Kobold Press
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Kobold Quarterly has posted some variant rules for sanity/madness, using a Mind score and different forms of temporary and lingering madness.
It's a freebie written by Scott Gable.
Linkie. Part 2 goes live tomorrow.
Thoughts?
Looks good, I like the CoC approach. I have a couple quibbles, though.
The average D&D world is "weirder" than the average CoC world. I think the high SAN costs for everyday creatures and the SAN penalty for all kinds of different knowledge skills means there's "too much SAN fiddling". Even in CoC, skeletons, byakhees, and Deep Ones are only d6 SAN; hell, a Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath is 1d10.
If it were me, I'd:
1. Ax the Knowledge skill SAN penalties - too fiddly and off point
2. Not do the "best of INT/WIS/CHA" thing for Mind, that's very 4e, 3.x doesnt' do "best of," just use WIS
3. Reduce and come up with a different formula for the creature SAN hits. Size should factor in instead of HD, perhaps. And the strong typing is difficult. Is a musteval guardinal as much of a hit as a urdefhan, and all those less than a reefclaw?
LOL and I just got done reading the Bestiary, one of the only new monsters, the Shoggoth, is an ooze and therefore incurs no SAN loss per these rules :-(
LOL and I just got done reading the Bestiary, one of the only new monsters, the Shoggoth, is an ooze and therefore incurs no SAN loss per these rules :-(
Hah, just reading this costed me a few sanity points myself!
Comes to terror/horror/sanity rules, groups I have played with usually just used a Will Save. Failing it by certain margins imposed certain conditions...shaken, frightened, confused, sickened etc.
-Weylin
That seems most sensible.
The thing about a SAN system is that your mind is essentially damaged by reality's curtain being raised, showing you unexpected, impossible, and disturbing things, things that absolutely contradict what you KNOW to be "Real".
Makes perfect sense in a contemporary setting Call of Cthulhu game where magic defies what we consider to be objective reality, where we know monsters don't exist, where things have to make sense, where God is a distant and debatable figure that cannot or will not intervene for you regardless of how you pray.
But in a fantasy game, that isn't necessarily there. Say you encounter a bunch of Deep Ones. Instead of your brain going "Those can't be, there's no such thing, I can't accept it!" it goes, "These things don't look like sahaugin or kuo-toa (I know I spelled that wrong) but they seem pretty similar." It's accepted that there are humanoid predators living in the deep. Likewise, magic is, for many people, a part of everyday life (in a High-Fantasy world) and anything unexplainable can be chalked up to odd magical experiments or the intervention of gods. The gods are present and regularly interact with their worshippers.
As such, while certain horrible things might frighten, shake, or even terrify someone temporarily in a fantasy setting (explaining the various states), the mind will be far more resilient simply because so much is considered acceptable to the "world as we know it".
LOL and I just got done reading the Bestiary, one of the only new monsters, the Shoggoth, is an ooze and therefore incurs no SAN loss per these rules :-(Hah, just reading this costed me a few sanity points myself!
Honestly, I think the simple solution is to bump oozes up a category to be on the same level as dragons and extraplanar entities. Unless of course you're in a world where every other mage has a teacup shoggoth familiar.
Heroes of Horror provides some excellent rules from using Sanity/Madness rules in a fantasy style setting. They were based off the CoC rules, and tweaked to work with the D&D world.
That's my suggestion:
AK
Honestly, I think the simple solution is to bump oozes up a category to be on the same level as dragons and extraplanar entities. Unless of course you're in a world where every other mage has a teacup shoggoth familiar.LOL and I just got done reading the Bestiary, one of the only new monsters, the Shoggoth, is an ooze and therefore incurs no SAN loss per these rules :-(Hah, just reading this costed me a few sanity points myself!
No, but it is a world where I don't expect people to lose it whenever they see a gelatinous cube.
No, but it is a world where I don't expect people to lose it whenever they see a gelatinous cube.
With or without half-digested corpses inside?
The "gelatinous cube" is a tame name that doesn't really get into the horror of the thing. Call it a "corpse aspic" and people can make san checks right and left.
I have used CoC-like SAN rules from time to time but this isn't the way to go about it. Creature type is a dull bludgeon to use to define SAN losses; it's a trivial exercise to look through all the types and see things that seem arguably SAN-losing and ones that don't.
And with part two of the article up, it gets worse. Here's where being converted from a 4e article really hurts; it takes the same drool-proof approach the 4e rust monster did with indefinite insanities. You spend all this time and trouble tracking Sanity, and what's the payoff if someone does go crackers?
"Design Note. These disorders are intended to roughly be a wash for their total penalty and benefit, providing primarily a fun mechanic to help flavor a character."
Yes, they're "balanced." Permanently schizo and seeing hallucinations? That's just +10 on enchantment saves and -10 on illusion saves. Amnesia? +5 on all CHA skills and -5 on saves against fear effects. Hell, these aren't disadvantages; they're good enough to take as traits if not feats... Paranoia (+10 to init, +5 to Perception and Sense Motive, but autofail fear saves) is better than any feat.
This is a great example how there's a core mindset different between 3.x and 4e that goes beyond mechanical conversion. Sure, the article says that "For more gritty and grim adventuring, it is easy to ramp up the penalties or ramp down the benefits." But that's the modded case?
