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View Full Version : Consequences for losing SAN



MammonAzrael
2011-10-05, 11:39 PM
I've never played Call of Cthulu or any other game that uses a Sanity score. However, I'm working on some homebrew (for 3.5) that could drift into that area, and I was wondering: What are the kinds of consequences for SAN loss? Both in flavor terms and in (light please) crunch terms.

NichG
2011-10-06, 12:56 AM
I have a game where there isn't really SAN, but despite that some of my players have really tried to lose their minds (one in particular). This works out because that one player has a bad habit of going off on his own and leaving the party to catch up. So what I tend to do is, when he goes off alone, I tell him that he sees X, but when the party catches up they see stuff that's subtly different, or even overtly in some cases.

Sometimes the hallucinations are sources of information, as if communicated to him by some Chthonian entity, and are eerily accurate. Other times they just aren't.

some guy
2011-10-06, 01:11 PM
One pc in my CoC-campaign lost such an amount that she no longer could speak words regarding death or the living dead, which was kind of a big drawback seeing as zombies were kinda big in that campaign and she was a death metal roadie.
But consequences for SAN-loss are really a case by case thing, for every pc san-loss would mean something different depending on their personality, upbringing and what made them lose their SAN in the first place.
For my group, the constant loss of SAN was enough to make them nervous (after all, get below 0 and your character is no longer yours), make sure that SAN-points are dificult to regain and things will work out pretty good.

Winter_Wolf
2011-10-06, 10:28 PM
If you can acquire Unearthed Arcana or Heroes of Horror, I believe both of them have versions of sanity mechanics. That's probably a big if, though. Took me two years to track down a reasonably priced copy of Heroes of Horror after I failed to snap it up the first time I saw it. :smallannoyed:

Offhand, I think the crunch was penalties to die rolls, phobias and mental illnesses which offered RP opportunities and enforced mechanical penalties for those who didn't want to pretend to be crazy. The fluff was varying degrees of accuracy and detail as to the mental illnesses you could find in DSM-IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th ed; or, "the big book of crazy" :smalltongue:).