The first sanity mechanics appear in Call of Cthulhu in 1981 and, in many ways, it remains the definitive mechanical model: The character is confronted by something unnatural, stressful, or terrifying. They make a check using their Sanity attribute. If the check succeeds, everything is fine. If the check fails, they take damage to their Sanity attribute based on the severity of the event that triggered the check. If the damage is sufficiently large (either immediately or in aggregate), they suffer some form of temporary or indefinite insanity. These insanities often force a particular action on the character (fainting, fleeing in panic, physical hysterics, etc.).
We can identify three distinct elements in these mechanics:
- The trigger which requires a sanity check.
- The check to see if the trigger causes harm to the character’s sanity.
- The reaction of the character to the trigger (usually due to a failed check).
This is a fortune at the beginning mechanic: You make the sanity check and THEN determine what your character does based on the outcome of the check. It is also a reactive mechanic, by which we mean that it is used in response to a triggering circumstance rather than resolving a statement of intention.
(Thought experiment: What would a non-reactive sanity check look like? It would probably be part of a wider array of personality mechanics which the player could use to interrogate their character’s state of a mind; a very non-traditional form of player expertise activating character expertise, with the player essentially “asking” their character whether they’re scared or aroused by Lady Chatworth or tempted by the devil’s offer. But I digress.)
RESOLUTION SEQUENCE
In my experience, most GMs resolve sanity checks in the same sequence listed above: they describe the trigger, make the check, and then determine the reaction.
GM: A tentacular thing comes slithering out of the closet! Make a sanity check!
Player: (rolls dice) I failed!
GM: You take (rolls dice) 3 points of Sanity loss! What do you do?
Player: Bertram screams and runs out of the room!
In this, they are usually mirroring how the mechanic is described in the rulebook: this is what this rule is for (the trigger), here is how the mechanic works (the check), and here is the outcome of the mechanic (the reaction).
This all makes sense.
But in my experience, it’s not the most effective way to run sanity checks. Instead, you usually want to invert the check and trigger, like so:
Player: Bertram very carefully turns the handle and eases open the closet door.
GM: You peer into the closet… There’s… Yes! There’s something moving in there! Give me a sanity check!
Player: (rolls dice) I fail!
GM: A tentacular thing comes slithering out of the closet! You take 3 points of Sanity loss! What do you do?
Player: Bertram screams and runs out of the room!
It’s a subtle distinction. What difference does it make?
First, the mechanical resolution now functions as foreshadowing: While the check is being made, tension builds at the table as the players anticipate whatever horrific thing might be triggering the check. (What’s in the closet?!)
Second, by resolving the check before describing the trigger, you allow the players to have an immediate, immersive response to your description of the trigger.
Which makes sense, right? When Bertram sees the tentacular thing he immediately wants to scream and run in terror. He doesn’t want to wait a minute while dice are being rolled.
So, in short, you heighten the emotional engagement of the moment both coming and going.
In my experience, the exception to this is when the trigger for the sanity check is generated by a different mechanical interaction. (For example, watching your friend’s brains get sprayed across the wall by a sniper’s bullet.) This is more a matter of practicality than effectiveness (unlike the tentacular horror slithering out of the closet, the GM doesn’t know whether or not the bullet will hit their friend until it does, and the whole table often learns that simultaneously), but does serve as a reminder that the “proper” ruling in an RPG is rarely a simple black-and-white affair.
TRAIL OF CTHULHU – LIMITS OF SANITY
In Call of Cthulhu, PCs start with a fairly large amount of Sanity and usually lose fairly small quantities in each session of play. There’s generally no way to recover lost Sanity, so over the course of a campaign, their Sanity is slowly eroded away by the horrors which they’ve seen, until finally the last few points are taken away and they are left permanently mad and broken by their experiences.
This is very effective at evoking the slow, inexorable destruction of Lovecraftian fiction. But, like hit points in D&D, you generally don’t feel actual risk until near the end of the process. There are some mitigating factors, but this can easily have the effect of reducing the impact of Sanity losses.
In Trail of Cthulhu, Kenneth Hite does a very clever tweak on this system by splitting it into two separate tracks: Sanity and Stability.
As in Call of Cthulhu, Sanity generally can’t be restored once lost. However, you also don’t lose it directly. Instead, you usually only lose Sanity as a result of your Stability meter hitting 0.
