Yora
2018-01-27, 05:57 AM
I've recently been looking into the game Symbaroum to perhaps use it for my own Dark Fantasy setting, and its magic system limits spellcasting by giving you corruption for learning spells and temporary corruption for the duration of the encounter for casting spells. The more magic you know and the more spells you cast in an encounter, the higher the risk of a hit by a corrupted creature permanently turning you into one of them. For my campaign, I want to slightly adapt this so that getting too magical doesn't turn you into a demon, but rather makes you become more like a fey than a mortal. Either way, the PC disappears into the forests, hopefully never to be seen again.
I like the buildup mechanic as a way to make spells and contact with supernatural effects potentially lethal, but also tempting players with the situation of "a little bit more surely won't hurt". Where the whole thing feels a bit lacking is that it's an all or nothing thing. In Symbaroum, getting 50% corrupted gets you a purely cosmetic effect to the character's appearance, but when you want to make it more about mental changes, I feel like there should be much more granularity and I really don't like the standard Insanity systems I've seen in other games so far. Usually it seems to be "when you're insanity reaches x, roll on this list for one mental disorder".
I think it would be cool to have a kind of insanity system in which characters slowly become increasingly stranger as they lose their connection to the ordinary reality that nnormal people perceive. The videogames Bloodborne has a mechanic where characters get Insight, at at different values more invisible things in the environment become visible and the appearance of some monsters changes slightly. I think that might be one interesting direction to take it. High strangeness makes a character more at risk of losing the last remains of humanity, but it also lets the character get additional information about the environment and opponents.
I like the buildup mechanic as a way to make spells and contact with supernatural effects potentially lethal, but also tempting players with the situation of "a little bit more surely won't hurt". Where the whole thing feels a bit lacking is that it's an all or nothing thing. In Symbaroum, getting 50% corrupted gets you a purely cosmetic effect to the character's appearance, but when you want to make it more about mental changes, I feel like there should be much more granularity and I really don't like the standard Insanity systems I've seen in other games so far. Usually it seems to be "when you're insanity reaches x, roll on this list for one mental disorder".
I think it would be cool to have a kind of insanity system in which characters slowly become increasingly stranger as they lose their connection to the ordinary reality that nnormal people perceive. The videogames Bloodborne has a mechanic where characters get Insight, at at different values more invisible things in the environment become visible and the appearance of some monsters changes slightly. I think that might be one interesting direction to take it. High strangeness makes a character more at risk of losing the last remains of humanity, but it also lets the character get additional information about the environment and opponents.