If you wanted to put insanities like these in for some one-shot where you're doing "Gygaxian dunegeon lays some insanities down on all who enter for kicks," maybe. But why would you track Sanity and worry with all these mechanics for months and many PC levels for this kind of payoff? Many PCs would just try to go bonkers fast - party rogue says "+10 to Initiative and I'm hell on wheels; if anything survives me long enough to fear me the priest'll being me back..."
I was noticing how if you gave a gnome the obsessive-compulsive one, no one would notice anything out of the ordinary except that all his spells are marvelously extended at the cost of slightly longer casting. Use this for buffs and other stuff where length is an issue and you can min-max the hell out of these.
I'll admit that the business of making creature types automatic for various types of san loss is kind of a dull blade, especially if you have a world where some mages, for example, like having beholderkin eyeballs as familiars. But that is why the article puts in the business about having dragons on a sliding scale of san-loss.
One thing I'll note that's sorely lacking is any sort of "Intellectualism" insanity a la WW's Vampire or for that matter Lovecraft's original "Whisperer in Darkness." There would be some wizards and especially archivists who, upon encountering That Which Man Was Not Meant to Know, would respond with "How Intriguing. Tell me more...." Having every insanity be some variety of the screaming heebie-jeebies doesn't work as well.
Of course, that's what house rules are for. I don't exactly like the Taint mechanics in Heroes of Horror either, but I could see use part of these rules and part of those to come up with something that works for me and my game.
Personally, I think what might work as a mechanic is Feats you can only get if you've gone somewhat insane. For example, the dry academic business I mentioned--which would be perfect for all sorts of wizards and archivists--is basically the same as a paladin's immunity to fear but without the extra holy sauce or ability to share it with your friends. (Or the Kender's immunity to fear, but whenever I think of Kender, I have to make a san check, so let's not go there.)
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Kobold Press
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Good critique, and some of the same issues did come up in the multiple playtests the article went through before publication.
FWIW, yes, it was originally a 4E article, and some of that is retained in the free conversion on the site.
OTOH, it's a freebie for Pathfinder fans to use, adapt, ignore, or embrace as you like. If there's no comments to the author on KQ.com saying "Thanks!", the odds of future free Pathfinder content do go decline. It's just human nature not to put effort into things that don't provide even a social reward.
So, if anyone enjoyed it or would like to see more free Pathfinder material, please do give Scott a thumbs up on KoboldQuarterly.com. Just sayin.
A good point. Done!
On Sanity mechanics in general, I like them. I ran a super long 2e game (Night Below) that had a Cthulian theme and I used Sanity rules pretty much directly from CoC. It was very effective especially in a RP intensive game; one of the PCs finally did go totally nutso.
In addition to the basics (5xWIS to start, losses from atrocities and mythosey/undead only) I took a hint from some study of psych and applied personality disorders on a kind of "insanity track"... As you lost SAN you got twitchier, half SAN you get a personality disorder, no SAN you get a real insanity.
Rather than a "random" one I fit them to the PC's personality. In fact, I found something exremely useful. As a PC starts to lose SAN and you ask the player to start "playing them crazier", they all do it a little different. In fact, if you take what they do and diagnose it against the DSM-IV (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, standard doctor book they use to classify disorders), you can often get a pretty direct match.
Like we had a wizard who lost SAN pretty quick. He was asked to act crazy and started acting eccentric, wearing odd clothing, withdrawing socially, being suspicious of others, and being easily led by the party leader, and even hearing auditory hallucinations during severe outbreaks. I went to the manual and he was (unknowingly) displaying a classic schizotypal personality disorder. He then went full schizo later on.
It's not "medically correct," but many of these disorders can be put into similar tracks with a personality disorder or otherwise "milder" insanity used before going with a full blown "bad" insanity at zero SAN. Those should be where you consider whether the PC should be retired and become an NPC, or go along but have some truly crippling problems.
We did the "go along" route; everyone was a good role-player and frankly the wizard in question was so powerful that even as a total schizophrenic who was sometimes a threat to party members, they wanted him along.
Augh, that second article's list of Indefinite Insanities is horrible. Why does insanity have to come with an upside? Mental illness does not work that way. Plus, half of them are all upside. Mania breaks the action economy, fear breaks the action economy (just keep a pet monkey and develop a monkey phobia), paranoia is just silly.
Any system that encourages player characters to contract a crippling disease for the combat benefits is a deeply broken system.
On the bright side, I liked the article's illustration -- an engraving by Hogarth. :-)
First off, I'd like to say that reading through this article definitely temps me towards using Sanity rules in my games, a temptation I fluctuate back and forth with often. If it weren't for the fact that I have already made up my campaign standards for my current campaign, I might have gone over the edge.
I liked the feats relating to this topic, as I think any subsystem that is going to work needs to have the standard d20 supports in place, including alternate uses of skills as well as feats to modify the topic at hand.
That having been said, if I do use sanity in my games, I'd probably be more likely to start with the OGC material on Sanity in Unearthed Arcana, but modified to take advantage of some of these rules. Both sets of rules, to me, introduce a little bit more complexity than I want to to keep things feeling natural (for example, the "levels" of sanity in the OGC material, and the creation of the Mind score and the save, which only relates to Sanity).
Its a great work for inspiration, and when I finally do succumb to adding Sanity to my games, I'll probably be mining this for some information to create a bit of a hybrid with the Unearthed Arcana material.