RPG Sanity Systems

By me

Let's clean out the drafts folder with a survey of RPG SAN systems, inspired by a discussion in the SA traditional games chat. I think essays are generally boring and reveal more about the author than they do about the topic of discussion. With that in mind I'll focus on games I've actually played and enjoyed.

BLADES IN THE DARK

I have not played a ton of Blades, this is based on the few sessions we got through. 

 

Blades models SAN damage as stress essentially the same as physical damage, something you accumulate during heists and pay off during downtime. The characters in Blades can't simply take the money from a heist and live happily. Criminal activity causes stress that has to be dealt with if the player characters want to stay functional. Dealing with the stress causes further problems because blowing off steam through vices is unhealthy and can lead to social consequences. A huge part of the game's theming is buying off present day problems by causing problems for yourself down the road. When a character dies or is rendered unplayable, it's probably because their decisions and lifestyle finally caught up with them.

DELTA GREEN

Delta Green is similar to Call of Cthulhu. You have mental HP called Sanity that decays when you do bad things, bad things happen to you, or you encounter the supernatural. 

 

Like CoC, Delta Green overweights "understanding of reality" as a source of SAN damage. Normal people do not care overmuch about the things which underpin their understanding of the universe. In reality most people would shrug off a magical healing spell without agonizing about where the necessary calories come from. Aliens are scary because they abduct and mutilate you, not because the existence of aliens is itself a psychological threat to the average person's belief in an ordered universe. The fundamental assumption of Delta Green is that the supernatural is corrosive by nature. Whether or not it's actually difficult for the human mind to comprehend a magical spell or the existence of aliens is irrelevant. You fight against the supernatural or you die, understanding it makes you part of the problem.

Delta Green's psychological hardening system (where characters can become inured to certain forms of SAN damage in exchange for permanent mental stat loss) gets a lot of attention, but the bond and projection system is where the real action happens. Delta Green characters suffer a psychotic break if they ever lose 5 or more SAN points in a single die roll. This temporarily takes away control of the character as they react automatically, and can be instantly lethal in dangerous situations. Delta Green characters can reduce SAN damage through projection, at the cost of losing an equal number of bond points instead. Projecting onto bonds can reduce SAN loss below the crucial 5 point threshold, giving a chance of survival. This is the real thematic core of the game. It's rare for Delta Green player characters to ever hit 0 SAN, but it's common to eat up bonds like crazy. You'll destroy every relationship to keep yourself in the fight long before your body or your mind gives up.

Hutter

The bond damage system resurfaces in Home Scenes, vignettes that occur at the end of a session. Characters get a choice of maintaining personal relationships with bonds, various activities that restore SAN, training to improve their skills and stats, or offscreen exploration of story hooks discovered during play. Each option has an opportunity cost. Grinding stats or studying the Unnatural shaves points off your bonds, as you neglect your responsibilities to make yourself better at solving supernatural mysteries 

The weak point of the Delta Green SAN system is accumulation of mental disorders on passage of breaking points. Lose a certain amount of SAN (typically 10 to 12) and you get a permanent condition, like PTSD or a substance use disorder. These used to be really badly implemented mechanically, triggering a series of linked SAN tests and essentially doing nothing but inflicting a numeric penalty when they activated on an "acute episode". Errata has improved them but frankly they still don't do much. There are a couple like Totemic Compulsion and Dissociative Identity Disorder that I would restrict solely to supernatural causes, since they fit best with magic spells or cursed items. There's already an Unnatural-only disorder called Hypergeometry Addiction that forces you to fiddle with dangerous artifacts and superscience, and it's the most fun disorder in the game.

One other fun system is the Delta Green Bond rules. When something bad happens on an adventure, like a guy dying or you almost dying, you make a SAN test at the end of the adventure. If you fail, you form Bonds with the player characters who survived the operation. Forming these Bonds automatically drains points from the normal Bonds already on your character sheet. Delta Green adventures make it difficult to relate to normal people, the other Agents are the only ones who understand.

 

 

RED MARKETS 

I played Red Markets a long time ago and had to refamiliarize myself with the rules. The SAN system is similar to Delta Green and Unknown Armies. You've got three stress meters: Detachment, Trauma and Stress. Your SAN is called Humanity and can be degraded by hits to these meters. Lose too many notches in a meter and you get Regrets, which start as temporary insanities (fight flee freeze similar to Delta Green temps) and become permanent ones. Like Delta Green, your bonds are a source of SAN defense/regen but also exert demands on you. Different classes interact with the system in different ways, like spending points of Humanity to boost their stats or starting the game with meters already damaged beyond repair.

