it's a very well justified inclusion in a system.

>They're sort of a crutch for DMs who can't drive their players to insanity through the strength of their own ability.

Are you the kind of GM who deliberately tries driving his players to suicide when their characters die?

I would like to play a horror campaign, but don't know any good sanity systems. What you guys recommend?

A horror game without a sanity mechanic.

New edition of delta green.

Insanity mechanics aren't super perfect, but if you want mental dysfunctions to be an element in the game at all you pretty much have to have them. Left to their own devices, player characters are just going to be perfectly logical robots who always make ideal and optimal decisions.

>Left to their own devices, player characters are just going to be perfectly logical robots who always make ideal and optimal decisions.

I'd beg to differ, sir. I'd say just as many players are going to do whatever is the most 'fun' thing to do at that moment in time. And fun doesn't always equate to the smartest thing to do.