7. Stunned, you stand immobile with your jaw slack
8. A shadow now lies permanently across your face as a sign of this great disturbance; terrible dreams will haunt your sleep.
9. You scream a long and terrible scream of genuine horror.
10. Regardless of your previous mental fortitude you swoon, hitting the floor unless caught by some fast-acting soul.
11. With a nauseous wretch you empty the contents of your stomach.
12. You faint. As with swooning except it takes salts, splashes of water or any other rigorous shock to revive you.
13. You fall in a dead faint, beyond the help of even the most potent of salts. [Awake in 1d6 hours].
14. You fall to your knees and burble, your hands twisted in evil-looking contortions. You’re fine after being shaken from this trance-like state, but all who witness this bestial charade are disturbed.
15. You flee a short way in blind terror, perhaps down the passage way or out of sight before mastering yourself and returning to the scene.
16. Moving to a suitable place you begin a mad diatribe against the scene before you, throwing up your arms and voice like some holy and ancient profit [+1 Madness]
17. You flee without concern for your safety or that of others; violently shoving people aside and even attempting to cross traffic or fast-flowing water in your mad escape. [+2 Madness]
18. Whether out of bewildered rage or some kind of twisted desire you charge into the scene of terror shouting wildly. Should you survive its horrors, your motivations for this action are, thankfully, forgotten but your mental state is vastly agitated. [ +2 Madness]

19. You fall to your knees and emit a terrible and vast howl as something deep and primordial within your soul rebels against the abhorrent nature of the scene. After this new horror, you curl into a foetal ball and wail uncontrollably. [+3 Madness, revive in 1d6 hours]
20. As above, but in addition such is the shock of what you have witnesses that you become suddenly paralysed, as if entering a state of living rigor mortis. [+4 Madness, Revive in 1d6 days]
21. The sight before you is so blasphemous and utterly potent that your very faculties are shaken from their foundations! An acute sensory depravation descends upon you, whichever two senses are deemed most appropriate to the event witnessed. [+4 Madness, recovery in 1d6 days]
22. Leave the scene as soon as possible and in silence. Your mind is greatly disturbed by the images burnt upon it; you seek to end yourself in the shortest time possible. [Your character exits the story if possible, if not +6 Madness with a possible taste for murderous violence]
23. Your mind is ruined by what it has witnessed and promptly snaps, your personality and all you are folds in upon itself like a house of cards leaving your body to hang like an empty, drooling shell. [You enter an untreatable vegetative state.]
24. So utterly, totally and instantly warped by the insane vastness and depravity of the vision before you that, before anyone can act, you plunge your digits into the orifices of your head and, in a fit of inhuman strength, wrench your cranium apart leaving your pulpy brains spooling about your shoulders. [You die. All witnesses must take a 3-Dice test.]

rolled 6, 6, 6, 5 = 23

keep rollin rollin rollin

>>3055741

So 24 is HNNNNNNNNNNNGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHH

rolled 2, 3, 6, 2 = 13

Okay, I'll shoot.

rolled 8 = 8

Uh dude. Are you aware that due to the probability of dice rolls stacking when rolling 4d6 the middle values are muuch more likely than either extreme, so the effects are in fact not typically as much worse from rolling 4d6 than 3d6 as they are from 2d6 instead of d6. It should be instead rolled as.a d6, d12, d20 and d20+d4 because your table is linear and not exponential.

rolled 1 = 1

Like the guy above said, On here at least I'm fine with just straight up rolling d24.

CAN I PLAY WITH MADNESS?

>>3056001
The answer is yes. Yes you can.

>>3056001
Awesome. I laugh in the face of tentacles, replacing their reality with ONE OF MY OWN MAKING.

It involves Cthulhu wearing silly kitty hats.

rolled 12 = 12

>>3056021
FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF

I'm taking SAN damage just from THAT.

>>3055842
Yeah, I thought of that, and I decided I'd rather have a bell-curve of probability.

rolled 5, 6, 1, 2 = 14

Eldergodly Luck

rolled 2, 6, 5, 5 = 18

Eldergodly Luck

rolled 1 = 1

I spy...

rolled 2, 2, 5, 2 = 11

Let's see how batshit crazy I'm gonna go!

