Recently I was listening to Sorry Honey, I Have to Take This (an actual play podcast focused on Delta Green) and picked up a nifty idea I don't remember coming across before.
For the impatient: substituting SAN loss for physical injury.
I think the episode in question was Episode 69 - Cantos Mirabilia. Fair warning; the mission that's part of is gory and mutilation-heavy, it's themed around the martyrdoms of Catholic saints, if that gives you a rough idea. Anyway, no spoilers for the mystery, mild spoilers for incidental events along the way.
Anyway, it's got the classic realistic(ish) game issue of danger. Injuries are a problem, no bouncing back with healing magic, quite mundane things can be fatal. Such as falling off the side of a cliff.
As an ongoing campaign, it's also got existing characters with a limited set of skills, who are now faced with challenges they aren't particularly suited to - in this case, while a couple of the PCs are capable outdoorsmen, nobody's much of a climber. They're also exhausted.
While the group isn't averse to bringing in replacement characters, that takes time and appropriate circumstances. The Delta Green setting makes this trickier than some others; you can't easily explain away a member of law enforcement with some experience of the supernatural just so happening to be on this mountain near a remote village.
In short, if one of the PCs gets taken out, there's not many options. Potentially they could take over the only NPC, although I don't know how viable that would have been in the circumstances.
So inevitably, someone fails climbing rolls badly, which is easy in a percentile system with a basic 40% and a -20% for exhaustion. In a lot of games this would result in plunging down the cliff and taking a chunk of damage, potentially taking this PC out just before the climax of the adventure through rather mundane means. It can also bog things down: now you need to stop during what is already established as an urgent excursion, in order to provide first aid, maybe even climb back down to rescue the PC.
In some media, this would be quite appropriate. One of your party slips and falls to their injury/death as you approach the final challenge? Just part of the slow erosion of your support and resources as you battle through challenges. But that's in passive media where there are one or two main protagonists. In a game, that means a player largely sitting out potentially hours of play. Some groups are fine with this, though in my experience it's much more satisfying if you were at least killed off on purpose. Failing a very difficult roll for an environmental hazard that you had no choice about (either climb, or stay at the bottom and don't participate in this adventure any more) is not very satisfying.
Rather than injury, the GM decides to treat this as a near-miss that causes minor injury (below the resolution of HP) but is frightening and stressful. Instead of taking from the pool of 12 or so HP - and I have the feeling she'd already lost some - the player's reserve of 50-odd SAN takes the hit. This worked well; the PC could carry on with the adventure, there was no bogging down, but it has a measurable cost. In fact, lost SAN is often a more significant cost for campaign play, since it's mechanically harder to recover than physical injury.
Stress Rates
The Call of Cthulhu-adjacent games that use some version of Sanity/Stress to track mental fortitude as a key part of play sometimes struggle with the balance between long-term campaigns and one-shots. In a long campaign, constant stress and weirdness slowly erodes your ability to cope, leaving you vulnerable.
In one-shots, intensely horrible things can lead to temporary panic, but it's genuinely hard to slowly chip away 60-odd points of SAN over the course of 4-6 hours. However, one-shots are very popular for horror and mystery games, including Cthulhu. Many people prefer that approach: for example, Roger's fond of pointing out that if characters escape from the horrible monster and go looking into the next one, it's no longer a horror game, it's monster-hunting.
This has a few common outcomes. One is the Mythos-fest: in the course of dealing with a mysterious uncle's bequest, our entrepid heroes meet a whole swathe of creatures that get increasingly hard to justify. Another is the classic "Azathoth in the basement", where a scenario's climax delivers a 1d10/1d100 SAN hit that might break some of the PCs. A third I will call "everything is scary", in which you roll SAN every time a floorboard creaks or a cat stalks across your path. Or there's the simple expedient of starting everyone with much lower SAN scores than a freshly-generated PC would have, to ensure there's a realistic chance of them succumbing.
Using stress as a substitute for physical damage has advantages here. As mentioned, characters have an awful lot more SAN than hit points, so they can absorb significant amounts of punishment that way. This allows for life-threatening situations without actually taking any characters out of action.
It also allows a bit more granularity to failures. An experienced GM won't treat every failed Climbing roll as plummeting to your death, introducing other options: you drop until your rope goes taut and lose a few HP, or you need to be helped and waste precious time, or you take a specific minor injury that will impede you later. Substituting stress is another tool in the kit for handling these situations. It's also great for a sense of threat: no, this was a very dangerous incident, you could have fallen to your death, and you nearly did. Describe the last-minute clutch at grass or tiles that bought time, the helping hand that dragged them up before their strength failed anyway, the sight of pebbles or wallets or spare ammunition tumbling down into the void.
And it's a handy way to erode characters' mental stability without a barrage of eldritch encounters that can end up feeling farcical. This is perfect for those one-shots. It also allows a slow transition from "you are losing SAN because of life-threatening mundane things" to "you are losing SAN because there is a monster chasing you" that can keep the tension dripping.
All this of course assumes that you can do it fairly competently, which... remains to be seen. But I'm definitely interested in trying this in future Cthulhu-adjacent games.
Has anyone else tried this, or seen it done? What did you reckon?
I'm very campaign-orientated as a GM, so I wouldn't do this unless recovering SAN was a bit easier than it is in the usual 20s/30s setting of CoC. That doesn't mean it should be /easy/, just practical. In the CoC-adjacent GURPS I'm running at present, there's only been one fright check so far. The NPC made it, but not by much, and asked if "we could get out of these tunnels into daylight, please?" Having done that, she described what she'd seen via Psychometry, then took a couple of days off to watch cartoons and comedies. She's feeling a lot better now.
ReplyDeleteYes, for a campaign I'd be a lot less keen. I might still use it as an option for PCs to narrowly avoid otherwise-fatal accidents, especially if it were the sort of campaign where replacing PCs is a challenge. In GURPS terms, you could build something like Extra Life (Triggers Fright Roll).
Delete