MADNESS@##%W!

[PriamNevhausten]

Pervy and I concluded that, since I had it already typed up for a friend of mine, I should post up the section of rules from Unknown Armies relating to descent into and/or away from madness. There's a bit more than what I have here, such as the methods of remedying insanity or callousness and whathaveyou, but this is the meat and potatoes of the thing.

Without further ado:

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STRESS CHECKS
There are five categories of mental stress: Violence, the Unnatural, Helplessness, Isolation, and Self. It's quite possible to be very casual about, say, Violence, while being a basket case when it comes to the Unnatural.
Each stress has two types of notches you can mark off. HARDENED notches represent stress checks you've beaten, and they are numbered 1-10. FAILED notches represent stress checks you've blown, and they are numbered 1-5.
Different stresses have different power levels, ranging from 1-10. These are called RANKS. The higher the rank, the more extreme the stress and the more you're likely to suffer if you fail the check.
If you already have a hardened notch at the same rank as the stress, and in the same meter, you don't have to roll. You automatically beat the check because you've faced this down before and prevailed. Failed notches don't affect stress checks.
Example: You face a rank-4 Violence check. You have five hardened notches on your Violence meter. You don't have to roll.
If you don't have a hardened notch at the rank of the stress check, make a Mind roll. If you succeed, mark off the lowest unmarked "hardened" notch on the appropriate madness meter. If you fail, you mark off the lowest unmarked "failed" notch instead and choose one of three reactions: panic, paralysis, or frenzy; these are discussed more under "Getting Crazy" on p.69. A failure may have other long-term effects as well.
Example: You face a rank-4 Violence check. ayou have four hardened notches in Helplessness, but that doesn't do you any good. You only have two hardened notches in Violence. You have to roll against your Mind stat of 58. You roll a 47, and so you mark the third hardened notch under Violence. If you had rolled a 64, you would mark the next failed Violence notch and react accordingly.
It's common to have both hardened and failed notches in the same meter. Someone who's deep in both directions in Isolation probably has a highly ambivalent attitude towards being alone, which is perfectly in character for people who have been repeatedly exposed to that mental stress. Someone with the same situation for Violence feels little or nothing when exposed to most forms of bloodshed, but when something is so shocking that it gets through the hardened barrier, the result is devastating.

THE VIOLENCE STRESS
You have an instinctive revulsion towards actual violence. It's stressful to hurt others, to watch others get hurt, and to *get* hurt. This stress also covers the fear of death that everyone suffers from in varying degrees.

Sample Violence Checks
1 Be attacked with a weapon--shot at or slashed.
2 Witness an act of torture.
3 Get shot at random. Be tortured briefly.
4 Kill someone in a fight.
5 Be present at a massive battle, with hundreds of deaths on both sides.
6 Perform an act of torture.
7 Deliberately kill a helpless target.
8 Get tortured for an hour or longer.
9 Witness a brutal mass execution.
10 Watch as someone you love is tortured to death.

Failed Violence Notches
1 At this level, you're superficially fine. Perhaps you're a little edgy whenever a knife in the room happens to be pointing your direction.
2 You are very aware of violence, both as it exists and as it is depicted. It strikes you as somewhat odd that so many people don't realize that movie violence is very different from real violence.
3 You get alert or uneasy every time you see blood, even badly faked blood in a horror flick or when someone cuts a rare steak. Sometimes you have nightmares about violence you've witnessed.
4 You instinctively take a defensive posture whenever there's a loud noise or raised voice nearby. Your nightmares are frequent, and you have a hard time looking at anyone without imagining (if briefly) what you would do at that moment if they attacked you.