The biggest difference is the way the Red Markets Humanity system is plugged into the game's economy. Red Markets is a game about economics, where everyone and everything costs money to maintain and accumulating enough money to escape the zombie apocalypse is your ultimate goal. You can regen your Humanity by spending money, though once you get in a Regret in a meter that limits how many notches you can heal. More importantly, money spent healing SAN is money that doesn't go into your retirement fund, prolonging your suffering.

 

UNKNOWN ARMIES 3E

The Unknown Armies psychological hardening system is frequently cited as best-in-class. Previous editions of the game were the inspiration for the simplified version found in Delta Green, and UA3 pushes the concept further.

 

Unknown Armies 3e has five stress trackers representing the five sources of SAN damage that characters can experience: Helplessness, Isolation, Self, Unnatural, Violence. Your character can become "hardened" to each source of SAN damage, filling up the associated meter each time you pass a saving throw versus the associated stimulus. If you encounter a source of stress which is lower ranked than the number of notches you have in the associated meter, you can just ignore it. You're sufficiently hardened that it doesn't bother you.

 

Each stress meter has two linked stats, an "upbeat" and a "downbeat" ability. As a stress meter fills with hardened notches, the character gets better at the downbeat ability and worse at the upbeat. Get hardened to violence and you get better at fighting and worse at talking. Some of the connections are a little tenuous (like Fitness vs Pursuit), but they emphasize the central theme of transformation. Occult adventures don't automatically drive you mad, but they change you and make it harder for you to relate to normal people.

Failing a save vs psychological stress causes an instant psychotic break, equivalent to a temporary insanity from losing 5 or more SAN in Delta Green. You fight, flee or freeze and you get a failed notch on a separate stress track from the one that measures your hardened notches. Failed notches don't affect your skills, they don't do anything until you get five of them in one meter. Then you're really in trouble.

 

When you hit five failed notches in a meter, you get a disorder and you automatically fail any stress checks targeting that meter - unless your existing hardened notches are sufficient that you can ignore them. Unknown Armies' implementation of disorders is not that much better than Delta Green's, you get a fugue disorder or OCD or whatever and you're supposed to roleplay whenever it comes up. The automatic SAN failure whenever the character encounters a source of stress they are not sufficiently hardened to in that meter is much more interesting. It's mechanically punishing and hooks into an existing game system. It also reflects how real people with PTSD and panic disorders manage their conditions. They try to structure their lives to avoid encountering things that could trigger a stress response that would get them fired from their job, disowned by their family, shot by the police... It affects what they can do, where they can go, and what employment they can hold.

 

While the disorder system does a poor job encouraging players to embody their characters' ravenous madness, the passion rules pick up the slack. Like in previous editions, Unknown Armies 3e characters have a Rage, a Noble and a Fear passion. These passions allow you to manipulate die results if you act in such a way that they might help you succeed on whatever you're attempting to do. The more you give in to your strange urges, the more chances you have to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

 

Whether or not someone keeps their cool when they encounter the supernatural is an important dividing line in Unknown Armies, between "checkers" who dig deeper and squares who freak out at the first sign of trouble. In UA3 (and in optional rules found in the Hush Hush sourcebook for prior editions) using magick in front of a crowd is a great way to trigger a riot. This is an extrapolation of the way people in the UA 'verse react when they fail a stress roll, freaking out in a potentially destructive fashion. Unknown Armies assumes that if even a third or quarter of people in a crowd do this, it'll cause a chain reaction. Whatever outburst they do causes other people to freak out, and you've got a self-sustaining riot on your hands. It may not be exactly how things would play out in real life, but it's a logical application of how the game's sanity system works for individual characters. It also shows us why, in the world of Unknown Armies, the existence of magick is typically kept hidden from the public. 

 

This also explains the attitude of the various metaplot factions toward broad acceptance of magick. The aristocratic conservatism of the Sleepers (who believe magick must be strictly controlled to stop antimagick pogroms), the magickal revolution of the old Mak Attax conspiracy (who believe humanity can be persuaded to accept the emancipatory power of magick if exposed to benign supernatural effects in small doses to build up their hardened notches), and the messianic enlightened despotism of The New Inquisition and the Sect of the Naked Goddess (who believe that humanity can only be made to accept magick if it's properly packaged and branded by a charismatic leader).