Avert Your Eyes! Saving Sanity By Not Looking

I disagree. As a kid, I was absolutely terrified of what might be under the bed or just outside my covers. I never saw anything. I didn't have to. I couldn't even hear it. I was straining to listen. Something was out there. I just couldn't detect it.

When I turned the lights on, then it wasn't a big deal, because what I thought was lurking around was clearly not in evidence.

But to put more of a clarifying point, I agree that say, a blind person is going to react to fear differently from someone who can see a monster charging at them. What I'm saying is I sincerely doubt anyone will WILLFULLY look away from a horrible beast to save their own sanity in a moment of terror.

There are repeated references in Tatters of the King where sanity loss is significant if the character is looking at it, and then there's lower sanity if the character closes his eyes or looks away. I don't think this is a legitimate mechanic any PC should normally use, and certainly not a recourse in a horror game.

That said, I also understand where this mechanic comes from. In Lovecraft's stories, the poor author who looks back over his shoulder has his mind shattered because he SAW the thing. But I should point out that in the majority of those stories, the person FELT compelled to look at it...the fact that the other characters didn't look at it was often sheer luck or circumstance.

In essence, this mechanic feels like it started out well-intentioned (the idiot who looks the thing in the face is the one who suffers most) and has turned into a meta-game concept that's abusable by PCs. If horror is reduced to the one dimension of sight alone, it means that by negating sight I don't lose sanity.

And that just seems completely opposite of being afraid of things-that-go-bump-in-the-night...cause of the, ya know, "night" part.

It's been a while since I ran a Cthulhu game, but this is the first time I've heard of this being used. It sounds like it's something that's been introduced in Tatters of the King, is that correct?

The example with the medusa makes sense, because it's a constant effect. Mechanically, at least, SAN loss gets charged at first encounter- so seeing the thing and then closing your eyes isn't going to help, because you've already seen it.

I suppose if the PCs knew there was a monster around the corner, and went into the room with their eyes closed, then this would be a valid tactic. But they'd be blind, and effectively unable to do much. And, since I'm of the "alien horrors affect your brain directly without needing to be seen" school, then I'd probably still charge half the original sanity loss.

How is Tatters of the King, anyway?

talien said:

Since when does averting your eyes when you encounter something terrible make it okay?

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It's a staple of Lovecraftian fiction, of course. I quite like the idea.

Amusingly, this came up in one of Sagiro's game. We were attacked by eight mummies, and the number of fear saves we had to make were directly proportional to the results of our spot checks. Apparently the more we could see, the more screwed we knew we were. It was a bad time to boast about my PC's high spot...

Sanity loss is not tied directly to fear. Sanity loss happens when the mind comes to an understanding that fundamentaly conflicts with reality as it knows it, kind of like a cognitive short circuit.

Many of the Lovecraftian creatures are not a part of our universe at all; their forms don't obey laws of physical nature. It's possible for them to manifest negative angles, ocupying the same space as other parts of itself, causing time to bend or slow, etc. The human brain with our senses can't handle such things on a concrete basis and so the mind, trying to follow the obvious display before it, retreats, stops (catatonia), or constructs another set of reality where the thing doesn't exist (delusions). When someone goes to 0 SAN, it suddenly all makes sense and that person doesn't really belong to the human race anymore.

One good house rule would be to have two seperate types of Sanity. One would be the sanity you lose when confronted by fearful or disquieting things, such as dead bodies or flayed corpses: things that certain people with training (or blunted empathy) can deal with and not wake up screaming every night.

(This also bear mentioning: people don't actually 'get used' to seeing fundamentally disturbing things in the sense that that phrase is usually meant: they simply express it differently. What actually happens is a kind of mental 'damage' that results in stunted emotions among other things; what you're seeing is Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. Stress affects everyone differently, which is very hard to model in game terms - though you could construct a 'Sanity' class of Feats in CoCd20 that could attempt the job. One person will start having trouble sleeping, the other wakes up screaming, a third turns to drink or sex to distract himself, etc. Some people can 'hold it together' for a longer time than others, just like some people can go longer without going to the bathroom. They can present an outwardly calm exterior, but inside they'll be constantly battling various afflictions.

For game purposes, though, you might want to introduce a 'SAN DR' against the more mundane things that cause SAN loss - the reason that person has such a DR is up to the player)

Then you'd have another type of Sanity that tracked how much exposure to the more cosmic aspects of the Mythos. You never, ever get used to that no matter what you do. It would be like trying to get used to fire or living without oxygen.

Byrons_Ghost said:

It's been a while since I ran a Cthulhu game, but this is the first time I've heard of this being used. It sounds like it's something that's been introduced in Tatters of the King, is that correct?

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I think I've seen it in Ripples from Carcosa, but I'd have to check. It's definitely frequent enough in Tatters of the King, for just about every Sanity check upon encountering a monster for the first time.

How is Tatters of the King, anyway?

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Despite my complaint about the rule, it's otherwise excellent. There are some boring, overland, way-too-much-travelogue-info-for-my-tastes parts, but they're very thorough if you're fond of that sort of thing. On the other hand, the climactic moments are fantastic. You'll see all this adapted to an Arcanis campaign in my story hour (several chapters in the future, I'm afraid): http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?t=103252

Tatters of the King is extremely thorough, very well written, and logically fuses together a variety of Hastur/King in Yellow elements into a cohesive whole. I'm planning to wrap up the Tatters of the King in three weekends, which will eventually play out in the story hour.