The Stability meter CAN be restored when depleted, but it’s limited enough that it can easily be wiped out in a single session (which would result in Sanity getting hit).
This allows the system to create a mechanical sense of risk that builds over the course of each session (as Stability is depleted), while ALSO capturing the long, slow, inexorable, and irreversible destruction of a character’s psyche (as Sanity is depleted). It allows characters to brush up against madness without being permanently broken.
If you’re a Call of Cthulhu GM coming to Trail of Cthulhu for the first time, you’ll want to consider how the hard limits in each system are different. This will affect both scenario design and the pacing of individual sessions. In some ways Trail of Cthulhu is more forgiving (because Sanity is “shielded” behind Stability), but in other ways it is considerably less forgiving (because it’s relatively easy to completely blast through Stability in a single session).
The game is fairly well-tuned so that in a typical scenario some or all of the PCs are likely to feel the risk of running out of Stability, but it won’t actually happen in every single session. (Which is also good, because if it’s getting hammered so hard that it IS happening like clockwork every single session, that also deflates tension.) But this is something you’ll want to monitor and adjust in your scenario design and rulings: If their Stability is rarely or never at risk of running out, check to see if you’re not calling for Stability tests as often as you should. If their Stability is being sand-blasted away, see what you can tweak to get a more balanced result.
UNKNOWN ARMIES – A MULTITUDE OF MADNESS
Unknown Armies by John Tynes and Greg Stolze has several more features in its sanity system (which, in the first edition, was called the madness meter and was resolved using stress checks).
First, instead of having a single track, the system has five separate meters, one for each type of psychological stress the character might experience:
- Helplessness (unable to take action you feel is necessary)
- Isolation (when you’re cut off from society or loved ones)
- Violence (pain, injury, death)
- Unnatural (challenges to your perception of reality)
- Self (violations of your deepest beliefs)
This paints a more evocative picture of a character’s psychological state. It also allows the game to track separate effects for each type of trauma, while still measuring overall psychological stability across all the meters.
Having these separate meters also allows Unknown Armies characters to become hardened: Each stress check adds a hardened notch to the associated meter. Each trigger is rated by its severity, and if a character has a number of hardened notches in a meter equal to or higher than the rating of the trigger, then they don’t need to make the stress check. (They’ve seen so much Violence, for example, that someone being punched in the face no longer has a psychological impact on them.)
Systems that harden you against tests can suffer from a “plateau effect” where you reach a certain level equivalent to whatever style of play you prefer and then stop rolling checks (see Katanas & Trenchcoats). This also happens in Unknown Armies, but it sidesteps the problem by having the five different meters: You can plateau in one, but the character will remain vulnerable in the other meters (and realistically can’t plateau in all of them because there are cumulative psychological consequences based on the total number of hardened notches the character has).
Unknown Armies also does something interesting with the reaction phase of the resolution: If the PC fails a stress check, they have to choose fight, flight, or freeze – in other words, is the character’s reaction to furiously attack the source of psychological stress, flee from it in a panic, or simply lock-up in indecision, terror, or a “deer-in-headlights” effect.
The cool thing about this mechanic is that, although the failed check constrains the available options, the player still remains in control of their character. Conversely, even succeeding on the check gives a roleplaying cue (because becoming psychologically hardened is meaningful) that the player can pick up and run with.
SANITY CHECKS FOR NPCs
Something which many games with sanity mechanics miss (and which, in my experience, many GMs ignore even in the games which do include support for it) is to also make sanity checks for the NPCs.
If you aren’t already doing this, it’s well worth exploring. It can really push the narrative in cool and unexpected directions.
It can also emphasize how dangerous and unusual the PCs’ lives are (and, therefore, how extraordinary and meaningful their actions are). It can also remind them why they need to be the ones to solve the problem and that it may be a very, very bad idea to call in people who aren’t prepared to deal with it.
On that note, remember that NPCs will generally only have a fraction of the screen time that the PCs do, and, therefore, will only have a fraction of the opportunities to make sanity checks. Don’t load ‘em all up with the default maximum Sanity ratings for starting PCs. Seed in a broad range of Sanity ratings, from those who are fairly robust (at least to begin with) to those who are already psychologically unsound.
A DIGRESSION ON MYTHOS MADNESS
So it turns out that there are aliens. And some of them have visited Earth. Maybe they’ve even been involved in genetically engineering human beings.
… why is this driving me insane again?
