D&D 5E Do you use Sanity and how do you handle it?

[Morrus]

Whispers in the Dark is a 5E version of Call of Cthulhu which has sanity rules.

 

[iserith]

I don’t care for the sanity rules in the DMG, and I haven’t seen any homebrew or 3rd party sanity rules I’ve really liked. If I were to run a campaign with those kind of lovecraftian themes, and if I did decide that D&D was the system I was going to use for it, I would probably try to hack together something along the lines of Bloodborne’s Insight mechanic, where encounters with the horrific give some mix of advantages and disadvantages. But probably I would use a different rules system.

I'm not familiar with that game. Would you mind sketching out how that might look roughly in D&D 5e? It sounds like an interesting hack.

 

[Charlaquin]

I'm not familiar with that game. Would you mind sketching out how that might look roughly in D&D 5e? It sounds like an interesting hack.

In Bloodborne you gain a point of Insight at certain predetermined points, such as when you first encounter a boss monster. There are also items you can expend for Insight. As your Insight gets high enough, certain environmental effects occur, like the music changing, or certain environmental features that were previously invisible being made visible, etc. There are also certain enemies and attacks that do more damage to you the higher your Insight. So having high Insight makes the game more difficult in certain ways but can also reveal more lore through the environmental changes. You can also spend Insight to call another player into your game to help you with a boss, and to buy certain items.

The ideas from this I would want to translate to D&D are that “Madness” is a matter of revelation about a horrifying truth rather than a loss of sanity from witnessing scary stuff, and that there’s a trade-off to gaining such revelations. Also the fact that it can wax and wane. So, for example, I might have players make like an Intelligence save when they catch a glimpse of the true, horrifying nature of reality. On a failure, they are able to rationalize it away. On a success, they fully appreciate the implications of what they’ve witnessed and gain a level of Insight, which I might treat a bit like Exhaustion, in that it’s a condition with cumulative effects as you gain levels. Not sure what the exact effects would be, but maybe you gain bonuses to perception and/or knowledge checks related to the Horrible Cosmic Truth and penalties to saves against being Frightened, or to Charisma checks... Or maybe it affects enemy behavior, maybe the Eldritch Abominations prioritize higher Insight targets because they can sense that you know too much about them.

 

[Shiroiken]

I don't use sanity; I go with megalomania instead

 

[Celebrim]

I use a close variant on the 3e Ravenloft fear/horror/madness rules. It could probably use some more tweaking, as the modifiers are a bit fiddly, but the system is pretty decent.