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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Grendel_Khan" data-source="post: 8275945" data-attributes="member: 7028554">The most obvious reason people go nuts in Lovecraftian narratives isn't because they learn that the universe is unknowable. It's because they learn that we're not only insignificant (standard lesson to learn from astronomy/cosmology) but that there are alien intelligences actively trying to slaughter and subjugate us, using magic/tech/etc. that actively exploits rules we can't understand. It's the difference between knowing, intellectually, that matter moves in waves, and seeing something that can take advantage of that, and knowing there's nothing you can do to stop it.But on a broader level the reason Call of Cthulhu and Delta Green have sanity rules is because they're trying to get at a more realistic sense of the toll that RPG-ish stuff would take on a real person. Delta Green, for example, has fantastic rules for losing sanity points not just when you encounter the unnatural, but for seeing someone murdered, or murdering someone yourself. You can become hardened to certain kinds of nasty situations, mitigating future sanity losses of a given type, but that has its own effects on you. There's even a mention of possibly losing a tiny bit of sanity from being fired.Maybe that seems silly, but think about how being fired rattles and sticks with you. Or how, for most people, seeing even a single dead body over the course of your whole life becomes the big anecdote you can bust out to wow people, and how that visual can haunt you. And the trope of fully losing your mind in Cthulhu games is overblown--just play the game, or look at the rules, and you'll see it's usually a slow burn. A lot of people don't want to play that sort of game, and aren't interesting in telling a story about people unravelling (again, Delta Green has great mechanics for that, with your emotional bonds with family and friends fraying in order to stave off major sanity losses, essentially giving you rules for becoming a detached, thousand-yard-stare sort). But what they're getting at isn't some binary, zany "Ooop, you saw Cthulhu and now you're in a straightjacket" situation. It's that the captain you mentioned who rams Cthulhu is now permanently scarred by the experience. And if he does the PC thing and just keeps dealing with tons of horrible things and circumstances, he's likely to become more and more disordered over time.In other words, you could apply CoC's and especially DG's sanity rules to a non-Lovecraftian game or setting, and they'd still make sense. But those games posit that seeing monsters wears and breaks you quicker than more familiar horrors.That's not tropey or unrealistic at all.</blockquote>

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