[Sindri]

Originally Posted by Kromm

In my secret-agents campaign, I use a simple house rule:

After each assignment, the PCs must make a Will roll. If the job involved killing, torture, or similar unpleasantness, there's a penalty equal to the Fright Check penalty for encountering bodies in the state or number involved, whether the PCs witnessed those acts or committed them. Even if there's no physical violence, a roll is required at no modifier. Disadvantages liable to be triggered by the events of the mission (e.g., Charitable or Selfless if the bad guys were starving innocent villagers) give -1 per -5 points of value.

Failure (and 14+ is automatic failure) leads to new or worsened mental disadvantages agreed on with the player. Points of problems equal margin of failure. Quirks and smaller disadvantages accumulate gradually into bigger issues.

Immediate downtime to recover – one month of recreation per point – can prevent this psychological trauma from becoming permanent. A Psychology roll (usually from a friendly PC), allowed once per month, can even reverse a point of old damage.

This isn't terribly realistic (PTSD is a lot more serious than this), but it explains campaign pacing (missions separated by downtime) and why somebody on the team needs to know Psychology. It also somewhat pressures the players to find less-bloody solutions to problems. And it makes easily ignored disadvantages rather relevant after each adventure.

Seems like a well crafted set of rules. How has it ended up affecting the PCs?

Originally Posted by GodBeastX

I kinda like this method better, especially the part where you put in campaign pacing, because I tend to like pacing but struggle to come up with a good reason of why a PC wouldn't just jump into danger the very next day. There's a lot of mechanics in GURPS that don't come into play if you don't have spaced events.

It can be nice to spread the events of a campaign out a bit.

Originally Posted by Glimmerman

I also like that pacing method.

I've lately used Maz's SLA-GURPS stresspoint hybrid, but this needs more bookkeeping.

In latest campaign I have made Magery powered by stresspoints instead of Fatigue Points.
There is a Pyramid sample article about magic stress, too.

They're nice rules, I had read over them before posting this. How have you found it to work in play?

I don't remember reading the pyramid article. It's always fun to come across samples I haven't read before.