As Unknown Armies demonstrates, sanity mechanics are not ineluctably linked to the Mythos. But they did originate there, and so pervasive is the influence of Call of Cthulhu that any Mythos-based game seems almost incomplete without them. So this feels like an appropriate time for a brief digression on why Mythos-inspired madness exists.
Partly this is just cultural dissonance: At the time Lovecraft was writing, these things were not part of pop culture, so it was possible to believe that people would find their existence unsettling to their settled views of the way the world worked. The understanding of how insanity worked was also different in some key ways. And, of course, Lovecraft was a huge racist and had a plethora of mental issues himself, so there is some projection of his own preexisting mental infirmities into the mental state of his characters.
So, to a certain extent, it’s like wondering why women faint all the time in Victorian literature.
On the other hand, there’s a bit more to it in terms of the time when the “Stars Are Right,” which suggests a fundamental reordering of the laws of the physical universe. The creatures of the Mythos literally belong to a universe incompatible with the universe we think we live in. To put it another way: We live in a little tiny pocket of abnormality which uniquely makes it possible for human life and consciousness to exist and/or prosper. The idea that at some point the Earth will leave our zone of grace, the stars will right themselves, and our little epoch of abnormality will come to an end can be rather unsettling in a way that “there are aliens” isn’t.
But more than that: The creatures of the Mythos are a living connection to the way the universe is supposed to work… and the way the universe is supposed to work is inimical to humanity. At extreme levels it can be like trying to run COBOL programming through a C++ compiler. At lower levels it’s more like trying to run a program through a buggy emulator. It’s not just “that monster is kind of creepy,” it’s “that monster has connected my brain to a place where my brain doesn’t work right.” (This idea also works in reverse: Mythos creatures are operating in a semi-insane state within this period of abnormality. That’s why Cthulhu is lying in an induced coma below R’lyeh… he’s trying to minimize the damage.)
But even more than that: The damage being done to your mind is actually a direct result of the mind desperately trying to rewrite itself to cope with the true nature of reality. Mythos-induced insanity? That’s not the mind breaking. That’s the mind trying to fix itself. It just looks like insanity to us because we’re all broken.
I think there’s also an argument to be made that Lovecraft’s mythos insanity is PTSD as seen by a society that is beginning to notice PTSD but doesn’t understand how it works yet.
Great post as always!
About non-reactive SAN checks, there’s not too much need to do a thought experiment: some games like Delta Green 2e encourage such proactive checks when the character is about to do something possibly disturbing, like murdering or torturing someone. Not only does this highlight the messed up aspect of such acts which too often get trivialized or even romanticized in RPGs and movies and such, it also acts as a small break in the game that underlines the GM saying “are you sure you want to do this?”, because it adds mechanical consequences to the narrative consequences the GM might warn about.
By the way, if you haven’t checked Delta Green 2e, you might want to, it has some interesting little tweaks on BRP rules. As for SAN, it feels to me like a streamlined version of the Unknown Armies rules.
Cheers!
One problem i have with the fight, flight, or freeze aspect of games is that if your outside of combat it doesn’t really do anything (nothing to really fight, freezing isn’t really that bad because time it isn’t an issue outside of combat, same with running away – you can come back at any time). So whenever it comes up it feels…toothless.
I like your idea of changing the resolution sequence of sanity checks. I’m curious, though, how you’d narrate the outcome if the player *passed* their sanity check vs. tentacled-thing-in-the-closet.
Regarding your last point, some time ago I had the thought that it would be interesting to run with the idea that Lovecraft’s stories are all filtered through the perspective of a paranoid, xenophobic narrator, and have as much resemblance to the reality of what they describe as “Dark Dungeons” does to actual D&D. Take away the filter and you could end up with a story that’s less horror and more “weird fiction”. That’s not to say that you couldn’t have horrific things happening or beings hostile to humanity, but the threats would be to life and limb rather than your sanity.
Part of the issue with “alien” is that it has 3 meanings: 1. Foreign as in someone from another country which doesn’t usually come up in an RPG context, 2. Extraterrestrial which is our most common usage and, 3. Strange, which was the most common usage in Lovecraft’s day but is usually used in the less disrobing sense as something discombobulating (an alien environment Can be working from home rather than the office) rather than the mind-destroying context Lovecraft meant (an alien environment was one inimical to your existence in both a physical, emotional and intellectual way).
