Vector Theory #22: Call of Cthulhu's Sanity System
There are things man was not meant to know.
Unless you know these things, you'll never be able to confront the eldritch horrors of the unknown.
The more you know of them, the more distant you become from the rest of humanity.
The more distant you become from the rest of humanity, the more chance you'll get locked up as a lunatic, or simply break down in a heap of anguish.
There it is, the basic premise behind the works of HP Lovecraft, and the core ideas behind the mechanisms of Sanity in Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu.
Onto this raw driving force was tacked a percentile skill system and a bunch of subsystems that I've rarely seen in use. But the core is what drives a game of Call of Cthulhu, whether it's a single session witch hunt, or a growing symphony of horror.
The Sanity system integrates into the percentile skill system, I wouldn't say that it dovetails into it (it seems a little clunky after 30 years), but it still works.
Like most games of the era, it used 3d6 to generate most statistics, then derived some values using other means to get the figures actually used in play...
Your Sanity starts at a certain level (five times you POW score), but if your combined Sanity and Cthulhu Mythos score ever exceeds 100, you're sanity drops until the total is 100 points.
Sanity is a very valuable trait as it lets you fend off horrors by not believing in them, Cthulhu Mythos is a very valuable skill because it teaches you how to fight off monsters that you can't disbelieve.
The whole game is about confronting horrors, so the core mechanism reflects this.
It gives a narrative choice and a mechanical choice, both of which mirror one another. Do you choose to have faith in humanity and the light (and thus pursue tactics relevant to this agenda), or do you choose the occult and darkness (and thus risk taint or ostracism from the mundane world).
From a perspective of Vector Theory, the wavelength and spectrum of the character retains a maximum intensity, but the colouring changes...as the Cthulhu mythos part of the spectrum increases, the sanity part of the spectrum decreases. The Cthulhu Mythos part of the spectrum is alluring because it offers power and new supernatural choices, but the sanity part of the spectrum is almost impossible to regain once it's lost. And it's Sanity that works as the best defence against the creatures of the night. Too little of it and you'll easily succumb to the horrors of the game.
The whole game has a general bias in this way.
Every choice you make has an easy option that brings you closer to temptation, and a hard option that might actually make a difference in the end.
Every filter passed, has a chance of reducing sanity further. But only a few rare filters offer the chance to regain it.
The polarisation of the game usually lends itself to dark and moody drama. If you're playing Call of Cthulhu, you know what to expect. If it doesn't have the darkness, the horror and the unknown, it just ain't CoC.
The game also has a gravity well. A fall to the unknown.
Narratons are drawn to a gravity well, like photons. It is a natural conclusion. In this game the characters often have to work hard to avoid succumbing to the unknown. Unless they make conscious decisions to avoid fate, they WILL be driven insane or they WILL die at the hands of eldritch beasts and dark gods. If they leave it too late to make a stand, they can only choose a method of demise, they can't avoid it completely.
But other tactics also become apparent when looking at the game in this way. They might be able to charge headlong into the finale, hoping to cause enough of a bang to pass through the other side, they might be able to deflect their trajectory enough to wrap around the gravity well sucking them in, catching a glimpse of the horror before hurtling back into safer territory.
There are always options, and a good GM will take these options for what they are...or will have considered contingency plans should they arise.
Unless you know these things, you'll never be able to confront the eldritch horrors of the unknown.
The more you know of them, the more distant you become from the rest of humanity.
The more distant you become from the rest of humanity, the more chance you'll get locked up as a lunatic, or simply break down in a heap of anguish.
There it is, the basic premise behind the works of HP Lovecraft, and the core ideas behind the mechanisms of Sanity in Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu.
Onto this raw driving force was tacked a percentile skill system and a bunch of subsystems that I've rarely seen in use. But the core is what drives a game of Call of Cthulhu, whether it's a single session witch hunt, or a growing symphony of horror.
The Sanity system integrates into the percentile skill system, I wouldn't say that it dovetails into it (it seems a little clunky after 30 years), but it still works.
Like most games of the era, it used 3d6 to generate most statistics, then derived some values using other means to get the figures actually used in play...
Your Sanity starts at a certain level (five times you POW score), but if your combined Sanity and Cthulhu Mythos score ever exceeds 100, you're sanity drops until the total is 100 points.
Sanity is a very valuable trait as it lets you fend off horrors by not believing in them, Cthulhu Mythos is a very valuable skill because it teaches you how to fight off monsters that you can't disbelieve.
The whole game is about confronting horrors, so the core mechanism reflects this.
It gives a narrative choice and a mechanical choice, both of which mirror one another. Do you choose to have faith in humanity and the light (and thus pursue tactics relevant to this agenda), or do you choose the occult and darkness (and thus risk taint or ostracism from the mundane world).
From a perspective of Vector Theory, the wavelength and spectrum of the character retains a maximum intensity, but the colouring changes...as the Cthulhu mythos part of the spectrum increases, the sanity part of the spectrum decreases. The Cthulhu Mythos part of the spectrum is alluring because it offers power and new supernatural choices, but the sanity part of the spectrum is almost impossible to regain once it's lost. And it's Sanity that works as the best defence against the creatures of the night. Too little of it and you'll easily succumb to the horrors of the game.
