Fragile Minds needs tweaking to capture Cosmic Horror

[prestonp]

I just played a converted Call of Cthulhu game using Spycraft with Fragile Minds. IMHO, the D20 system is far better than the the system CoC uses, and Spycraft seems to be the only one left supporting the modern setting, so it seemed a logical choice.

The thing is that the sanity system in CoC is supposed to document a slowly building mental trauma as you attempt to grapple with mind blasting insanity and Fragile Minds just doesn't capture that. Using the "Shock and Dread" portion of Fragile Minds calls for taking taking up to 3d6 points of stress damage for witnessing impossible strangeness (two moons in the sky, time travel, talking animals, etc). But the stress rules say that stress damage totals under double your wisdom score heal at the rate of one point every 10 minutes. So if your a modern person with a conventional understanding and an alien shows up and takes you back in time for a bit before depositing you at your office, you'll be freaked out for a couple of hours or so. Which seems to really trivialize the entire thing.

Long story short, stress damage heals far too quickly to really get any use out of the system. Thoughts on how to fix that?

[Sletchman]

Just off the top of my head - give suitations of extreme strangess lingering stress damage, make it's healing increment one higher then normal.  So someone with under double their wisdom would heal a point per hour, meaning it takes a day and a bit to get over the event.  Perhaps even have them forced to seek therapy, giving them a kind of perminant stress base line for extreme strangeness [but I'd reserve that for serously wrong things, mess you up for life kinda stuff].  Also have lots of table of sproing, the stress "damage" might be gone, but its effects are well and truly not.

[Crafty_Pat]

The easiest fix is to either a) halve all stress damage or b) double stress thresholds. The system as it stands takes the stance that while Spycraft characters are heroes they also live in the real world and are somewhat... fragile when it comes to grappling with impossible things. We also wanted to showcase the most brutal approach, as it's easier to scale back than forward. Either of these fixes should alleviate that, and you can use the "scale" of each stress threshold to gauge your characters' gradual slide into madness (3 of 7? He's a little spooked but still okay. 6 of 7? He's jumping at every shadow and about to crack.)

Happy investigations, and stay Crafty!

[prestonp]

I'm considering make stress damage heal only when one gets to spend time doing ones interests as opposed to automatically outside of combat. This would allow the stress damage to build up over the course of a the adventure, but allow for the character to heal more or less all of it after a couple of hours of fishing.

Thoughts?

[Krensky]

I'm considering make stress damage heal only when one gets to spend time doing ones interests as opposed to automatically outside of combat. This would allow the stress damage to build up over the course of a the adventure, but allow for the character to heal more or less all of it after a couple of hours of fishing.

Thoughts?

In that case, look at the R&R check under Resolve, if I remember right.

[prestonp]

I like the R&R check. Thanks for pointing that out. In response to the idea of simply doubling the amount of stress damage or halving the stress threshold categories, that would seem to present other problems without exactly fixing the one presented.

OK, time travel now does 6d6 of stress damage, which means if you happen to encounter time travel after which you witness a wizard casting a teleport spell for another 4d6 or so, your character has become after witnessing only two events. At the bottom end, if he wakes up and witnesses a river of blood flowing through the street he'd take 2d10 stress damage, from which he'd recover in three hours tops. Were he to then stumble upon the mutilated corpse of his partner, he'd take 4d6 of stress damage and, again, have recovered from it by the next morning.

The specific problem is that stress points are recovered too quickly, not that events do not cause enough stress damage or that the stress thresholds are not well designed. Attempting to tweak it by changing the amount of stress damage caused of the threshold level just seems to present other problems without fixing the main one.

Also, it seems like the R&R makes perfect sense, except that it doesn't account for the rapid rate of stress recovery  that characters will naturally get. Sure, if you're in your fourth or fifth threshold of stress damage, then a one hour check to recover 1d4 stress damage seems a good deal. If you're in your second threshold of stress damage, then taking an hour to attempt to relieve 1d4 stress damage is silly given that you'd recover 6 points of damage just doing other things, or possibly double that engaging in your interests.

As best I can tell, it's the quick recovery rates at the low thresholds that really wreck havoc on the stress system.

[Sletchman]

The rapid rates of recovery cover stress damage, not the effects of stress.  Your player suffers 6d6 stress [average of 21 points], which we're going to call more then their wisdom, but less then double.  They take their DC20 will save [and lets say they fail], and hit the table of sproing.  They could end up Terrified, Stupified, Paralyzed, Severely Depressed or even worse.  Some of these conditions last multiple missions, some for a few minutes, just as written - and you could certainly make it that they last until the player has downtime and psychological treatment.

Keep in mind the system tends to be set at a power level of about "special ops" - not average mopes strolling into an unknowable horror.  Also consider changing to the mastercraft style stress every time you take stress damage it's DC10 + half total stress damage [like an NPC damage save], that way the saves get considerably higher then the flat numbers in spycraft [our group was doing this long before fantasycraft came out, and it works great.  You just have to change a few effects that increase the characters stress threshhold, but that's pretty minor.

Sorry if that was rambling and jumped around a bit, hope it helps.

[TheAuldGrump]

I will say that when I was running Delta Green using Spycraft and Fragile Minds there was no shortage of rolls on the Table of Sproing. The very first mission ended up with several dead because of blown saves to Stress damage. Two were got by the Mysteriously Renamed Tree Creatures hiding in the swamp. In use they were much more like a combination of wolves and anemones than they were killer trees. One chased several members to where another was hiding, tentacles splayed over a 20' area....

There are circumstances where new shocks are coming at a faster rate than the mortal mind can deal with. (The best blown save was a three die critical failure... against a nonhostile creature. Yig in full glory, but not as the bad guy. )

The CSI: Arkham game has been much less Stressful, the team is encountering horror, not hurling themselves into horrors jaws.Finding victims of Spontaneous Human Combustion, but not generally bursting into flames themselves, that sort of thing. The PCs are very glad that the Arkham Police Department's health insurance covers full mental therapy.

The Auld Grump