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View Full Version : Whatever doesn't kill you simply makes you stranger.



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.

Vitruviansquid
2018-01-27, 05:36 PM
Maybe use dice rolls that progressively get harder and harder to fail, that when passed modify characters in an unsustainable fashion?

I set up a rules modification on a game once where the PC's stats place them at exceedingly unspectacular on the power scale, but they had special skills to temporarily exceed those stats.

Every time the special skill is used, you roll a die to see whether the use of that skill causes a permanent change in the character.

If the roll fails to cause your character to change, then the next time you roll, you add 1 to the result, making it more likely the change will happen, until the change does occur, at which point any additions to your rolls get reset.

An example:


Your PC is a normal person being slowly corrupted by a demon until that demon can possess your body and wreak havoc on the world, and as such, is hunted down by armed and armored soldiers who are trying to suppress demons.

There is no hope of your PC being strong enough to consistently harm the soldiers with your attacks because they are wearing armor, but luckily, you can channel the demon's power to increase your strength by 5 for a round, which will tend to greatly even the odds. Whenever you do so, it is possible that the demon will corrupt you slightly, causing you to move up a step in a "demonic corruption table" that you are provided with.

The steps in the Demonic corruption table are as follows:

Level 1 - No difference from a normal human. You have the ability to gain a strength boost when attacking, which requires you to roll on demonic corruption.
Level 2 - +1 strength permanently, -1 constitution permanently.
Level 3 - +2 strength permanently, -2 constitution permanently.
Level 4 - +2 strength permanently, -3 constitution permanently. You gain a new ability to attack twice per turn, which requires you to roll on demonic corruption twice
Level 5 - +4 strength permanently, -5 constitution permanently.
Level 6 - Your willpower succumbs to the demon. The demon inside of you gains control of your body, and your character becomes an NPC.


In this way, you can die of losing constitution so fast that an enemy's attack one-shots you toward the end of the scale (the system in question has exploding dice rolls for dealing damage), or losing constitution so fast that you die to two or three attacks within the round. You can also die of simply using your abilities too often. You can also die of not using your abilities often enough to overcome the NPC opponents.

Unfortunately, since to play with this is to always be somehow moving your character closer to death, this may not work as well for a game that has an extended campaign. It was first designed to be a rules mod I used for a one-shot (or possibly short campaign of 3-ish games)

Arbane
2018-01-27, 11:05 PM
Maybe take a look at Don't Rest Your Head? As I understand it, its system is pretty well designed so the characters get stronger but more precarious as the game progresses, until they eventually succumb to insanity or exhaustion.