>>3056109
...Nothing of any note.

rolled 13 = 13

Do I feel lucky?

rolled 22 = 22

Yeehaw

>>3056171
Well damn, I an hero'd.

rolled 9 = 9

>>3056171

Sucks to be you dude.

rolled 3, 4, 5, 1 = 13

Wheeeeee!

rolled 23 = 23

Here we go!

>>3056203

Goddammit. What the fuck is with my luck lately?

rolled 18 = 18

rolling them dice

rolled 19 = 19

Let's roll.

>>3056210
I don't know, but if that number keeps coming up for you, you might be in trouble. Or at least in a silly Jim Carrey horror movie.

rolled 2, 6, 1, 1 = 10

I just saw the new Jim Profit thread, so I think a 4d6 is appropriate.

Lucky lucky let's spin the wheel.

Perhaps writefaggotry will commence.

Nice writing here Mike. Really captures the Lovecraft style, I'm definately going to use these descriptions.

rolled 3, 6, 2, 4 = 15

A see something deep a terrible ahead! How do I react?

rolled 5, 5, 5, 1 = 16

>>3056447
Better make a dapper composure roll.

rolled 5, 2, 4 + 0 = 11

>>3056335
Fffff, it's been so long I forgot how to dice.

rolled 2, 1, 1, 4 = 8

i look back into the toilet bowl

rolled 17 = 17

scary shit ahoy.

:|

A person's reaction to a traumatic stressor should be based on the individual's personality and psychological profile, not randomized.

Can someone please give me a reason to use any other sanity system than UA's? I'm really trying not to be biased, but it's a) very simple and clean, b) realistic, and c) flexible. I guess the only problem is that you have to come up with the DETAILS in how your particular character manifests their insanity, even though the system gives you a clear direction to take that in and examples that you could use if you couldn't think of your own stuff?

rolled 19 = 19

Ok, I'll bite

>>3056521
Uh.

>This is for anyone who wants to add in some quick-n-simple insanity rules into their campaigns.

Says it all right there, doesn't it?

rolled 5, 4, 2 + 0 = 11

>>3056521
It's sort of two fold.

The thing is that not everyone has the same reaction to something. Even subtle things like changes in lighting can alter how someone will react. And often enough, people don't even know how they'll react.

Second reason is that people just like rolling dice. You should never let them run the story though, and should feel free to ignore them if they're out of character or out of narrative. It's just some quick and dirty way to simulate the variety of reactions one might have after experiencing emotional stress. It doesn't need to be realistic.


And since I've forgotten again, how does UA work again? You get ticks off off things, and you roll against your resolve or something. Succeeding means you aren't effected, but succeeding too much makes you harden, while failing too much makes you into a soft, hollow shell of a human being who jumps at his own shadow?

And there was... Violence, Social, and a few others, right? I think one of them the worst you could be was dreading to be away from other people so badly that you couldn't even take a piss without someone holding your hand.

rolled 2, 6, 5, 1 = 14

>So utterly, totally and instantly warped by the insane vastness and depravity of the vision before you that, before anyone can act, you plunge your digits into the orifices of your head and, in a fit of inhuman strength, wrench your cranium apart leaving your pulpy brains spooling about your shoulders.

Genius.

>>3056571
UA is quick and simple, though perhaps not as simple as this. And worlds better.

>>3056584
Right, exactly: not everyone has the same reaction to something. Their reaction depends on the PERSON: their genetic predispositions and the environmental factors that have built the personality of the person as they are today. The personality and the nature of the traumatic stimulus are what will determine the response, so it makes no sense for that kind of thing to be randomized.

The UA sanity system is based around 5 meters. You can either have up to 10 Hardened (jaded) or up to 5 Failed (oversensitive) notches in five different stressor areas: Unnatural, Self, Violence, Isolation and Helplessness.

>>3056619
>And worlds better.

Fuck you.

>>3056619
When you encounter something that stresses the human mind, it does so in one of five ways-- the five categories I just named. The stressor has a rank (an example of a rank 1 violence check is getting shot at) depending on how severe it is. If your Hardened rating isn't equal or higher to that rank, you have to roll your Mind rating.

