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Message: <blockquote data-quote="WayneLigon" data-source="post: 3315032" data-attributes="member: 3649">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.</blockquote>

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