The whole game has a general bias in this way.
Every choice you make has an easy option that brings you closer to temptation, and a hard option that might actually make a difference in the end.
Every filter passed, has a chance of reducing sanity further. But only a few rare filters offer the chance to regain it.
The polarisation of the game usually lends itself to dark and moody drama. If you're playing Call of Cthulhu, you know what to expect. If it doesn't have the darkness, the horror and the unknown, it just ain't CoC.
The game also has a gravity well. A fall to the unknown.
Narratons are drawn to a gravity well, like photons. It is a natural conclusion. In this game the characters often have to work hard to avoid succumbing to the unknown. Unless they make conscious decisions to avoid fate, they WILL be driven insane or they WILL die at the hands of eldritch beasts and dark gods. If they leave it too late to make a stand, they can only choose a method of demise, they can't avoid it completely.
But other tactics also become apparent when looking at the game in this way. They might be able to charge headlong into the finale, hoping to cause enough of a bang to pass through the other side, they might be able to deflect their trajectory enough to wrap around the gravity well sucking them in, catching a glimpse of the horror before hurtling back into safer territory.
There are always options, and a good GM will take these options for what they are...or will have considered contingency plans should they arise.
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Comments
In my game, while reading a book about CCD lore has a small chance of lowering your sanity when you read it, having a high CCD lore actually protects you from further sanity loss when confronting CCD things. It is just logical that if you study and read facts about something, you will not be so disoriented that you will go mad... you should have some ability to anticipate the horror with your knowledge. Players still can lose sanity from seeing their friends butchered, watching corpses vomit fetuses, and the like, but CCD knowledge gives them some amount of protection from interacting with CCD things.
I was about to type in a monologue about how the sanity system could be updated to match "modern" gaming systems with traits rather than percentages. Perhaps you'd risk losing long-term sanity traits as you acquired the dark knowledge, but perhaps your ability to resist short-term sanity shattering effects would be enhanced because you know the truth...
...but I've been distracted by a sick wife as I've been thinking through this monologue in my head.
Second thoughts have given me a different conclusion.
The Call of Cthulhu Sanity system doesn't do the occult hero, but neither did Lovecraft in most of his stories. Lovecraft's world was bleak and the unknown was a truly dangerous fear. The sanity system sets the tone for bleakness in a downward spiral. It's a simple and elegant way to pull the bleakness of the narrative back into a bleak mechanism that governs play.
You're knowledge of the dark and eldritch powers at work in the universe doesn't really make you less coherent, but it does make you insane (if you judge sanity to be the predominant belief system of a local people). This knowledge pushes your understanding of the universe away from other people...your ability to interact with them on a meaningful level becomes less possible. Have you ever tried talking quantum physics with an air-head fashion student...trust me, it's futile. Same thing applies, iof you start talking eldritch occult lore with the average person, they just ain't gonna get you. Conversely, the deep issues of their lives just aren't going to mean anything to you.
I guess in a round-about kind of way I agree with you in some respect. Enough Cthulhu Lore would render the death of a friend insignificant...you know the real dangers of the world so the end of a single mortal's existence wouldn't mean much of anything to you. But then again, most forms of psychosis and sociopathy would engender the same benefits.
I only played the Unknown Armies game once, almost 10 years ago. But from what I remember about it, there was a much better system for sanity and the degradation into altered mind states. Perhaps a fusion of the two games might lead into a superior game system for reflection the fiction of Lovecraft's world.
Abeo, which I think you can find at 1km1kt (a lite version at least) has a kind of nice sanity system in that I think all characters in the game start a little off, and the goal of the game is to balance going completely over the deep end with the quest for magical power that opens up as you go completely over the deep end.
But in terms of game theory, this type of node is actually quite common. Magic points and essence work like this in Shadowrun. You trade essence (instead of sanity) for cyborg powers (instead of mythos knowledge and spells). Injury (instead of meeting horrors) can further lower one's magic points (instead of sanity).
Actually Cyberpunk 2020 has characters trade sanity for powers, but other than to gain cyborg powers, there are no other ways to lose humanity in Cyberpunk 2020.
In Ron Edward's Sorcerer, he makes this node pretty much the centerpiece of his game. The GM is supposed to keep coming back to it over and over again. "How much of your mind and soul are you willing to risk now?"
The idea that a character has to trade some type of fortitude and sociability for power is common in games and fiction. How often a game returns to this type of node says something important about the game. A game where cyberwear is expensive and time consuming will feel different from a game where a character can buy nanites from a vending machine that will grant cool powers while inducing mutations and insanity.
Plus, how easily characters can climb back out of the pit of insanity says something important about a game.
Hey, lets start numbering the nodes, so we can identify when a type 1 node comes up. And type 1 nodes will be sanity systems where you trade sanity for knowledge or power or something that works the same way.
So CoC and Sorcerer have type 1 nodes coming up a lot, so much so that sacrificing a part of yourself for knowledge or power is part of the point of the game.
In Cyberpunk 2020, it usually only comes up in character creation, which makes trading humanity for power a theme, but not the central one.
Also, if we move a little away from Lovecraft, to Lumely, and his Titus Crow character, we see another character whose knowledge of the CCD strengthens him, even when he must face Yog-Sothoth face to face!