02 January 2014

TTRPG psychological shock systems

Unknown Armies 2E

The tabletop roleplaying game Unknown Armies has a great system for dealing with the psychological shocks of the characters’ adventures, a more complex iteration of the sanity system from the classic Call of Cthulhu game, in which characters can be expected to eventually go mad from exposure to Lovecraftian Nameless Horrors.

There are five kinds of psychological stress in Unknown Armies, representing different types of psychological stress. Shocking experiences can make a character either hardened to them or fragile about them (or both!), depending on the way the dice fall. Thus a character can become hardened against experiences of the unnatural, but fragile in the face of violence. (Get hardened or fragile enough, and the character goes insane.)

In the game as written the player rolls percentile dice against the character’s Mind score when something shocks them; rolling over the Mind attribute number makes the character snap temporarily. In my games, I have a house rule where I make characters roll against different attributes depending on the nature of the shock:

  • Violence vs Body
    a frail character is more likely to panic in the face of violence
  • Unnatural vs 100-Mind
    an intelligent character is more vulnerable to being troubled by seeing something supernatural
  • Helplessness vs Soul
    a person with a grounded spirit can better face this threat
  • Isolation vs Mind
    an intelligent character has more to think about while alone
  • Self vs 100-Soul
    a person with a strong spirit would be more shaken by having their sense of self violated

After I wrote this, 3E engaged a similar idea … and took it further! There are ten base stats, in opposed pairs linked to each stress. As one is changed by encounters with Violence, say, one’s Struggle stat increases … while one’s Connect stat decreases, which creates a breakdown spiral because one uses Connect to protect against Isolation shock.

Over on Twitter, Dragon Cobolt has an incisive comment about how this produces an ethical dimension which contrasts with other games.

So, my friend Jay was recently in a D&D game she had to quickly leave when the party went pretty quickly to torturing a captured NPC for information and it hit me how … the adventure and the mechanics both incentivize and encourage the players to unpeople stuff. And like, torture in D&D is kinda toothless? It’s just a rethemed skill check and if you’re not particularly engaged with the setting or the roleplaying, it can go by in a literal blink. “I rough him up for the password” “okay, that’s a DC12 intimidation check.”

Contrast with Unknown Armies. Unknown Armies actually has a … relatively robust coercion system for when you want to get an NPC to do something they’d rather not - and it’s infinitely more … visceral and bone cracking. Mechanically and narratively, you’re made deeply aware? It’s not just rolling percentiles, you need to know how you’re hurting someone. Hammering their helplessness gauge with threatening to ruin their lives, hammering their isolation by duct taping them up in a cargo container, that kind of thing. And those things then have effects on your character - using a blowtorch on someone’s thigh? That's a violence stress check. That’s going to change yourself. The game asks: Are you willing to become the kind of girl who will blowtorch someone’s thigh until they do what you want?

That's why I’ve never seen the kind of cavalier disregard for NPCs in any of the UA games I’ve run. People … shy away from the pain when it’s real. Which, like … that’s good? I think that’s good.

I agree, and in a way that connects to violence and TTRPG design more broadly.

Combining Hardened & Fragile

Another idea that comes out of a conversation with Zed Lopez about a game based on 2d6 rolls, rather than percentile rolls.

As in Unknown Armies, for each type of shock, characters have both a Hardened and a Fragile stat, and different experiences have a different Rank in the level of shock they represent. Seeing the ghost of someone one knows to be dead might be a Rank 6 unnatural stress, while a Tentacle Monster From Another Dimension which speaks in that person’s voice might be a 10. As in Unknown Armies, if a character’s Hardened score for a stress exceeds its rank, they need not roll. (“Bah! I’ve seen weirder!”)

When facing a shock, one rolls and compares the roll to Hardened, Fragile, and shock Rank:

  • under Hardened
    the character keeps their cool and gets another point of Hardened
  • between Hardened and the shock’s Rank (inclusive)
    the character snaps (fight, flee, freeze, or freakout) and adds another point of Fragile
  • above the shock Rank
    the player chooses one:
    • snap (fight, flee, freeze, or freakout)
    • add a Hardened point
    • add a Fragile point

The more severe a stress, the more likely it will make the character snap and become more fragile, and the less likely they will have control over their reaction. Hardened characters tend to get more hardened still; less hardened characters tend to become more fragile. A high roll creates a hard choice, fun for roleplaying.

Fate

This is a house system I have yet to actually playtest, designed primarily for Fate, my favorite TTRPG rules engine, but it is informed by earlier iterations I have used.

Three skills protect against psychological shock:

  • Violence protects against violence shocks, and is used for all fighting (and more). The difference in skills for weapons et cetera are all handled using Fate’s stunt system.
  • Gnosis protects against weirdness shocks, and can be used to intuit truths about Scary Things one encounters, use spooky magic, et cetera.
  • Willpower protects against other psychological shocks, and otherwise operates as written in standard Fate rules.

These skills must be justified by permanent character aspects, one for each level — though an aspect may double up to support more than one skill. So one might have a character with the aspects Former Army Commando and Deadly In A Fight supporting +1 Willpower and +2 Violence.

When a character encounters a shock, they employ the relevant skill to Defend against against an Attack which has a level suited to the severity of the shock. For simplicity, the GM just sets the level of the shock rather than rolling dice for it, and if the character’s relevant skill is higher than the severity of the shock they need not roll. So our Former Army Commando does not roll their +2 Violence to keep it together when they witness a bar fight (shock +1), but they must roll their +1 Willpower to run into a burning building (shock +2). As normally in Fate, characters can use stunts or invoke aspects to help with these rolls.

If a character successfully Defends against a shock, their player may elect to harden the character, spending a Fate point and transforming a character aspect into a different one which supports an additional level in the relevant skill. After running into that burning building, our example character might convert Proud Mother Of Two Sons into Relentlessly Committed To Stopping The Cult Of Flames. She now has +2 Willpower but her relationship with the kids will suffer.

If the character fails in Defending against a shock, as normally in Fate the shifts use up the character’s Stress track … and if they cannot soak the Stress, they get a Condition. For these psychological shocks, we borrow from UA and give players a choice of Condition: Frozen, Fighting Frenzy, or Freaking Out, with other context-specific alternatives offered at the GM’s discretion. (We do not need UA’s Fleeing as a possible Condition because the Fate rules already have the graceful mechanism for players conceding a conflict and controlling the narration of how.)

A player too impatient to go through the process for their character to recover from a Condition from a psychological shock may elect to have the character crack. This immediately clears the Condition, they get a Fate point, and must transform a permanent character aspect to make it more troubleshome. Cracking cannot improve skills as hardening does. After seeing an eldrich horror, a character with +1 Gnosis supported by the aspect Aware Of The True Geometry Of The Cosmos might become instead Obsessed With The True Geometry Of The Cosmos.

This should support interesting player choices in the spirit of Fate. Whether playing realistic, Lovecraftian, or pulpy psychological shocks, it reflects how certain experiences change a person.

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