Fright check phobias, Call of cthulhu like in GURPS

[Black Leviathan]

I like Call of Cthulhu, it's a fun genre specifically for going insane and playing progressively more insane characters. Its not very realistic. While you can have long-lasting emotional trauma from a single shocking incident that could result in a mental disorder it is also typically coupled with losing your **** for seconds or minutes or even hours, of emotional fugue, much like the Fear Check Table. Realistically the things that will break your brain will also be so emotionally overwhelming that you can't function through them.

Also you don't typically go crazy from seeing a monster or else there'd just be psychologist's lined up with couches outside of every Halloween haunted house. Trauma-induced disorders usually come from prolonged states of stress. In order for a single event to impact you extremely it has to happen at a time when you're emotionally vulnerable or be insanely traumatizing like dropping into an uncontrolled freefall while your airplane is on fire and having friends and loved ones dying traumatically around you.

If you are geared up for fighting warlocks, and go to fight warlocks and one of them throws a ball of fire at you, it's not going to cause you to become OCD, unless you're already on the edge of inanity. However if a warlock turns your spouse into a dog, the strain of dealing with that reality long term really should break you or at least force some coping mechanism on you.

[joppeknol]

Thanks for all the suggestions. It was an published COC adventure and I played it, except for the conversion, pretty straight by the book. I agree on the comments that the great old ones normally see us as insects and don't really care if we live or die.

Even then, a -10 on a fright check means that every normal person is probably down, which to me doesn't seem like fun. It is also much harsher than the CoC rules (one of the reasons to use GURPS instead of CoC, was that I thought that CoC makes investigators too weak).

I think I'll go with the 'add X to fright check table' suggestion. So my Monster would have 'fright check -3, effect +10'.

I also like the proposed house rules. I will discuss it with my players.

[Plane]

What about something like a randomized penalty? Say instead of -7 to Fright Checks it inflicts a -2d to fright checks (rolling separately for each target), so the lucky guys who only get a -2 probably will pass their checks, while the unlucky guys who get a -12 will probably not only fail them, but go beyond the "stunned" results into the "disadvantages" results. Having -4d to rolls instead of -14 would emphasize that even more.

[Dalin]

Originally Posted by Plane

What about something like a randomized penalty? Say instead of -7 to Fright Checks it inflicts a -2d to fright checks (rolling separately for each target), so the lucky guys who only get a -2 probably will pass their checks, while the unlucky guys who get a -12 will probably not only fail them, but go beyond the "stunned" results into the "disadvantages" results. Having -4d to rolls instead of -14 would emphasize that even more.

That sounds fun. I want to play in that game!