Hardened Violence Notches
1-3 Superficially, you're much like everyone else.
4-5 Your attitude towards violence shows on your face when the subject comes up in conversation, unless you work to keep it hidden. It might be intensity, or nervousness, or just a grim silence, depending on how you cope.
6-7 Violence is a common feature of your mental landscape. Unlike less-hardened people, you show little reaction at all when it is discussed or depicted in fiction.
8-9 Your callousness shows in your every word and expression unless you make a continuous effort to suppress it. Again, the exact tone is up to you: it could be bitter and harsh, feverish and vehement, or icy cold.
10 It's not hard for people to realize that the deepest horrors of torture and brutality have become commonplace to you, unless you work very, very hard to keep it hidden--which means you come off as tense and guarded all the time. The death of others, or yourself, has no intrinsic significance. You might prefer to stay alive, but it's only a matter of personal taste. Life, in the abstract, doesn't mean anything.


THE UNNATURAL STRESS
It hurts your brain to think of things that don't belong in your concept of the world. Contemplating infinity for too long, seeing *proof* that sometimes 2+2=5, and realizing that magick actually works are all unnatural stresses. It's more subtle and unnerving than Violence. Everyone recognizes that violence exists, even those who are insulated from it. Unnatural stresses don't just attack your idea of safety. They attack your idea of how the universe works.

Sample Unnatural Checks
1 Experience a preternaturally strong de ja vu.
2 See a creature or machine that cannot logically exist.
3 Realize that a vision you had of the future has come true.
4 See convincing proof that 2+2 does not equal 4.
5 Be successfully attacked with magick.
6 See someone you know killed by magick, without any visible or 'rational' cause.
7 Have a conversation with a loved one whom you know is dead.
8 See an animal with human features.
9 See the dead rise.
10 Realize that the reason you and your husband of ten years have never had children is that he's not really a human being. (first edition text: "...is that he is a mechanical automaton.")

Failed Unnatural Notches
1 At this level it's pretty hard to tell. Perhaps you become a little superstitious--reading your horoscope daily, watching for "lucky" numbers, avoiding cracks in the sidewalk, etc.
2 You have a few nightmares, and you are suspicious of and/or fascinated by occult and religious books, places, paraphernalia, and people.
3 You frequently feel like you're being watched, even when there's no one around. Sometimes it seems like you hear voices in "white noise"--sounds like the wind in the trees, the sloshing of a washing machine, or the noises of traffic.
4 The nightmares are frequent, and often you don't know you're dreaming until you jerk awake. Sometimes you feel like there's someone--or some*thing*--watching you and you can almost see it out of the corner of your eye. When you whip your head around, there's nothing there.

Hardened Unnatural Notches
1-3 There's little to distinguish you from the average person, except perhaps a tendency to snort derisively when someone mentions their "intuitions."
4-5 You tend to listen very closely and intently when someone discusses the paranormal or supernatural, trying to figure out if they know something or if they're just talking trash.
6-7 You now know and accept that there are vast, incomprehensible forces governing the universe. It strikes you as odd when people act as if they're in control of their lives; you know better.
8-9 Things that average people consider "meaningless coincidences" strike you as deeply, intensely funny because you see the connections that they do not. You may develop a reputation for laughing inappropriately.
10 You are no longer surprised by violations of ordinary logic. Everything is "normal" to you--talking foliage, spontaneous combustion, and stigmata are as ordinary and reasonable as cars, dogs, and rain.


THE HELPLESSNESS STRESS
A sense of control is crucial for feelings of safety, even when it's completely unmerited. When you have been challenged by helplessness, you can lose your ability to gauge how "in control" of a situation you are: you may feel powerless when the situation is not completely lost, or you may ignore real impediments from a misplaced sense of capability.

Sample Helplessness Checks
1 Unintentionally humiliate yourself in public.
2 Get fired from a job you love.
3 Fail at something when it's *imperative* that you succeed.
4 Get dumped into a pit of maggots.
5 Spend a month in jail.
6 Watch a videotape of your spouse committing adultery.
7 Be placed in a situation where you have to either saw off one of your limbs or die.
8 Watch someone you love die.
9 Watch someone you love die because you tried to save them and failed.
10 Be possessed, yet conscious, as your body commits unspeakable acts against your will.