If you succeed, you gain a Hardened notch in that stress-- you didn't care. You become more jaded. As you gain more and more Hardened notches, you start to care less and less about, well, anything. When you gain too many, you become a sociopath.

>>3056619
That'd work, if you were always playing UA, or used to it even. If you want to have a quick and dirty splice in of Sanity for a 3.5 game, though, I like Mike's system better. I'd have the examples in Mike's as guidelines, with basic effect, but shifted to make sense in the situation.

If you copy and past the UA lists of what to do, THEN I'll think about it.

>>3056662
Typed too soon, I suppose.

>>3056619
That's where the second part comes in. People just like rolling.

But out of the sanity systems I've seen (though I haven't used any), the better ones were "roll against your Will/Composure/Resolve/etcetera. If you fail, pick an appropriate mental problem and move one step closer to being a complete nutcase."

UA's is good because it also covers what happens if they succeed. And that it's got more than one meter, which is something I haven't seen anywhere else. Not that I've seen a lot, I'll admit.

>>3056632
Yes, Greg Stolze is better at writing RPG systems than most people. This shouldn't be surprising or insulting. Just a fact of life.

lol jk bro your system's not that bad. It's quick and fun, but not a good reflector of insanity at all.

>>3056649
If you fail your mind roll, you gain a Failed notch. You then freak out, choosing if your character starts fighting, running the fuck away, or freezing. You're now more sensitive to this stimulus and will go to lengths to avoid it. Once you hit 5 failed notches, you autofail against the stimulus and you probably have a veritable psychological disorder.

>>3056619

Right, because abstracting an extremely complex set of highly situational and fluctuating factors into the roll of a d20 is absurd and unheard of.

>>3056673
This IS effectively rolling against your will or composure. Your Mind rating is your mental resolve and willpower, not just how smart you are. You can have a character with high Mind who never finished high school.

>>3056662
>>3056672
AT YOUR SERVICE SIR

>>3056674
You know, I keep meaning to use this whenever I try to run Ashcroft again, but I never do, and I keep having to delete them to make space.

>>3056686
If the world were perfect, it would be. There's simplifying, and then there's oversimplifying.

ANY QUESTIONS?

>>3056649
The system still relies on an arbitrary quantification of madness-enduing scenarios.
In the examples given, seeing that 2+2 doesn't equal four is more mentally devastating than seeing a creature that cannot logically exist; Getting tortured for more than an hour is less horrific than witnessing some brutal executions.
However many layers of randomisation you might pile atop, you still have to accept a fairly asinine interpretation of events.

>>3056722
Because these situations ARE inherently arbitrary.

And some things will be more devastating to certain people than others, so the GM can tailor the rank of the stressor to individuals if they want to.

>>3056747
So what's the point of UA's tables then?

>>3056762
You mean the examples? Guidelines. They're just examples, because you couldn't possibly list every stressor out there, and the POINT is that it's up to the GM to decide what rank a stressor is. It's a judgement call.

>>3056722
This is true as well.

Which is probably why you should not use the ones set forth in the book as more than a suggestion. Not everything effects everyone.

For instance, you don't need to be hardened to not reel back in horror at the sight of a dead body. You could be, for instance, a very religious person. Instead of a fearful pulling away, they could cross themselves and say a prayer.

>>3056784
Exactly. And on the opposite side, for example, my character had to make a Self check for lying to his wife and avoiding her (because he really wants to be a family man), whereas other party members don't give nearly as much of a shit about their families and don't have to make that roll.

rolled 1, 2, 3, 2 = 8

Let's see what happens.

>>3056778
There's a logical fallacy here. If the reaction to the scenario can be arbitrarily selected by the player then further rolling on charts to lessen or increase the severity of the reaction fails to produce a more 'realistic' result, it just modifies the player’s/DM’s intentions slightly.
Ultimately it boils down to what's more dramatic within the remit of the campaign and for that purpose Mike's table is perfectly suited.

>>3056967
You're interpreting it incorrectly.

The GENERAL reaction of the player, which is statistically swayed one way or the other by his Mind score (representing the character's willpower/mental strength), is determined by the GM's decision of the rank of the stimulus and the outcome of the Mind roll. This is limited to "don't care" or "freak out" in the short run. In the case of "freak out", the player decides in which of the three ways the PC would react depending on the situation and the PC's personality.

