D&D 5E Do you use Sanity and how do you handle it?

[atanakar]

I'm preparing a session that involves a lot of dark fantasy tropes and a general sens of doom and gloom. I'm looking at the Sanity paragraph in the DMG and find it lacking. How do you handle it in your game?

 

[ART!]

I'm going to be running Tomb of Annihilation, and want to use Sanity or something like it. I've heard it's sort of meh, though. I'm thinking of just using the Madness rules, with some Wisdom save benchmarks or something. ?

 

[iserith]

I don't use Sanity in D&D as I don't think it's a good fit for the genre. It fits better in a game like Call of Cthulhu. One could have a D&D game that features those sorts of tropes, but I would prefer to play some other game that's meant for it if it will be the major theme.

I do sometimes use the Indefinite Madness table to generate a cost for failing at one thing or another as appropriate. This dovetails nicely with how I use Inspiration.

 

[ART!]

Sanity as it's written seems like a bunch of nothing. It suggests Wisdom saves, so I'll probably just use that and not add the extra ability score.

The madness rules are pretty good. Off the top of my head, when encountering a mind-bending horror, you could use the CR as the DC for the Wisdom save?

Has anyone homebrewed the Sanity rules into something with more oomph?

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

I tried to create a homebred version of Sanity/Madness for d20 based in the system by Unknown Armies.

D&D 5E - House rule: Madness system as Unknown Armies.

Some horror genres RPGs use systems to record the psychological damage by mental stress, for example the pool of sanity points from "Call of Chulth" but my opinion is the system for madness from "Unknown Armies" is closer to reality. My idea is madness has got five pillars: violence, reality...

www.enworld.org

 

[the Jester]

I don't use sanity (the score), but I do use madness, importing the "madness level" concept from Out of the Abyss.

 

[Salthorae]

I don't use sanity (the score), but I do use madness, importing the "madness level" concept from Out of the Abyss.

Same. This works well for times when the characters encounter truly horrific things.

 

[Charlaquin]

I don’t care for the sanity rules in the DMG, and I haven’t seen any homebrew or 3rd party sanity rules I’ve really liked. If I were to run a campaign with those kind of lovecraftian themes, and if I did decide that D&D was the system I was going to use for it, I would probably try to hack together something along the lines of Bloodborne’s Insight mechanic, where encounters with the horrific give some mix of advantages and disadvantages. But probably I would use a different rules system.

 

[atanakar]

I don’t care for the sanity rules in the DMG, and I haven’t seen any homebrew or 3rd party sanity rules I’ve really liked. If I were to run a campaign with those kind of lovecraftian themes, and if I did decide that D&D was the system I was going to use for it, I would probably try to hack together something along the lines of Bloodborne’s Insight mechanic, where encounters with the horrific give some mix of advantages and disadvantages. But probably I would use a different rules system.

I was considering that. Characters gain Madness points, which in turn has some gradual effects on their ability to function mechanicaly.

 

[atanakar]

I don't use sanity (the score), but I do use madness, importing the "madness level" concept from Out of the Abyss.

I'll look it up. Thanks