Failed Helplessness Notches
1 At this level you're fairly normal. Perhaps you're a little finicky or meticulous, trying to eliminate the possibility of something going wrong.
2 You have a tendency to get unreasonably nervous and pessimistic when small things go wrong. You may be irritated if a bus is just a few minutes late, or if your computer freezes up.
3 You have an intense dislike for surprises, even good ones. They remind you of the essentially unpredictable nature of reality, and that scares and annoys you.
4 You find it very difficult to trust anything. Your friends, your own abilities, even your memories could be false, waiting to betray you. You have a tendency towards obsessive-compulsive behaviors such as checking the door to your house two or three (or more) times every time you leave to make absolutely certain it's locked. You attempt to be prepared for every eventuality.

Hardened Helplessness Notches
1-3 You don't have any major behavior or attitude shifts yet, just minor things. You tend to be pessimistic and fatalistic, perhaps.
4-6 Your fatalism has increased. When things go wrong in a big, bad way, or when trouble comes from a completely unexpected or unlikely source, you handle it with a remarkable lack of affect. (This is not necessarily incongruent with the behaviors of 2+ failed notches: it's perfectly possible to be freakishly calm about big things and freakishly upset about little things.)
7-9 You have a boundless faith in the ability of chaos to screw you over. You can easily believe that even the most suspicious of mishaps is a simple random chance. ("So my brake cable snapped and my gas pedal got stuck down to the floor. What makes you think someone tinkered with my car? Shit happens.")
10 The distinction between "intentional" and "accidental" is pretty much lost on you. Maybe you believe that everything is completely predestined, or maybe you believe that everything in the world happens due to chance. The one thing you find hard to swallow is the idea that we are the captains of our fates.

THE ISOLATION STRESS
Isolation is a subtle danger; it corrodes your sanity by denying you input. You rely on other human beings for feedback. Without the opinions of others, you do not know how to judge yourself. When you become resistant to isolation, you overlook social morés and unwritten rules because you've forgotten how to conform to the expectations of others. If you've suffered from isolation, you become very needy. These are not mutually exclusive: it's possible to be very clingy and still be unable to pick up hints about when your behavior is unacceptable.

Sample Isolation Checks
1 Spend a day without seeing anyone you know.
2 Spend five hours in a sensory-deprivation tank.
3 Spend three days without talking to another human being.
4 Be institutionalized by someone you love and trust.
5 Spend a week in solitary confinement.
6 See someone you thought you knew intimately behaving in a fashion completely contrary to her normal behavior.
7 Spend a month in a country where no one speaks your language and where you can't make yourself understood no matter how hard you try.
8 Be deeply, painfully, and violently betrayed by someone you love.
9 Be treated like a stranger by your closest friends.
10 Spend a month in a sensory-deprivation tank.

Failed Isolation Notches
1 You can interact with society and get through your everyday life with no real problems. You're maybe a little shy with people at first, but you feel a kind of gratitude whenever a new acquaintance doesn't reject you.
2 You're a bit nervous around new people, eager to make a good impression. This could be expressed as shyness or through "chatterbox" behaviors.
3 If you sleep alone, you sometimes suffer from insomnia. Perhaps you don't like silence when you're by yourself, and always keep a television on or a radio playing. Sometimes, when you're not paying attention, you talk to yourself or think out loud.
4 Sometimes when you're isolated (either all by yourself or surrounded by strangers) you have panic attacks--a sense of intangible, impending doom. Your skin flushes, your breath becomes rapid and labored, you sweat. Simply put, you show the signs of being in mortal danger, when there is no danger around.

