Sanity Meter: Difference between revisions
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Some games will try to measure [[Karma Meter|how bad or good you're being]], on the basis that the game is set in a moral universe. This ain't one of those games. ''[[Cosmic Horror|This]]'' is one of those games where [[Reality Is Out to Lunch|the very nature of reality is mutable]], there are [[Eldritch Abomination|''things'']] out there beyond human imagining that mean us ill, and [[Mind Rape|you've encountered several of them first hand]]. After a while, that's ''really'' going to wear on a person...
Ergo, the
[[Disney Owns This Trope|"Sanity Meter in video games" is, by the way,]] [http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?patentnumber=6935954 patented] [[Disney Owns This Trope|by]] [[Nintendo]], the publishers of ''[[Eternal Darkness]]''.
{{examples}}
== Tabletop Games ==
* ''[[Call of Cthulhu (tabletop game)]]'' pretty much [[Trope Maker|pioneered]] the Sanity Meter. Each character starts with some measure of Sanity out of 100. When encountering a Mythos horror, or something just plain horrific, they roll their Sanity score. If they succeed, they roll to see how many of a smaller amount of Sanity points they lose; if they fail, they roll to see how many of a ''larger'' amount of Sanity points they lose (e.g., "roll for 1d6/1d20 SAN"). SAN points can be regained through psychotherapy and successful adventuring, but learning more about the Mythos ''permanently'' decreases your maximum Sanity. In fact, it is absolutely impossible to learn everything about the mythos without your SAN falling to 0
** A form of
** In another take on Lovecraft RPGs, Trail Of Cthulhu, the
** Parodied in ''[[Toon the Cartoon Role Playing Game]]''. One of the settings in the ''Tooniversal Tour Guide'' supplement is "[[Parody Names|Crawl of Catchooloo]]", where exposure to the eldritch but otherwise strait-laced minions of the Elderly Gods drives the 'toon PCs ''sane'' (since they're already crazy to begin with). Sane PCs become boring, unremarkable characters with pointlessly dull interests.
** ''[[Arkham Horror]]'', being [[Cthulhu Mythos]] [[The Board Game]], also makes use of sanity rules. Seeing monsters and casting spells are the primary cause of sanity loss, but many encounters can also trigger it. Being reduced to zero sends you to Arkham Asylum ([[Batman: Arkham Asylum|not that one]]) with some items lost. (Before long, you'll regain enough Sanity to leave ... but you'll be back. Oh yes. This game takes ''hours.'')
* ''[[Pandemic Legacy|Pandemic: Cthulhu]]'', a board game which uses the mechanics of ''Pandemic'' to represent a groundswell of cult activity that threatens to end the world, gives each player four sanity tokens. These may be lost any number of ways, and can be regained in a far fewer number of ways.
* ''[[Changeling: The Lost]]'' has a Clarity rating for its characters. Unlike the standard [[Karma Meter
** There is also the fact that in all of the gamelines, when the [[Karma Meter]] decreases, a charecter has to roll to determine if they gain a Derangement. The Storyteller is advised to select a Derangement appropriate to whatever caused the [[Karma Meter]] to decrease.
* ''[[Exalted]]'' has the Limit meter, which measures mental and emotional stress. Max it out, and it drops back down to zero...because you've just unleashed all that stress in an outburst of insanity that can last anywhere from a few hours to ''several months.''
** The Chimera rules in the Lunars book also work like this, only fused with a sort of mutation meter: if you undergo this break in the Wyld, and you're a Lunar without moonsilver tattoos, you gain a permanent point of Limit. By about five or six, Lunars with tattoos will try to kill you on sight. When it hits ten, your mind and body are both reduced to screaming madness.
* Palladium's RPG system has a [https://web.archive.org/web/20080510145926/http://www.mymegaverse.org/Games/Mechanics/Palladium/House/hf.shtm horror factor] stat for how monsters affect your sanity, simply by looking at them.
* The ''[[Dungeons
** In second edition, when Ravenloft first became a full-fledged campaign setting, Fear, Horror, and Madness were added to the ''five'' saving throw categories. In third, they became extensions of Will saves.
* The Madness Meters in ''[[Unknown Armies]]''. There are five; Isolation, Helplessness, Violence, Self, and The Unnatural. Depending on how well you roll when confronted with triggers, you either fill them with a Failed notch, or a Hardened notch. The more Failed notches you gather, the more likely you are to break down crying when you experience a trigger; the more Hardened notches you gather, the more immune you become to the trigger (to the point where a character with all Hardened notches in their Violence meter becomes a sociopath who doesn't really see the problem with carving a guy's face off with a potato peeler, and is only vaguely aware that others might not feel like he does).
* ''[[Vampire: The Masquerade]]'' has a Humanity meter for vampires, which the lower it becomes increases the chance that a character will Frenzy, causing them to lose all control and attack targets randomly (both enemy and friendly targets) until it fades away.