I wonder if the Stablity/Sanity would help with hit points? The same question of “always being SOMEWHAT tense, but also feeling like you’ve been worn down” applies to health (tho on a cycle of days rather than forever). There must be existing systems that work like this but I don’t know them.
It’s a bit like “hp plus replenishable-hit-dice” or “hp plus lots of healing potions” but they both require that the refresh is associated to an in-world fiction of heroes constantly being stabbed to death and revived habitually which only works with that specific flavour.
“Each stress check adds a hardened notch to the associated meter.”
This makes think of an idea I’ve been mulling over but haven’t looked into seriously. The idea of having traits that characters develop over time, like, if you kill people, you’re naturally intimidating, which usually helps but occasionally scares people. If you’re always kind you can develop an aura of being trustworthy. Etc. And those might TEND to pull in opposite directions but don’t have to. Maybe it’s best for the GM to just intuit that without mechanics, but it feels like having it be specific may be rewarding for the players — if they want to play the innocent little girl or the hardened gunslinger, they can, even if they’re not good at acting, and gives a way of resolving social situations that fits the kind of narrative the group is looking for, depending on genre.
PS. I resubmitted this because chrome autocompleted my full name in the previous comment without me noticing. Could you possibly delete that one? Thank you if so.
@Jack:
The d20 Star Wars RPG used a “Vitality and Wounds” system (which was also included as an optional rules variant in D&D 3e’s Unearthed Arcana). Vitality points are basically the same as hit points but heal faster; Wound points are equal to your Con score (not increasing with level) and heal more slowly. You take Wound damage when you run out of Vitality or when you suffer a critical hit.
Damage in Chronicles of Darkness comes in three different levels of severity (bashing, lethal and aggravated) which take progressively longer to recover from, and damage in one category can roll over into the next category.
In the Conan and John Carter RPGs from Modiphius, when one of your stress tracks fills up, you take Harm of the appropriate type (Wounds, Trauma or Madness) which causes cumulative penalties to checks using the corresponding attributes.
In Fate Accelerated, you can negate damage in excess of your stress limit by suffering a “consequence”, which is an ongoing complication.
I’m sure there are other games that do similar things; these are just the ones I’m familiar with.
As for proactive sanity checks, I would liken it to the idea of a character steeling their nerves against the potential stress that they anticipate enduring in the future.
GM: “Are you prepared to delve into the tomb?”
Player: “Let me take a moment to get ready for this. I’ll make a SAN check.”
GM: “The roll to beat is 9.”
Player: “I got an 11. I can handle this.”
A proactive check may not always be possible, as stress may come from sudden, unexpected sources (just a Jumping skill may be made irrelevant when the floor collapses under the PC’s feet). But such a check, when the opportunity arises, could be a viable way to obviate some potential trauma, assuming the players think to do so.
I’ve taught players to consider this by having an NPC insist upon meditating before investigating a crime scene, opening a crypt, or taking any action that may lead to major consequences for their physical &/or mental health. The difficulty is usually, but not always, less than that of a typical reactive SAN check in a given encounter, representing a small bonus for taking the time to steady oneself.
As I am currently re-reading Lovecraft’s work, I can’t help but point out that his actual writings don’t feature the “go mad from the revelation”. While I haven’t done an exact count, I feel confident saying that the great majority of Lovecraft’s characters don’t suffer any permanent mental stress. They faint or run away a lot, but then usually recover (and then write down their experiences in florid prose).
And from those that do suffer some mental harm, most is what we now clearly would call PTSD, ranging from the severe (Malone from Horror at Red Hook, Danforth from At the Mountains of Madness) to the mild (Cold Air, The Nameless City, Pickman’s Model). The worst case is shown in Dagon, where the narrator has nightmares and flees into a drug addiction. And in those cases, there is always something more than just the rational revelation of the supernatural to set it off. Malone sees a dead man walk and then dissolve before his eyes, followed by a building falling on him. Danforth is almost eaten by a shoggoth.
As for actually going insane in a “locked away in a madhouse” sense, there really aren’t that many, and all of them have causes for that insanity that go beyond just the revelation. Some inherited it (The Rats in the Walls, Shadows over Innsmouth), and in other cases it’s the direct influence of something supernatural: The artists and poets go into a delirium from the Call of Cthulhu because he’s literally speaking with them in their brains. The Colour out of Space infects the farmers and thus makes them act unnatural. The colossus under the Shunned House sends out its vampiric mist.
