Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
ShortQuests -- Pocket Sized Adventures! An all-new collection of digest-sized D&D adventures designed for 1-2 game sessions.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9874588" data-attributes="member: 42582">I think I agree.Or at least, I think the "being scared" has to be generated by some sort of internal effort, a willing oneself into a certain emotional state.One thing that I personally have found works with CoC Sanity is that it gives a type of permission, in the context of the play of the game, to depart from what would be normal/rational for one's character. It authorises a type of portrayal - easily drifting into the lurid at a table of hammy RPGers! - of "nervous breakdown" in the literary sense of that phenomenon. And because it's not (entirely) under the player's control, and it does pertain to the fate of one's PC in the game context, the play-acting is not just or entirely play-acting: it corresponds to a type of concern for one's piece/place in the game.In this session of Cthulhu Dark that I posted about - <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/cthulhu-dark-another-session.658931/" target="_blank">Cthulhu Dark - another session</a> - the player of the PC who succumbed to insanity quite rapidly (in the context of the game, due to some unlikely rolling) got to portray his PC's mental decay. And this wasn't mere colour in the context of commando-raid-esque play: it drove the way events unfolded in the game (which I was GMing largely "no myth").I find this a challenging proposition - not necessarily because I disagree with it, but because it asks me to think about RPGing in a particular sort of way which I don't typically do.Presumably the proposition isn't meant as mere tautology (ie the PC's priorities are whatever the author of the PC chooses to have the PC do). So there's an idea of the character having priorities that are authored/established in some way, and then the idea of authoring action declarations in a way that is expressive of those priorities. But how, then, do we establish that the PC's priorities have changed to - say - ones that would warrant the sort of responses that the butler PC had in my Cthulhu Dark session?This is where I find mechanics can be helpful. I don't think I know how to get the sort of stuff that happened in that session playing purely freeform, because I'm not sure how the ruptures in sanity get conveyed and established purely via the narrative medium.</blockquote>

Verification