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 eventually go mad from exposure to Lovecraftian Nameless Horrors.

There are five different kinds of psychological stress in Unknown Armies, each tracked independently. Shocking experiences can make a character either hardened to the stress it presents, or fragile about it, or both. A character might become hardened against encounters with the unnatural but fragile in the face of violence. If a character becomes hardened or fragile enough, other people start to notice that there is something off about them, and ultimately a character pushed too far becomes an insane NPC.

In the game as written, when something happens with a higher shock rating than the character’s relevant Hardened score, the player rolls percentile dice against the character’s Mind score to see if they can keep their composure. On a successful roll, they keep it togther and their Hardened rating for that shock goes up +1. On a failed roll, the character’s Fragile rating goes up +1 and the player chooses whether the character freezes, flees, freaks out (screaming et cetera), or goes into a fighting frenzy against the cause of the shock.

In my games, I tweaked this with a house rule where characters rolled against different attributes for the different types of stress:

• 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 dread from 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
  violating their personal norms is more upsetting to a person with a strong spirit

After I originally wrote this post, 3E engaged a similar idea and took it much further! In UA 3E, characters have ten base stats in opposed pairs linked to each stress. As one is changed by encounters with Violence, say, one’s Struggle stat used for fighting improves while one’s Connect stat decreases. This can feed a breakdown spiral: one uses Connect to protect against Isolation shock, so even hardening to a shock creates vulnerabilities.

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 re-themed 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.

Vigorously agreed; this connects to the challenge of responsibly thinking about violence in TTRPG design more broadly.

Making stronger shocks more threatening

This similar mechanic 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 rating, with different experiences having a different Rank in the level of shock they produce. 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 adds the character’s Fragile rating for the shock, then compares the roll to the shock Rank and the character’s Hardened rating:

• under Hardened
  the character keeps their cool and gets another point of Hardened
• between Hardened and the shock’s Rank (inclusive)
  the character adds +1 Fragile for that shock and the GM chooses their response:
  • fight
  • flee
  • freeze
  • freak out
• above the shock Rank
  the player chooses one:
  • fight
  • flee
  • freeze
  • freak out
  and may also either:
  • add +1 Hardened point
  • add +1 Fragile point

The more severe a stress, the more likely it will make the character snap and become more fragile, and the less likely the player 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 — more likely when very fragile! — creates a hard choice, fun for roleplaying.

Fate

This is a comparable house rule for Fate, my favorite TTRPG rules engine. I have tinkered with it at the table but do not yet consider it fully playtested.

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 of skill — though an aspect may double up to support more than one skill. For example, a character with the aspects Former Army Commando and Deadly In A Fight could have +1 Willpower and +2 Violence.

When a character encounters a psychological shock, it functions as an Attack. Rather than roll for the Attack, the GM just gives it a value reflecting its severity; the player employs their character’s relevant skill to Defend. A character ignores shocks with an Attack value below their skill (like with Hardened ratings in the other systems). Our Former Army Commando with +2 Violence has no problem witnessing a bar fight (violence shock +1) but must roll their +1 Willpower to run into a burning building (will shock +2). Characters may use stunts, invoke aspects, or get help from other characters when making these rolls, but these do not help ignore the need for a roll.

If the character successfully Defends, their player may elect to harden the character, spending a Fate point to raise the relevant skill, transforming a character aspect into a different one which supports this. After running into that burning building, our commando might turn Proud Father Of Two Daughters into Relentlessly Devoted To Stopping The Cult Of Flames. He now has +2 Willpower but his 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 their choice from a short menu of Conditions: Frozen or Fighting Frenzy or Freaking Out. (The GM may also offer context specific alternatives.) Fleeing is not a possible Condition because the Fate rules already have a mechanic for characters leaving a scene by conceding a conflict.

A player too impatient to go through the normal process for their character to recover from one of these Conditions may elect to have their character crack. This immediately clears the Condition and gives the character a Fate point, but they must alter a permanent character aspect to make it more troublesome; this may not improve skills as hardening does. For example, after seeing an eldrich horror a character might go from Elegant Debutante to Frightened Of Tentacles, or another 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 supports interesting player choices in the spirit of Fate and reflects how traumatizing experiences permanently change a person.