Insanity using Radiation Rules

[Koningkrush]

I was thinking of a realistic way of modeling insanity in GURPS. There are already Fright Checks which represent single intense exposures, but I can't really find anything to represent a gradual descent into madness.

Then, I looked over the radiation rules, which if you replaced radiation exposures with insanity exposures, might work well.

It's really just to represent that insanity doesn't just cause specific problems for a specific event, it's the accumulated hell that you've experienced throughout your life. Since 10% of the exposures to insanity inducing events don't heal, future exposures continuously become harder and harder to resist.

In a way, someone with a lot of unhealed accumulated "insanity rads" could represent someone with a permanent PTSD. Someone who goes to Vietnam could accumulate a single huge exposure from constant psychologically damaging events to the extent that he never fully recovers. He might be able to heal from the Illness caused by the exposure roll, but some stressful event in the future might bring everything back.

The only issue I see is deciding what the effects of failed rolls would be (you would have to replace all the radiation illnesses with psychological illnesses) and how much "rads" a certain event would cause in damage.

[dfinlay]

Have you looked at GURPS:Horror? There are Stress and Derangement rules that do something similar, as well as the madness checks charts.

[Peter Knutsen]

I tend to think of the simulation of the loss and recovery of "SAN", Sanity, as being much more about stimuly strength versus resistance (analogous to weapon damage vs armour DR) than about "accumulated dosage", and with particular attention paid to characters becoming "hardened" towards particular kinds of stimuli, e.g. your first Undead encountered will be freakin' scary, but after you've met and survived five Vampires you should realistically be somewhat resistant to Sanity loss from meeting Undead and particularly resistant to meeting Vampires.

That's based on a desire to simulate realistic Sanity loss from encountered horrors (and other causes of realistic Sanity loss), though, rather than any interest in so-called "cosmic" unrealistic horrors, ones that exert a parapsychological rather than (or in addition to) a psychological effect on the victims. That never made any sense to me, so I wouldn't know how to best simulate it. Something much like accumulated dosage might in fact be optimal.

[Flyndaran]

But the way that most people deal with continued emotional stress is through short term effective but long term self destructive coping mechanisms.
Putting a dimmer switch on all emotions, callousness, compulsive calming behaviors, etc.

[Refplace]

I also recommend the rules in Horror.
I did use Radiation rules for SAN loss and it was ok but I prefer Horror.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

But the way that most people deal with continued emotional stress is through short term effective but long term self destructive coping mechanisms.
Putting a dimmer switch on all emotions, callousness, compulsive calming behaviors, etc.

Yes. Continued emotional stress needs to be simulated too.