Hardened Isolation Notches
1-3 There are no really obvious signs of your experiences. Perhaps you're a little standoffish or curt.
4-5 You can be unthinkingly rude, breaking in during the middle of conversation before someone's done speaking, scratching yourself in an indelicate fashion, or telling the truth when it isn't diplomatic to do so. (For example, you might blurt out "DAMN that's an ugly haircut!" instead of saying "Wow, that's a new look for you, isn't it?")
6-7 You lack patience with people who don't immediately understand what you're trying to tell them. Your natural inclination is to repeat the same explanations (which are obvious to you) over and over, or just give up. (This is your first impulse; it can, of course, be overcome if you pay extra attention. In game terms, this means that your Charm or Explain skills aren't penalized any time you make a roll, but you might have a little bit of trouble in casual situations.)
8-9 Unless you're concentrating, you lack dialogue skills. You don't like it when people interrupt, but you frequently interrupt others. You also don't see the point of a lot of social conventions such as clothing, grooming, etc. You might still shave every day, but it all seems a little silly.
10 At some level, you not only don't care what people think about you: you can't understand how anyone could care. You are very aware that people are inherently alone, that we can never really understand anyone or communicate anything but the most rudimentary ideas and feelings. You know everyone is an island, in the final analysis. Especially you.


THE SELF STRESS
This is the trickiest one. It's your guilt and self-loathing, but it's more than that. A major stress is when you find out you're not the person you thought you were, by breaking a promise you honestly meant to keep, or by standing idly by when your values (or what you *thought* were your values) are desecrated. It's your sense of alienation from self that provides, perhaps, the deepest terror. Where other meters how traumatized you are by things that happen to you, Self measures how traumatized you are by your own reactions to those things. To put it another way, the only thing you can ever really be 100% sure of is "I think, therefore I am." The Self meter measures how uncertain you are about the "I" in that statement.

Sample Self Checks
1 Break a minor promise.
2 Be confronted with proof that your self-imate is incorrect. ("I'm very responsible; I'm sure I've called you back every time I said I would." "Actually, you've blown me off so many times I started keeping track in my journal. Lessee, November 19, December 3, again on December 19...January 9...")
3 Secretly gratify an urge that is unacceptable to your upbringing and background. (Spit on a cross if Christian, date a person of another race if raised in a racist home, have a homosexual affair if you come from a homophobic background, etc.)
4 Lie to conceal some aspect of your personality from a close friend or loved one who trusts you implicitly.
5 Decide not to act on an impulse from your Noble stimulus (Priam's note: The Noble stimulus is what compulsively brings out the best in a character--saving wildlife, preserving ancient artifacts, passing on knowledge; all these are good Noble stimuli) because it's "too dangerous."
6 Deliberately deceive someone you love in a way that is certain to cause them terrible pain if they find out.
7 Discover that you have inadvertently committed an act of cannibalism.
8 Deliberately act completely contrary to your Noble impulse.
9 Kill someone you love.
10 Deliberately destroy everything you've risked your life to support.

Failed Self Notches
1 You don't have any real kinks yet, but every now and again you feel a sense of dissociation, an eerie moment when you feel alienated from your own character and motivations. "Sure, I know I'm Greg Stolze," you might think, "but who's Greg Stolze?"
2 The "who am I?" moments come more frequently. You tend to become introspective whenever someone mentions "truth" or "lies" or "promises."
3 Half the time your words and actions feel oddly forced, fake, or reheased to you--as if, rather than yourself, you were an actor playing the role of you.
4 You frequently feel like you're watching your every action from the outside. You have little or no sense of will or volition; it's as if you're a passive observer, along for the ride while your body goes through the motions.

Hardened Self Notches
1-3 There are few external signs of your interior struggle; people may sometimes find you to be a little brittle or "phony"-seeming.
4-5 Even when you're telling the truth, people often think you're lying, unless you make a particular effort to act "natural."
6-7 You've lost a sense of connection to those who were previously close to you. You ca predict the actions of your friends, relatives, or lovers, but you no longer know exactly what you feel about them.
8-9 Half the time, you only know you're telling the truth if you take a minute to think about it. Truth and lies aren't nearly as important as they used to be--back before you quit lying to yourself...
10 Life bas been pared down to the essentials for you: you no longer have opinions about music, food, or fashion. You've lost the ability to enjoy or dislike things, because there's so little "you" there to interact.

