Modelling psychological damage

[coronatiger]

Several methods have been suggested for modelling some kind of mental or psychological damage.

The fright check table either gives temporary effects (stunned for X time, running away etc.) or permanent Disadvantages or Quirks. This is all related to fear of some kind, and may not be appropriate in all situations.

Corruption points turn characters gradually more evil, and can result in nasty Disads eventually, but I would argue that they model spiritual damage, not psychological.

Another method is to lower Will (temporarily, and possibly only for defensive rolls) after an unpleasant incident, to reflect the vulnerability of traumatized individuals.

Similarly, Self Controll rolls for certain Disads may be lowered to increase the chance of them triggering.

Other games/systems use some kind of mental hit points, often called Sanity Points, to model mental damage. The obvious way to port this into GURPS would be to base SP on Will the same way FP is based on HT and HP is based on ST. If you take only a couple points of SP damage, you suffer no ill effects, but if you cross certain thresholds, something might happen, just like with FP and HP.

What other methods have you come across?

[Varyon]

If you weren't previously aware of it, this thread may be of use to you.

[Gumby Bush]

Originally Posted by coronatiger

Several methods have been suggested for modelling some kind of mental or psychological damage.

...

Other games/systems use some kind of mental hit points, often called Sanity Points, to model mental damage. The obvious way to port this into GURPS would be to base SP on Will the same way FP is based on HT and HP is based on ST. If you take only a couple points of SP damage, you suffer no ill effects, but if you cross certain thresholds, something might happen, just like with FP and HP.

...

It has been ported to GURPS: "Mad as Bones" in Pyramid #3/103: Setbacks. Sanity Points are based on IQ, the way HP are based on ST, though rolls against Will are used to avoid taking SP loss.
Thresholds are akin to FP's thresholds.

It might be interesting to try applying other resource tracking methods to sanity: Control Points' count-up with thresholds or Conditional Injury's effect-based system, for instance.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Gumby Bush

It might be interesting to try applying other resource tracking methods to sanity: Control Points' count-up with thresholds or Conditional Injury's effect-based system, for instance.

Another accounting system: the Threshold-Limited Magic system from pp. 76-79 of Thaumatology looks as if it could readily be adapted to sanity.

[muduri]

Not too divergent, I’ve been using SP coming off of IQ*, with a split box for “short-term” (recovers 1 per day) and “long-term” (recovers 1/year, or more with psychoanalysis or shamanism). Temporary madness when you hit 0 short-term. When there’s a resistance roll for half damage from a necromantic madness spell or some such, a fail causes 10% long-term as well. So some poor PCs are down at long-term SP of like 6—makes fright checks and life-draining undead quite threatening! Theoretically you’d be out of the game at 0 long term but no one’s gotten there yet. I concede the split box, not to mention tracking tenths of sanity, are inelegant but the system’s been fun.

* Technically I split off “wit” (WT) as a fifth basic attribute—That Other Game has a funny gravitational pull sometimes—and SP is the secondary to WT rather than IQ.

[cptbutton]

Originally Posted by Varyon

If you weren't previously aware of it, this thread may be of use to you.

This one might be also:

Psychological stress

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by cptbutton

This one might be also:

Psychological stress

Huh. The mind, it works in strange ways - I remember commenting in that thread but at the time didn't even consider the thread I linked earlier in this one (although it would have been useful to bring up there), and then this time I had no recollection of the alien thread but remembered having come up with a barebones system in the thread I linked (indeed, the way I found that was to search for instances of me using the word "sanity" in posts).

[Refplace]

Another is the Long Term Fatigue option from GURPS After The End.