In the long run, the player gets to choose how the PC's sanity meters manifest in his behavior. For example, a character with four failed Unnatural checks could either become paranoid and start to record all sorts of incidents he finds suspicious in a notebook, or the character could start avoiding places he thinks will have supernatural things, or he could start obsessively denying the supernatural things he sees... the list goes on, and the way your meter ranks combine and show up in your PC's personality is up to your roleplaying.

Mike's system takes NO account whatsoever of the PC's personality or anything to do with lasting effects of "insanity-inducing" stimuli, and it doesn't differentiate between types of "insanity-inducing" stimuli.

>>3057012
In addition, whereas UA's system has GENERAL guidelines for reactions (panic, paralysis and frenzy are general terms, and you can decide exactly how and why they manifest), Mike's system has SPECIFIC behaviors that the PC undertakes, with absolutely no regard to the personality of the PC. The more specific the behavior (output), the more important the PC's personality SHOULD become in predicting it.

That's why UA is open-ended in the specific behavior the character exhibits, both in the short run and long run. It HAS to be. Getting specific behaviors from a table is not roleplaying insanity, since roleplaying involves taking a character's perspective and doing what you think the PC would do. Mike's system is not roleplaying insanity, since there are no character-related CHOICES involved. It's a good attempt, but it's too restrictive in its input and output.

>>3057053
>This is for anyone who wants to add in some quick-n-simple insanity rules into their campaigns.
Delieving no more than promised. I salute you, Mike.

Archive this jazz!

>>3057246
And this is why I am arguing that the UA rules are significantly better for roleplaying insanity for the small price of being slightly more complicated and involving GASP!!! thought. Rather than spitting out specific behavioral results from a table.

I would rather have NO sanity system (as in totally freeform 'you decide how/if your character goes crazy') than an overly restrictive one that doesn't actually represent sanity and forces my character to behave in certain ways with no regard for the actual CHARACTER.

>>3057261
No need to get all angsty about it. I just love the fun reactions tables - like the damge ones in DH.

God forbid someone voluntarily provide original content. Stop being such a shitbag.

>>3057273
Except those are different because where/how badly you get shot is not a psychological/behavioral output, the deciding of which is a core part of roleplaying a character.

>>3057305
Did you notice that I'm discussing this and not just flaming him? GOD FORBID SOMEONE HAVE LEGITIMATE CRITICISM FOR A SYSTEM!

Again with the black and white, /tg/. Either someone loves a system or they're flaming it and hate it for no reason.

>>3057336
>"the UA rules are significantly better for roleplaying insanity for the small price of being slightly more complicated and involving GASP!!! thought. Rather than spitting out specific behavioral results from a table."

Your arguements are passive-agressively bitchy and one-sidedly admonishing enough to piss me off. Let it go, man.
Of course UA has the deeper, more rounded system - I wrote this chart in the same time it took you to read it; I wasn't going for pathologically accurate detail just some dirty-quick descriptions of melodramatic insanity.

>>3057374
There is nothing passive-aggressive there. I'm stating the truth.

What you're saying is that you're butthurt because I'm offering reasons that your insanity system is flawed, and that if you're going to try to address insanity in a game, you shouldn't fuck it up with half-assed rules that involve no actual thought.

I do appreciate that you a) tried, because many systems completely ignore sanity, b) attempted to show both ways that a traumatic event could condition someone, and c) you acknowledged different levels of 'madness' in individual characters.

>>3057400

facepalm.jpg

You're face-meltingly lame, you know that? Just leave it. Criticsm is fine, but you're hammering nails into the coffin of the blindingly obvious.
I don't care if it's flawed, it was never meant to be right. I don't care that a profession system is better than this, it should be.
I don't care that it's half-assed, you make up for the low ass quota in this thread all on your own.

Bot-coder here. I will add this table to my bot, if you have nothing against it.

The bot can be found here:
http://1d4chan.org/wiki/Servitor_Bot

>>3058690
Do it.

UA's insanity system is like unto a god.

However, I like yours. Very simple, nice and easy. I might give it a try in some of my non-UA games where I don't feel like explaining how UA actually works. "One is lulz, two is HNNNNNG"