Emulating Call of Cthulhu with Spycraft

[Committed Hero]

How would you go about it? Not as far as monsters with NPC qualities, but rather the effects of long-term Sanity erosion from the gradually increasing exposure to horrible secrets?

Rather than making Stress damage long-term, I would prefer some sort of dwindling resouce allocation, since it meshes well with how Spycraft already works....

 

[2WS-Steve]

I've been thinking of doing this as well, since Delta Green would fit so nicely.

My plan was to just use SC2's stress damage as written, then assign values for different sanity losses.

If you wanted to keep the long term effects it seems just porting over the Sanity rules would likely work fine. They overlay nicely on other game systems with stats in the 3d6 range.

 

[trancejeremy]

Yeah, I would just use the Sanity system. In a way it is a bit kludgey, but it does work with d20 just fine (and is actually in Unearthed Arcana)

 

[AscentStudios]

Expanded stress damage is something we're always kicking around amongst other projects. An easy way to handle this is to expand the stress tables into a 10 tier format (with 10 being total insanity). Applying the Tense campaign quality helps these fill much faster

Another way is to lump stress and subplots. Create a subplot and say a player gains it automatically when he hits a certain stress threshold within a certain set of conditions (such as, suffering 1/2/3 complete threshold's worth of damage in a single event and fails his save), he gains an Insanity or Phobia subplot of equivalent severity. Though the stress eventually fades, the subplot sticks around for the player to deal with as he or she can. Kinda rough, but you get the idea.

 

[Committed Hero]

I wouldn't want to track both Stress damage and Sanity; plus Stress damage is such a well-considered mechanic that it deserves the spotlight.

But what about specific things like reading a tome? Since that's not an inherently stressful task, it doesn't seem to fit quite as nicely.

 

[Pbartender]

Shoot... Back on the old Alderac Spycraft boards someone came up with a campaign quality that replaces the normal effects of stress damage (Shaken I, II, II, etc...) with more interesting conditions, like Stunned, Frightened, Terrified, and so on. I can't seem to find it in the Google cache, or I'd repost it.

It'd work perfect for a Sanity stand in for Spycraft.

 

[HeapThaumaturgist]

My initial reaction was, honestly, a slowly raised eyebrow.

But I'd say an expanded stress damage table would do that.

You'd be gaining lots more xp if you used all of the appropriate qualities. CoC is traditionally real mean on characters.

--fje

 

[Committed Hero]

You'd be gaining lots more xp if you used all of the appropriate qualities.

An excellent point. But dead characters get no XP.