Mental Stress and Morale in roleplaying games

[Florin]

I’m curious about roleplaying games that try to model the effects of mental stress and morale on the characters.

Some games include guidelines for roleplaying mental illnesses, Eclipse Phase for example. However, these are more on the narrative-/roleplaying side of the game.

What I’m looking for are games that try to account for situations like “The group has been lost in this cave for three days. The characters are in low spirits, start making mistakes, and are not as resilient as usual”. These effects could also be counteracted by the group, for example, by keeping each other’s spirits up, or by having to abandon an adventure and returning to a safe place for some time.

Do you know of games that attempt to model the mental state of the characters? How do they tackle this, and, in your experience, does it work out during play?

[Florian]

Warhammer Fantasy 3rd makes a very good use of a "stress track" to model situations like this.

[Lapak]

I knew one D&D DM who tracked that kind of thing as actual hit point damage, assessed and applied daily for long-term things. Since hit points are kind of abstract, it worked better than I expected.

[GunDragon]

Only one RPG comes to mind for me, and that's the Maid RPG. In that game, you do not have hit points. Instead, you have like a stress meter. Once that stress amount on a character reaches its limit (the actual limit varies from character to character by way of stats) they have what's called a "Stress Explosion." This stress explosion can vary from character to character, but it basically means that a character experiencing a stress explosion does some really stupid stuff for about 24 hours in-game time. These things can involve gambling too much, using alcohol and drugs, or going on a violent rampage.
Pretty interesting and unique system.

[Anonymouswizard]

Unknown Armies has five 'Shocked Guages', which represent different ways to go mad. Each is made up of two types of notches, Failed (5) and Hardened (9 in 3e, 10 in 1e/2e), which represent two different types of madness for each.

Failed notches are your 'mental illness' madness, with roleplay guidelines for each of the five guages. Hardened notches represent detachment, again with guidelines. Too much of either is bad, especially for Avatars (who lose their powers if they get too detached).

In 3e these five sanity meters also control your basic ability to do stuff. Each one is linked to two abilities, one of which begins at 60% and the other at 20% at one hardened notch, and then for every hardened notch you gain you lose 5% from the 'healthy' ability and gain 5% in the 'detached' ability.

For example, a starting 3e character might look like this:

Spoiler

Show

Identities:
Bobby 60%
-Substitues for Fitness
-Provides initiative
-Substitutes for Notice
Old 50%
-Substitutes for Knowledge
-Substitutes for Status
-Resists challenges to Stealth

Helplessness Hardened 5, Failed 1
-Fitness 40%
-Dodge 40%
Isolation Hardened 2 Failed 3
-Status 55%
-Pursuit 25%
Self Hardened 6 Failed 1
-Knowledge 35%
-Failed 25%
Unnatural Hardened 2 Failed 0
-Notice 55%
-Secrecy 25%
Violence Hardened 5 Failed 1
-Connect 40%
-Struggle 40%

The end result is an eldery, likely retired, policeman who has seem some weird stuff but not a lot.

[KarlMarx]

D&D 3.5e has an optional Sanity ruleset. However, it more represents the high-fantasy tradition of forbidden lore threatening to break one's mind than day-to-day stress.

[PastorofMuppets]

It’s not a pen and paper game but you may want to try out Darkest Dungeon. It can arguably be tougher to keep your team sane than alive on some outings. The game should provide you with some good ideas on just when to affect the player morale or health as part of challenges.

[Knaight]

The first thing that comes to mind here is Torchbearer, quickly followed by Mouseguard. Both of them have various conditions that track character state, and while each condition is handled in a simple way there are a fair few of them and they all have a negative effect. In Torchbearer this is explicitly a mechanic about getting ground down by the wear of dungeon crawling, and is an ordered list:

Hungry and Thirsty | Exhausted | Angry | Sick | Injured | Afraid | Dead

The grind wears these down from left to right, filling in whatever is still open. Each can also be both individually inflicted and individually cured through a number of methods, and the positions of angry and afraid set them up as protective bulwarks against things getting a whole lot worse, and thus as notable focal points.