(There's more, about getting Callous (sociopathic due to Hardenedness) and Crazy (insanity due to mental fracturing), and about how to treat and/or prevent it, but I'm tired of typing this business for now. Buy the book.)

(All of this is copyright Atlas Games, blah blah blah I didn't write this.) <p><span style="font-size:xx-small;">"It's in the air, in the headlines in the newspapers, in the blurry images on television. It is a secret you have yet to grasp, although the first syllable has been spoken in a dream you cannot quite recall." --Unknown Armies</span></p>

[The Dark Gun]

I'd have to say the real downside to this system, if you wanted to get into it, is that for some of them, once you reach a certain point, you would almost prefer to fail your roll and be messed up or panicky in the situation, even in badly so, instead of succeed and increase your "hardness" towards it because of the permanent screw-over it can mean for your character. Any system where a given roll, success or fail, can cause permanent, long term bad stuff for the character isn't a good one, in my opinion. <p><div style="text-align:center">
Excalibolg! Bat that can do anything! </div></p>

[Archmage144]

Yeah, because it'd be horrible when characters actually develop as a result of being exposed to extremely abnormal or unusual circumstances. Nothing that happens on your typical RP adventure should have any long-term psychological or emotional impact on an RP character, after all, especially if it might mean that the stresses of being involved in something greater than themselves would result in their having anything less than stoic heroism about their fates!

On that note, interesting read. It'd be a great system to apply to a Lovecraftian setting or any sort of paranormal-suspense genre, and it might even work in some heroic fantasy milleux. <p>

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[The Dark Gun]

Not quite what I meant, AM. I meant more to the point where the GM can, basically, force any characters to automatically go insane by, say, exposing them to enough "Stress" type or "Violence" type so where, whether they succeed or fail a certain number of the rolls, either their "hardness" tops out so they basically don't exist as a character, or become borderline psychotic, or whatever, or they just go flat out crazy. It's not that I object to the concept that there can be negative results even from surviving something with a successful check, I just think that there shouldn't be such a definitive scale where, after a certain number of successful roles, the character is basically totally destoryed on a mental level. I mean, badness. You could argue that "A good GM would never force a character into insanity by making them make lots of checks in any of these singular areas" but if it's not meant to happen, why make rules to allow it to happen? <p><div style="text-align:center">
Excalibolg! Bat that can do anything! </div></p>

[Uncle Pervy]

I think Priam didn't mean "HAY GUYZ LETS DO THIS IN GEARA!!!" so much as he meant if for a way for RPers to reflect on how things may change their characters, slowly and in the long run.

Obviously, this would have to be adapted a LOT to fit Gaera at all. Most Igalans are going to have a very different ideas on what is unnatural. Especially Domans.

Thus, don't worry about it, Thram. <p>---------------------------

Your are not supposed to be reading this!</p>

[Jak Snide]

What Pervy said.

As it stands, I'm looking up at those tables right now and trying to figure what my characters would have been exposed to and how they would have been affected by it. Violence especially. A good majority of characters have killed someone, and some of those people have done it a good few times.

[Uncle Pervy]

Of note, Priam did mention that he had yet to get to things like counselling, which can undo the mental damage to some degree, if not completely with enough time. <p>---------------------------

Your are not supposed to be reading this!</p>

[pd Rydia]

What Jak said.

Thanks, Priam. <p>

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<div style="text-align:center">"Pants are bad!!! We should wear pants only on our head you conformist bastard!!! Pants are the devils work!! Run freee!! And pantless!!!" -- Vulture</div>
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[Capntastic]

I see this as a sort of "Hey look, examples of things your characters may deal with!" type info funtime, and thusly I like it. WHATS'AMATTA, YOU?