** A character's Humanity stat in the table game did much more than it did in Bloodlines. The Humanity stat for vampires is curious in that it did double duty as
** Low humanity vampires also found it excruciating to act in the day, had extreme difficulty in mimicking human physiology when it would help them (for example, warming your skin so a potential meal you were attempting to seduce wouldn't realize you were a corpse), and at Humanity Zero, a character would pretty much become a mad dog who had to be put down. Many princes of the Camarilla (the "less evil" faction) would put a vampire down before Humanity 0
** The game also featured alternative moral systems which were horrifying and outright evil by pretty much anyone's standards, but kept the Beast at bay. Such characters dove headfirst into being monsters to avoid becoming berserk, mad killing machines. For examples, one path says [https://web.archive.org/web/20120511150706/http://wiki.white-wolf.com/worldofdarkness/index.php?title=Path_of_Night be God's personal scourge], another mandates you should [https://web.archive.org/web/20120511150819/http://wiki.white-wolf.com/worldofdarkness/index.php?title=Path_of_Power_and_the_Inner_Voice be a ruthless bastard] with [[Chronic Backstabbing Syndrome]], and a third suggests you become an [https://web.archive.org/web/20120511150618/http://wiki.white-wolf.com/worldofdarkness/index.php?title=Path_of_Bones emotionless killer and student of death]. Characters on these paths used very dark [[Blue and Orange Morality]] to remain less insane than the beast.
** [[Vampire The Dark Ages]] featured alternate paths than Humanity which would be similar to Humanity and served a similar purpose. For example, the [http://whitewolf.wikia.com/wiki/Road_of_Heaven Road of Heaven] put religious duties first, human ethics second, but the overlap between them was very high. Such a character fought the Beast with their faith.
* ''[[Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay]]'' and''[[Warhammer 40,000 Roleplay]]'' (except ''[[
** In ''[[Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay]]'' you need to make a willpower roll for every Insanity Point you gain above 5; failure on this roll or reaching 12 insanity points resets your points to 0 and gives you a major derangement that will cripple or render your character unplayable right off the bat. On average, a bad roller will get two-three insanity points per session; double that estimate for a magic user. Unless you have a Gold Wizard, a very lucky brain surgeon or a Priest of Shalliya amongst your list of friends, insanities and insanity points are incurable.
** ''[[
* The attempt to make a ''[[Wheel of Time]]'' RPG based on 3rd Edition [[Dungeons
▲* The attempt to make a ''[[Wheel of Time]]'' RPG based on 3rd Edition [[Dungeons and Dragons]] rules had this for male channeler characters. As male channelers eventually go insane, each time the character gains a level or uses too much power, he has to roll a die to determine how much sanity he loses. There was also a table laying out what psychoses the characters should manifest at what levels of sanity.
* While [[GURPS]] doesn't have a sanity meter in the basic game (though it's very easy to add one, considering the system), it does include Fear checks whenever a PC encounters something particularly or personally terrifying. The basic game includes a massive table of effects that can be caused by fear, from becoming somewhat shaky to falling into a coma.
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** ''[[Haunting Ground]]'' has a very similar concept. If Fiona reaches "panic mode", she becomes disoriented and cannot be well controlled by the player (to the point where the entire screen goes monochrome and disables use of the inventory/item menu).
** ''Clock Tower: The First Fear'' has this too, but it is slightly different in that it simply causes you to trip more frequently and makes traps more likely to kill you.
* The Nightmares quality in ''[[Echo Bazaar]]'' is an inverted sanity meter - it starts at zero, and increases as you go through particularly horrific experiences. At eight you [[Go Mad
** Once you [[Go Mad
* ''[[Elona]]'' has a sanity stat. It is, however, mistranslated and actually a measure of insanity, as the healthiest possible level is 0. As it increases you are more vulnerable to effects that cause the insanity status which causes you to lose control of your character.
* ''[[Eternal Darkness]]'' brings the
* ''[[Fahrenheit (2005 video game)]]'' has a
** Tyler gets one moment at the end of the game, {{spoiler|where he has to choose between his duty to the NYPD, or his long-time girlfriend that he loves who is leaving the rapidly freezing north for Florida. Interestingly, regardless of which choice you take, his sanity meter gets dinged (taking about a 50% loss if he leaves, and a whopping 95% crash is he stays). In both cases, it's entirely irrelevant, however: he's never seen again.}}
* For an incredibly early (perhaps the earliest?) example, check out Domark's 1985 ''[[Friday the 13th]]'' on the Commodore 64, Amstrad and Spectrum (it's nothing like [[Friday the 13th (video game)|the NES version]]). The game has a sanity/fear meter that raises as the game goes on. It's represented as a kid's head, with the hair starting to stand on end as you get more frightened. If the meter maxes out, you die of fright... this almost never happens in-game, but it does increase the chances of seeing hallucinations (a pile of skulls covered in blood, someone with a machete through their head, etc) accompanied by a blood-curdling scream. Surprisingly effective for 16-colour graphics!
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[[Category:Game Tropes]]
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