Mouseguard has almost the same list, but interacts with it differently. This removes dead from the list (as the whole worn down through the list mechanic isn't there). Afraid is removed for a bit of a different reason, namely that the characters are mice, they're basically always afraid of almost everything, and the rules can roll that into the rest of the rules for mice being mice.

Unknown Armies has five 'Shocked Guages', which represent different ways to go mad. Each is made up of two types of notches, Failed (5) and Hardened (9 in 3e, 10 in 1e/2e), which represent two different types of madness for each.

A very similar mechanic also shows up in Nemesis, which was also written by Greg Stolze. It's a fairly focal set of mechanics at that, given the page count dedicated to it in what is a pretty short book (though a mechanically dense one).

[CharonsHelper]

I don't like it for PCs as it just feels too much like losing agency, but I do like morale rules for NPCs to see when they run, so long as they're streamlined.

In the system I'm building - morale for NPCs is the same roll as initiative (which is every round - and by side rather than individual). If the NPC's group rolls too low (with modifiers for casualties etc.) then they break and run/surrender. It adds interesting tactics, like making taking out the leader more important, as they have a better Morale score and keep the whole group from fleeing, while otherwise you'd probably be better off killing the other NPCs first.

It does add a bit of complexity for the GM as theoretically an NPC who gets away from the first encounter could join another group and fight later, but overall it tends to speed up gameplay as the fights generally end right about when it becomes obvious the PCs are gonna win. (Though sometimes the NPCs break early, and occasionally they'll fight to the last - but both are pretty rare based upon how I set up the odds.)

[JoeJ]

Fate has a mental stress track as well as a physical one. And since anything can be modeled as a character in Fate, you can easily give the environment aspects and skills to engage in conflicts with the PCs.

[Segev]

If I were modeling the kinds of stresses the opening post poses in D&D 3e, I would do it with morale penalties. Mostly to skill rolls; in combat, the stress would focus you as much as distract, so you're not suffering penalties there unless things get really bad. (Maybe when they hit -6 morale penalties on skill checks, I'd give -1s to attack rolls and saving throws in a 1:1 progression thereafter.)

Mechanics like this need to be modeled in terms of the impact they have on PC activities. You should avoid anything that tells the player what his PC is doing; instead, give bonuses and penalties that reward or penalize things in ways that make it "better" to choose what would normally be things the PC wouldn't do. Giving stress relief options - ways to counteract or even relieve the penalties - that are behaviors which may not be healthy in the long run, but are soothing now. Maybe winning a fight reduces stress penalties, until they start accruing again. This represents feeling like you can get control by beating other things down. This also encourages hot-headed, fight-picking behavior to get that stress relief.

Maybe alcohol counteracts the morale penalties. This obviously encourages drinking, and as you get more used to it, you need more... leading to its own problems.

Maybe some actions get BONUSES from the stress, and thus encourage these problem-solving methods over others. Methods which might be...more unsavory than the party would otherwise do. Or more dangerous.

[Kardwill]

Fate has a mental stress track as well as a physical one. And since anything can be modeled as a character in Fate, you can easily give the environment aspects and skills to engage in conflicts with the PCs.

And in many Fate iterations, there is only one stress track, so morale/mental stress lowers your ability to fight just as much as physical stress. That's got my preference : A good intimidation or social/mental attack in the middle of a gun battle is not an action "wasted" against a separate stress track, but an attack just as effective as firing your gun. :)

And Fate's Consequence system is cool too : When your stress track can't absorb a hit, you can either be taken out or take a consequence to stay in the fight. It's an aspect that the enemy can use against you, and you've got a limited number of them.

So, for example, the GM can model a difficult travel as a "combat" against the environment, where the enviromnent makes "attacks" against your stress track and you have to turn back (or arrive too late) if you're "taken out". And if you took a consequence (say "hungry and grumpy") to absorb a hit, then that consequence will be used by the GM to impede you during the fight AND will not be available to absorb physical hits.

[Anonymouswizard]

A very similar mechanic also shows up in Nemesis, which was also written by Greg Stolze. It's a fairly focal set of mechanics at that, given the page count dedicated to it in what is a pretty short book (though a mechanically dense one).