Saying that Lovecraft’s narrators are weak-willed pansies who go insane at the idea of there being aliens on Earth is quite honestly selling his fiction short.
I’ve just started running a game of Unknown Armies 3rd edition and am loving the detailed pictures of a character’s mental state the 5 meters give me. I’m finding that it adds a lot of interesting details to my NPCs that emerge without my conscious decision and nicely informs how they’ll respond to certain stimuli. Good luck intimidating this guy with violence, he’s seen it all, but isolate him from his friends and he’ll break really easily.
I also really like that it makes it clear that events can be horrible and traumatic without needing to be supernatural. My players recently witnessed the aftermath of a grisly murder and that prompted a violence stress check. I wouldn’t necessarily have thought about that in a sanity based system.
I’m definitely going to think about inverting the check and trigger in future though. I’m sure the scene of violence would have had a lot more impact if the players knew it horrified their characters so much beforehand rather than interrupting the moment to ask for a roll before getting their response.
Also I definitely agree with you on having NPCs make checks as well. A player just used that to great advantage in the previous session by triggering a stress check on an NPC who then failed it and fled leaving the players unsupervised in the place they wanted to investigate. If the players see that NPC again I’ll be sure to show the consequences.
Lovecraftian horror, as far as I understand it, is anchored in a few different concepts that I personally find strongly resonant.
The first one, the one that I think he was trying to get across with the whole “eldritch color out of space” language, is one that is really hard to explain, because the whole point is that it involves dealing with the literally indescribable and unthinkable. So, for example, there cannot possibly be any such thing as a four-sided triangle. The very concept is logically self-contradictory. So what happens when you witness a four-sided triangle *anyway*? Your eyes are reporting something that your brain cannot parse, because what you’re witnessing cannot possibly exist and yet it does.
Or imagine seeing a color that doesn’t exist, a color that doesn’t correspond to anything on the electromagnetic spectrum. Your brain cannot identify this color, so what happens when you try to remember this scene, even a second later? Your brain cannot reconstruct this nonexistent color, so you can’t remember what color this item was, but you know that it existed and it had a color…
It’s like a computer program crashing when it gets an impossible input, only the computer program is your own mind.
And I think the “genetic engineering legacy” thing is also easily misunderstood. The horror of finding out you have Deep One ancestry isn’t about racism as such. It’s about the idea of your mind, your beliefs and values and personality, everything that makes you *you*, being eaten away from the inside and replaced by something else, something that wears your skin and maybe even has your memories, but *is not you*. And it’s about the horror of knowing that this is going to happen, maybe even feeling it beginning, and not being able to do anything to stop it. It’s like the horror senility has for some people, people who have watched a loved one slip away or are beginning to slip themselves.
So yeah, I think Lovecraftian horror is a lot deeper than most people give it credit for.
My approach to sanity is to have my players during character creation pick some bouts of madness for themselves and make a list. I encourage them to have subtle ones and clear ones. They get to make these up and make them feel unique to their characters. I encourage the player to get real unnerving with it, especially with the subtle ones. My players surprise me with their choices and sometimes creep me out My players are instructed to keep their bouts of madness to themselves.
I tell my players that their subtle bouts may be used whenever they like when they lose sanity and their large bouts must come out after reaching the 5 San loss. Players also are to keep their sanity to themselves. When they roll for sanity the amount they lose is communicated covertly through text.
The results of this method have been amazing and gave my CoC games a powerful second wind. The most haunting moments I’ve had as a GM was watching my players get real into character and simulate losing their minds. We don’t roll on tables and I don’t know what’s going through their characters minds. This gets simulated very well through my npcs who are at times as disturbed as me. None of the players feel as though they have a very strong grasp on each other and it makes the game that much more isolating.
An example in practice was a player who played a old woman whose children had grown up and left the house. When things got scary she started calling for her eldest son and at times addressed the players as though they were her children. The voice the player carried gave this interaction a tragic and disturbing atmosphere. For awhile the players had no idea what was going on and thought this player was being possessed and every become very paranoid. That was until everyone else started losing San and what emerged was everyone unraveling in their own unique ways which made everything extra unpredictable and creepy
I will say as beautifully as this has worked in my games it is partly because I have very dependable great players and I would never do this with a group who hasn’t gone through a consent checklist