Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="loverdrive" data-source="post: 8276936" data-attributes="member: 7027139">There's an important difference between offering options and telling the group "do whatever you want! have fun!" and leaving them stranded. 5E does the latter, actually designed games do the former.I'm not the one being asked, but I did play a game with both sanity and madness rules. And I agree that they're garbage.There's a laundry list of issues I had with madness rules (sanity is serviceable, but far from being good):<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">It's absolutely unclear what calls for, well, madness. Ok, aberrations with tentacles probably are madness-inducing, but what about other things? Is something like discovering that the town you've been living your whole life was an illusion all along mind-shattering, or is it's just "who the hell had enough time and 6th-level spell slots to do that?"? That's not exactly issue with madness rules themselves, but it's an issue within a context of D&D. When you have a dude who can hurl fireballs and build life-like major images, the line between "normal" magic and things that defy reality starts to get kinda blurry.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Short-term madness table often produces results that are just stupid and belong to slapstick comedy and not lovecraftian horror. A character that starts to eat naughty word because they've seen an alien visitor from the Great Beyond isn't something I'd expect from a cosmic horror story.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Long-term madness often table produces results that are either just debilitating (ah, yes, falling unconscious for 1d10x10 hours is so fun) or largely meaningless. And both categories are something that I'd expect to happen to a secondary or a tertiary character, not a protagonist.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Indefinite madness table produces nothing but gimmicks, that are, again, much more suitable to NPCs, not the PCs.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">And, most importantly, there's zero incentive to seek madness. The rules punish the player for doing things they're supposed to be doing -- y'know, meeting fish people, deciphering evil books, and looking beyond the illusory veil of comfortable "normality".</li> </ul>Using madness rules not only ain't gonna turn 5E into a cosmic horror story generator, but place additional obstacles on the way.</blockquote>

Verification