Sanity Meter: Difference between revisions

** 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 [http://www.mymegaverse.org/Games/Mechanics/Palladium/House/hf.shtm horror factor] stat for how monsters affect your sanity, simply by looking at them.

** 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).

** ''[[Dark Heresy]]'' has a 0-100 score on insanities: You automatically start getting some minor derangements once you get over 30, with the number and severity increasing for every 10 over that. Once you reach 100, your character is unplayable. Unlike in ''WFRP'' insanity can actually be a ''good'' thing as it makes you more resistant to fear: A character with more than 80 insanity points can stare down an [[Eldritch Abomination]] without much trouble, but at that point the voices in his head will already be doing far worse to him on a daily basis. On average, a session of Dark Heresy is about six-eight insanity points for an unlucky roller, with about two-three more per session for being or standing too close to a psyker. Insanity points can be bought off during reconciliation time for about 100 XP a point.

**''[[Only War]]'' has a similar (if not the same) mechanic as Dark Heresy.

* 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.

 

** ''[[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.

* ''[[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 Sanity Meter to video games. If it starts going low enough, you experience hallucinations; if it drains entirely, you take damage whenever a monster sees you. These hallucinations include [[Breaking the Fourth Wall]], reciting Hamlet, healing spells that backfire and cut you in half, and most interestingly, [[Interface Screw]]s such as game resets, cranking down the volume, switching to another video input, or "deleting" your savegames instead of saving.

[[Category:Video Game Interface Elements]]

[[Category:Game Tropes]]