[The Dark Gun]

I wasn't approaching it as a "Oh it's going to be Gaera! I fear!" but more of as an entire overall concept, though I must have missed the counsuling can help bit, that I dislike a system that, in the long run, "punishes" (I admit I use the word roughly) a character for both success and failure. I see nothing wrong with some of the lower hardness point stuff as sort of modifier to how your character acts, but with some of them the character him or herself almost stops existing by 6 or 7 or so.

It's an interesting idea, and I think it could work pretty well in an appropriate setting or system, particularly since, after a certain point, it would be unlikely the character's hardness points should go up just on the grounds that it takes some exceedingly extreme measures and so on to get stresses beyond their hardness immunity, but it very much takes the characters mental developement out of the player's hands in some ways. This had its ups and downs, unless they meant the character to from the beginning, most people won't have their characters go insane because of stuff that happens while they're adventuring around without very good reason. This sort of provides a modifier for the fact that the player is seeing everything from a rather removed perspective, and showing, perhaps, with the character would be more likely to be like or go through. On the other hand... Well after a certain point it's not the character the player started out or wanted to play, at which point they may no longer wish to play the character and so on.

It's a good idea, but under any circumstance where it would be implimented, it should be done so with care. Of course, for stuff like Call of Cuthulu and things where characters are basically EXPECTED to go crazy... Hey, works great. <p><div style="text-align:center">
Excalibolg! Bat that can do anything! </div></p>

[PriamNevhausten]

Personally, I have problems with the Isolation-gauge Hardness levels, and am in the slow process of attempting to rewrite them. More on that later.

Also, this is meant to be a roleplaying aid, not a roleplaying must. Lord knows that in the game in which I will be using this, characters will not be forced to be crazy or whatever just because some notches on the paper said so. It is just like Alignment in D&D systems: It is a guideline to keep in mind, but also to throw away when appropriate. <p><span style="font-size:xx-small;">"It's in the air, in the headlines in the newspapers, in the blurry images on television. It is a secret you have yet to grasp, although the first syllable has been spoken in a dream you cannot quite recall." --Unknown Armies</span></p>Edited by: [url=http://p068.ezboard.com/brpgww60462.showUserPublicProfile?gid=priamnevhausten>PriamNevhausten</A]&nbsp; at: 4/11/05 21:28

[pd Rydia]

previous post by Priam:

<ul>Two points.

Point the first (http://www.keirsey.com/).

Point the second: Unknown Armies has a system of Stimuli for each character, which is quite useful for character building purposes in general.

The three stimuli:
• Rage. This is what makes your character abandon all logical thought in favor of sheer, carnal, utter animosity.
• Fear. This stimulus will cause your character to try to find a way to escape, except in extreme cases, where the character will curl up into a ball and quiver.
• Noble. This is often the hardest one to pin down. When a character's Noble stimulus is triggered, the character will behave in a completely altruistic sense, going the extra distance for others' benefit with relation to the stimulus itself. Librarians might have a soft spot for illiterate folk who want to learn; brawler characters might act nobly if they see a woman being harassed or victimized; planetary destroyers might take students under their wings, to hopefully take over when they are dead.

Be creative with all of these, they can drive what the rest of your character is.

Maybe later I'll make mention of the Stresses...</ul>

Oshit! <p>

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<div style="text-align:center">"Pants are bad!!! We should wear pants only on our head you conformist bastard!!! Pants are the devils work!! Run freee!! And pantless!!!" -- Vulture</div>
</p>

[PriamNevhausten]

THE FUTURE THAT WAS WRITTEN IN THE PAST IS PRESENT.

ALL SHALL FEAR. <p><span style="font-size:xx-small;">"It's in the air, in the headlines in the newspapers, in the blurry images on television. It is a secret you have yet to grasp, although the first syllable has been spoken in a dream you cannot quite recall." --Unknown Armies</span></p>

[Uncle Pervy]

OSHIT TIME BROKE.

NOW YOU'RE YOUR OWN GRANDPA, PRIAM! <p>---------------------------

Your are not supposed to be reading this!</p>