Stress and Madness

[Dark_Jester]

I've been wondering. Are there any good mechanic systems out there for keeping track of/measuring a characters level of stress and/or madness? I've always loved the dark and gritty type of fantasy that sees regular people confronting terrors and monsters far beyond their abilities. Facing trials that tax them to their core. Adventures in the same vein as Cthulhu and Darkest Dungeon where victory merely means surviving to face the horrors again, and you are fighting a battle of attrition you are most likely doomed to fail at.

I would love a way to implement this into a low magic game of D&D, and have actually been planning one out for some time. All I really lack is a good system for managing just how beaten down characters are mentally.

[Saint Jimmy]

Probably a variation of Call of Cthulhu's method, with Sanity checks and using Sanity as an alternate form of HP (it would probably be derived from Wisdom or something).

[Knaight]

I've been wondering. Are there any good mechanic systems out there for keeping track of/measuring a characters level of stress and/or madness? I've always loved the dark and gritty type of fantasy that sees regular people confronting terrors and monsters far beyond their abilities. Facing trials that tax them to their core. Adventures in the same vein as Cthulhu and Darkest Dungeon where victory merely means surviving to face the horrors again, and you are fighting a battle of attrition you are most likely doomed to fail at.

I would love a way to implement this into a low magic game of D&D, and have actually been planning one out for some time. All I really lack is a good system for managing just how beaten down characters are mentally.

I'm pretty sure you could straight up steal the madness meters from Nemesis, which is a completely free game.

[Dark_Jester]

I actually don't know how either of those systems work. I've never used them before.

[Saint Jimmy]

Since you specified d&d, this might help.
http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/campaigns/sanity.htm

[mikeejimbo]

Since you specified d&d, this might help.
http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/campaigns/sanity.htm

I saw this thread and thought "Oh! I think the Sanity system is SRD. I'll be helpful and link - never mind...

The GURPS system has characters earning Stress when they fail Fright Checks, and if they gain too much Stress, they get Derangement. Derangement becomes mental disadvantages.

[Ken Murikumo]

I made a system like this for a silent hill type game i ran a while back.

pretty much any time they encounter something they roll a will save. If they fail, they get a point of stress. Stress is a universal penalty but can be reduced by taking breaks (and/or smoking a cigarette, this was set in the 1930s). After 10 points of stress had accumulated (without being reduced) they would get a point of madness, which had rp elements as well as the DM (me) having more strange and thematic things happen to the character. After 20 points of madness, they lost their character to insanity.

[Knaight]

I actually don't know how either of those systems work. I've never used them before.

For Nemesis (which again, is free and can be looked at easily) there are four categories. I don't remember the names off the top of my head, but they're basically three sets of conventional trauma (e.g. exposure to violence, loss of control over the self), plus one for supernatural stuff. Different traumatic events are then sorted into these categories, and ranked on a 1-10 scale. There are then two trauma responses - one that leaves the characters just worse, the other which hardens them to the category; events of lower intensity than your hardness rating don't do anything to you and you can buy hardness ratings in character creation (the book uses examples of career criminals and cops having some anti-violence hardness rating, among other things). It's detailed but not slow, and while the die system isn't D&D compatible everything else is.

[Dark_Jester]

Since you specified d&d, this might help....

That seems pretty ideal. Thank you very much.

[Saint Jimmy]

Your welcome! Glad to help!

[Slipperychicken]

I heard darkest dungeon was based on an RPG called Torchbearer. That would be a good place to look.

[X3r4ph]

Hey All

I am currently trying to turn Darkest Dungeon into a campaign. Here is my work so far:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B6...XpFQktNM0thNlk

Credit go to Natural Crit for the stress conversion.

[Corsair14]

If you can find the old Ravenloft books they had a pretty definite fear, horror, sanity system. Each type of check was provoked by different encounters one may run into and specific results based on how they failed. Not sure if its in the newer Strahd adventure path thing.

[Mastikator]

Quantifying and abstracting mental health is not going to be easy, Call of Cthulhu and World of Darkness both have robust systems for sanity/mental health. Another interesting option comes from the world of computer games, Don't Starve has a pretty good sanity system IMO.

[Psikerlord]

Low Fantasy Gaming rpg has a short madness section you might use (free PDF: https://lowfantasygaming.com/ )

[CharonsHelper]

Pathfinder has rules for it - though I've only skimmed them and I wasn't a huge fan. But that's mostly because I think such a mechanic would need to be the focus of a campaign and I didn't want to deal with it.

[Bohandas]

IIRC in addition to the Unearthed Arcana/Call of Cthulhu sanity rules, there were also a bunch of different mini insanity systems in Heroes of Horror