I've personally always thought that saying "oh, you see it, and it looks like it can't exist and it drives you MAD!" is pretty stupid.

I mean, has anyone ever been driven any closer to becoming insane by these:

Slife said:

I mean, has anyone ever been driven any closer to becoming insane by these:

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If one of those was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train – a shapeless congerie of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, burbling "Tekeli-li, Tekeli-li!" -- then I'd say yes. Yes, it has.

Slife said:

I've personally always thought that saying "oh, you see it, and it looks like it can't exist and it drives you MAD!" is pretty stupid.

I mean, has anyone ever been driven any closer to becoming insane by these:

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Well, those things exist in our universe, wholly and entirely. As PC pointed out, neither one is some sort of extradimensional, impossible thing.

This irks me, it really does - what is so damned difficult to grasp about the damage the Mythos causes being caused because it's fundamentally alien, not because it's 'non-Euclidean' or rugose or squamous or whatever?

People are rotunely driven to dysfunction by things that your average player character does on an almost daily basis - wtinessing bloody murder and battle, having a friend killed in front of their eyes, suffering badly at the hands of someone else while they're helpless. And yet the same old tired 'the Mythos isn't scary' crud always comes out, usually with someone posting something by Escher or another optical illusion to 'prove' it.

Look - the Mythos universe is fundamentally different from the world we exist in. Lovecraft and many other writers are not psychologists, they're story tellers. And in the context of the shared universe they write in, the Horrors From Outside drive you crazy.

Given that relatively mundane things like being mugged and seeing a mutilated corpse can cause serious emotional and mental trauma, I don't think it's too much of a stretch that something that rips away the fragile social and emotional fabric we all use to cover up the stresses of the world driving someone off the deep end is all that unbelieveable. Psychologically unsound under current ideas of such, maybe, but not all that big a stretch in a fantastic universe.

The Truth in a Mtyhos universe is that you are fundamentally helpless, and not just helpless, but utterly insignificant. You, human, are a mistake, a dead-end experiment with delusions of grandeur. And being exposed to that horrific truth, in the context of that world, can shatter you.

Jim Hague said:

People are rotunely driven to dysfunction by things that your average player character does on an almost daily basis - wtinessing bloody murder and battle, having a friend killed in front of their eyes, suffering badly at the hands of someone else while they're helpless. And yet the same old tired 'the Mythos isn't scary' crud always comes out, usually with someone posting something by Escher or another optical illusion to 'prove' it.

Look - the Mythos universe is fundamentally different from the world we exist in. Lovecraft and many other writers are not psychologists, they're story tellers. And in the context of the shared universe they write in, the Horrors From Outside drive you crazy.

Given that relatively mundane things like being mugged and seeing a mutilated corpse can cause serious emotional and mental trauma, I don't think it's too much of a stretch that something that rips away the fragile social and emotional fabric we all use to cover up the stresses of the world driving someone off the deep end is all that unbelieveable. Psychologically unsound under current ideas of such, maybe, but not all that big a stretch in a fantastic universe.

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The entire reason why seeing your friend killed in front of your eyes is *because* it's something familar. If I saw a gigantic blue blob with twenty horns and fifty eyes turn orange and emit yellow gas, it would lack the same emotional impact, even if the blob really was the great poet Qavd-dax of Elordora who just was murdered by his enemies from Zygath-tirsax because of his inablity to Emmfoz.

The fact that all of the horrible monstrosities can be quantified (at least on a metagame level) means that they will never really seem horribly alien. And if your brain gets sensory input that doesn't make sense, it will just stop interpreting the messages (certain forms of blindness happen because of this, IIRC). When it really comes down to it, it's all light rays (waves|particles) anyway. Just because they happen to be reflected off Hastur doesn't make them special.

I would prefer a "sanity" system where the characters' brain stops parsing inputs that no longer contribute enough meaningful information. A penalty to spot checks whenever you saw someting from outside the universe (cumulative temporary penalties, each of which has a chance to become permanent) and other things of that nature, combined with a sanity system based on seeing atrocities.

Actually, something similar to this has been proposed earlier. If it had a less nonsensical OMG I can SEE something with a SQUID for a HEAD it's just CRAZY! sanity system, (and flavor text to boot), I would probably find it enjoyable.

Slife said:

I mean, has anyone ever been driven any closer to becoming insane by these

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Those are illustrations, and well-known ones that are meant to fool the eye. They are impossible constructs in the real universe. Seeing them made manifest in the real world might well drive someone mad; we won't know until we can subject someone to an actual bending of physical law. The closest we probably get are people driven over the edge by violent hallucinations.

Again, it's the breakdown of reality* in the vicinity of the viewer that causes the radical type of insanity that the Old Ones cause.

*Actually, it's the revelation of actual reality that causes it; the Old Ones and such are the true structure of the universe. Everything Man thinks he knows is just illusionary crap; seeing one of the Old Ones jerks the carpet out from under your mind and rips away all the illusions that it's woven around itself. For the first time you see reality as it actually exists and you can't 'unlearn' that knowledge. Going mad is the mind's way of protecting itself against that cold surety of knowledge.