Avert Your Eyes! Saving Sanity By Not Looking

[Byrons_Ghost]

Interestingly, in At Your Door, a Cthulhu Now campaign, they show that SAN loss is lowered by not directly percieving the Mythos - characters have an opportunity to observe Shub-Niggurath herself appearing via a (silent) video link to the summoning site. SAN loss is dropped down to something like 1d10/1d20. Huzzah for the inadequaces of human technology, eh?

I remember, also, that the Devil's Canyon adventure in "Shadows of Yog Sothoth" featured invisible creatures who caused minor SAN loss simply from being near you- the sense of being watched by unseen alien forces was enough. Some of this even got recorded on movie reels, which naturally caused SAN loss in return.

I think what we can really take away from all this, though, is that Chaosium's official rules depend largely upon who is writing a given supplement.

 

[billd91]

Without addressing the question of "looking away", I think it's poor game design to regularly reward characters for being bad at a skill. Maybe once in a campaign as a gag, but characters should not regularly benefit from failing checks.

And no, beneficial uses of the Spot skill do not make up for it, as Spot is something for which character building points must be expended and so should be pretty uniformly beneficial.

It's not really a reward, though. Is a PC rewarded because their Search ability was too low to find the secret door protected by a lethal trap? Not really. Having a low score means there's a missed opportunity for... something. Could be good, could be bad. But you'll never know because you simply missed it.

I generally don't agree that things that cost build points should be uniformly beneficial. I think that tends to run counter to CoC in a number of ways. Being more competent at finding mythos creatures, for example, isn't necessarily a good thing. Of course, being less competent at it isn't necessarily better.
God I love CoC!

 

[Jim Hague]

I remember, also, that the Devil's Canyon adventure in "Shadows of Yog Sothoth" featured invisible creatures who caused minor SAN loss simply from being near you- the sense of being watched by unseen alien forces was enough. Some of this even got recorded on movie reels, which naturally caused SAN loss in return.

I think what we can really take away from all this, though, is that Chaosium's official rules depend largely upon who is writing a given supplement.

Entirely true. Looking at the copy on the back of At Your Door, the campaign as described as having threats 'neither too numerous nor too powerful for reasonably clever Investigators' to handle. First adventure, here comes a Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath and Tcho-Tcho bikers armed with fully automatic weapons and grenades.

So yeah, like the stories, a lot of it depends on the writer.

 

[Frostmarrow]

Well, people who don't look away are soon stark raving mad, and incapable of so fundamentally sane a thing as raising and supporting a family.

I mean, really. One family picnic that includes a jello-mold, and Daddy'll be getting out the shotgun, mumbling about how Aunt Martha is clearly a Mi-Go, and Cousin Terrence is out to eat his brains. High velocity lead poisoning is not good for children...

You paint a vivid picture my friend. Still, I have never looked away and my sanity is above reproach. -Or so the voices keep telling me.

 

[Faraer]

Heck, I could argue that not actually seeing a monster actually causes MORE of a loss of sanity than less! Sometimes the horror in the mind's eye is far worse than staring straight at it.

This is a truism of horror film-making, and what the mind conjures can indeed be more horrible than what a lot of film-makers could conceive and show. But this is only one way of doing it, part of the conservative strand of horror fiction which says you should be afraid of what you're already afraid of. Loveraftian fiction says: no, there are things far stranger and far worse than you can imagine.

 

[Shadeydm]

Lovecraft is great stuff, so many good stories it's impossible to single out one as a favorite.