Season 3 and Madness

[Tyranthraxus]

Not much we can do if your DM isnt running the game right Horus sadly. We could flay him for you, but we would be down a dm then. Should we send a hit squad?

 

[Warmaster Horus]

We made it, but only because we had adequate healers in the party. My main concern is that the addition of madness doesn't become an impediment to the gaming experience. I think it should stay in because it's a great bit of environmental hazard but as it was run I thought it was way overboard.

 

[Steve_MND]

Unfortunately, i don't think Madness is well-suited to DnD (at least the way it's been implemented). In the Granddaddy of all madness-based RPGs, Call of Cthulhu, one's Sanity plays an integral and fundamental part of the entire game. It's slow, gradual, insidious, inevitable and hard to get rid of, and that's all part of the horror that the system is based on.

In Season Three here, tho, it's tacked on, fast and blatant. AL wasn't designed to handle insanity from the get-go, and it's more a sputtering faucet in terms of effect. You either have a momentary pause in the module (short-term) a potentially module-crippling bout lasting for hours or tens of hours (intermediate) or a vaguely-debilitating "permanent" issue that lasts exactly as long as it takes for the module to be over and you pay for a spell to get rid of it. It's more of an extreme, ham-fisted environmental hazard that was shoehorned in, rather than a character-driven, slow, creeping descent into madness.

Not saying that it's not an interesting or intriguing concept to be incorporated into a D&D campaign, or even that it doesn't fit well with the Underdark. Just that I don't think it's necessarily a good fit for AL.

 

[Eltab]

If Madness is getting in the way of accomplishing the objective, the DM can (behind the screen) drop the Save DC low enough to make it a non-issue. Unless somebody rolls a 1, of course.

An earlier edition had an Underdark sourcebook with a comment to the effect that 'living in the Underdark gradually drives most folks mad. The PCs are not suffering that effect, and the DM should point out how much more robust / fortunate the PCs are than the typical denizens. The DM should craft random encounters with persons who have succumbed to (harmless) madnesses.'

I liked the Madness Table entries that read like 'add this Flaw to your character' more than the entries that read 'a sudden mental ZAP shuts your character down for the Duration'.
I especially liked the Demon Lord Madness table entries where you get an exaggerated version of HIS personality traits / flaws.

Full Disclosure: thinking about the Underdark gives me a mild case of claustrophobia, and I'm not enthusiastic about being stuck down there for a whole Season. (This must be an after-effect of failing a short-term Madness check in my youth)