Anyone else having trouble rationalizing CoC sanity loss?

[Tiefling]

Reading through Call of Cthulhu d20, I found that some of the sanity loss stuff doesn't make sense to me. I like the basic idea - exposure to the Mythos gradually drives you mad - and I think it totally makes sense that seeing the Great Old Ones (who are simply too horrible for human comprehension) and casting spells (which aren't supposed to work in the human mind) would cause sanity loss. But some things cause sanity loss that don't seem to me like they would in reality.

For instance, seeing monsters. The first time I see a ghoul or a zombie, I would definitely be freaked out, and, just maybe, lose a little sanity. But once I've resigned myself to the fact that the world is more than it seems, it wouldn't really do anything to me. Another thing is Mythos tomes. It can't think how knowledge would drive you mad. Scare the sh*t out of you, sure (the knowledge that we have enough nukes to destroy the world three times over does that to me all the time). But make you go insane? Seems iffy.

And suppose you read a Mythos tome and you don't believe it at all. You think the author was crazy. If you learned about the Mythos, but believed that it was all bunk, would it really cause a loss of sanity?

Has anyone else wondered about these things? And if so, how do you deal with them?

 

[mearls]

I have some house rules that indirectly address this issue:

http://www.mearls.com/cthulhu/coc_sanity.html

Mental hardness allows characters to slowly grow adjusted to seeing bizarre things.

My house rule for the exact situation you're asking about is that once a character has lost in total the maximum he can lose for seeing a type of monster, his mind has accepted its existance and he no longer loses sanity for viewing it.

For example, let's say garden gnomes cause a 1d4 sanity loss. Once a character loses 4 or more total SAN from viewing garden gnomes (either all at once or over time), he's grown to accept them and no longer takes SAN damage against them.

The problem with this rule is that it can cause some bookkeeping headaches, since you need to keep track of how you lose SAN. OTOH, as a Keeper I do that anyway since I like to model how a character goes mad based on what drove him to insanity.

I think there's a rule like this in the BRP version of CoC, but I can't remember if it was official or optional.

 

[ColonelHardisson]

As far as rationalizing sanity loss due to tomes...look at it like this. I believe that in Judeo-Christian beliefs that God has a single-word name that, if uttered, would destroy the world. Can you imagine that? A single word, universal destruction.

Lovecraft loved to use odd or impossible imagery - take the Color Out of Space, for example. It's a color never before seen by the human eye. Can you imagine that?

The point of my two examples is this: these are things that are so awful that we can't possibly imagine them, let alone actually experience them, without being or going insane. You may not understand how knowledge can drive one insane, but if you were a Lovecraftian character, you'd soon find out - when words that seem normal in and of themselves suddenly seem to open up a vista of knowledge never imagined before.

In a way, it's like contemplating a Zen koan. The closer one gets to understanding a koan, the greater one's understanding of universal truth becomes. Lovecraftian tomes are like evil koans, and they erode one's ability to grasp what we know of as reality, giving a glimpse into a far greater, infinitely more sinister reality.

 

[Tsyr]

Unknown Armies has a hardness rule...

 

[jaerdaph]

That was really well said and put, Colonel H.

 

[Aaron L]

Very well put Col H.

You may think that you would get used to the idea that the world is not the way you thought, but would you really? Or would every time you were confronted with these things be an assault on everything your mind has been ingrained to believe? A loss of a few points of Sanity here, a few points there, this is the slow gnawing away of your mind that true knowledge of the universe causes.

Sanity is like a defensive buffer our mind uses when it is exposed to something it can't handle. Know how people lie to themselves? Change memories to make them better? Forget or block out memories that are too horrible to remember? This is all Sanity. Eventually, if you are exposed to too much horribleness, if you learn that the the average level of life in the universe is gfodlike compared to us (and considers us little more than bacteria) or if you are constantly fighting for your very soul, your mind will have its protective barrier stripped away and leave you screaming and gibbering your newly found secrets to the tentancled blob that follows you around everywhere but you just couldn't see before.

 

[Moe Ronalds]

There are some things that get more horrible every time you view them. For example, every time I see a commercial for a CD for some group called Play I lose a rather large chunk of my sanity... *shiver*

 

[Chimera]

Being relatively new to CoC (since February), but an old friend of the Mythos (having read the books for 25 years), I very much like the whole Sanity issue and how it is treated. Heck, I have considered using it in my D&D campaign!

I like the Max San loss idea, but I can also see how that might tend to be "reset" if one spends a lot of time in the "real world" without encountering those things again. The Mind tries to 'heal' the damage by convincing you that they may not have been real. We tend to forget how horrible things really were.

And, having encountered something in real life that made me make a Sanity check, I can say for certain that I would NEVER get used to that type of encounter... (Don't ask, I'm not talking. It truly was Too Terrible To Tell.)

 

[Umbran]

Consider - facing stress (especially violent stress) changes a person. Even in so common thing as war, people go through psychological change. They change their priorities, and methods of viewing the world. Even with common sldiers, they go to war, and come back... well, a little weird from a civilian's point of view.

Now, make it like going to war with things your mind can't quite wrap itself around. With things who'se very existance mocks the reality the character grew up with. That'll change a person. Now, the character might very well think these changes are quite rational, knowing what he knows (it isn't paranoia if they really are out to get you). However, he sure doesn't appear sane by everyone else's standards. And, as he slowly changes more and more to adapt to the reality nobody else can see, he slowly ceases to be able to deal normally with the rest of the human race.

Essentially - one way to think of it is as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, on steroids.

 

[northrundicandus]

All this whining about Sanity points seems to be complaining players who want to hold on to their characters a little longer than they should.

How many HPL stories had a happy ending? And in how many of his tales does the protagonist turn into a gibbering idiot at the end? The descent into madness is part of the HPL universe.

I've never played CoC, but the impression I received from my copy of the 5.6 hardback rules is that characters really don't last that long...