Yeah, it's essentially Stolze's version of the Sanity Score. It's a really really good version, it elegantly makes it both inevitable you'll go insane while allowing you to become dulled to stimuli (although never completely), and can be tailored to other kinds of horror just by changing what tracks you can use.

I also like how PCs are encouraged to begin insane. Everybody wants a bunch of hardened notches anyway, so they're an easy sell, but they come with failed notches meaning most characters have already taken that first step into madness.

[Florin]

Thank you all for your answers so far, and your interest in this topic!

I will definitely have a look at Torchbearer, since it seems to put a huge emphasis on exactly this kind of thing!

Warhammer Fantasy 3rd edition appears to model character stress by changing the amount of dice they can use (If I understood it correctly from reading reviews about it). A neat twist is the idea of giving the players choices that allow them to do additional actions in exchange for increased stress!

It seems like multiple systems use this system of "failed" and "hardened" system by Greg Stolze.
I like that it could show players the impact of experiences on their characters, without interfering too much into how they view and roleplay them.

And Fate's way of combining different types of stress also looks pretty cool. Especially since I always have trouble to make travel/wilderness-adventures exciting...

It’s not a pen and paper game but you may want to try out Darkest Dungeon. It can arguably be tougher to keep your team sane than alive on some outings. The game should provide you with some good ideas on just when to affect the player morale or health as part of challenges.

My curiosity for mental stress in RPG's actually started with Darkest Dungeon! Especially the campfire skills and stress relief in the hamlet fascinate me. The scenario I use for my games is somewhat inspired by the theme of "In a world that is threatened by horrible stuff, what can people (and societies) do to keep up hope and fight back?"

If I were modeling the kinds of stresses the opening post poses in D&D 3e, I would do it with morale penalties. Mostly to skill rolls; in combat, the stress would focus you as much as distract, so you're not suffering penalties there unless things get really bad. (Maybe when they hit -6 morale penalties on skill checks, I'd give -1s to attack rolls and saving throws in a 1:1 progression thereafter.)

Mechanics like this need to be modeled in terms of the impact they have on PC activities. You should avoid anything that tells the player what his PC is doing; instead, give bonuses and penalties that reward or penalize things in ways that make it "better" to choose what would normally be things the PC wouldn't do. Giving stress relief options - ways to counteract or even relieve the penalties - that are behaviors which may not be healthy in the long run, but are soothing now. Maybe winning a fight reduces stress penalties, until they start accruing again. This represents feeling like you can get control by beating other things down. This also encourages hot-headed, fight-picking behavior to get that stress relief.

In fact, I am tinkering about on a morale/stress house rule for my group. We are using DnD 3.5, and as KarlMarx said, the optional sanity rule is more suited to forbidden lore than to the mental impact of dungeoneering. But I really like your ideas!
I would like to post my houserule in the homebrew section to discuss it, I just have to translate it first, as well as overcome my shyness

[Segev]

In fact, I am tinkering about on a morale/stress house rule for my group. We are using DnD 3.5, and as KarlMarx said, the optional sanity rule is more suited to forbidden lore than to the mental impact of dungeoneering. But I really like your ideas!

Thanks! Glad you like them. My preference in these things is for the mechanics to encourage PLAYER choices to make CHARACTERS behave a certain way, rather than taking it out of the hands of the players. I believe that players "feel" the stress, a connection to the condition, more when they're having to choose the "easy" way (which is how stress and other mental influences are trying to make them act) or fight through it to do it "right" (by suppressing that nature...and suffering for it).

If they're having the character compelled by mechanics to act outside their control, it breaks the player's connection to the character, making the sense of stress lose its impact. It's just a "bad stuff gauge" that they have to police to avoid crossing the threshold where they don't get to play the character for a while.

I would like to post my houserule in the homebrew section to discuss it, I just have to translate it first, as well as overcome my shyness

Ah, the dreaded demons of shy'ness. Evil creatures that tell you not to draw attention.

I'd be interested in discussing them, though I confess I don't go to the homebrew forums much.