How does one accurately portray the mental degradation that comes from killing another human or realizing you are doomed? I feel like it's very similar to SAN checks in Call of Cthulhu, but I was thinking more of designing a Sanity system for something like World War 1, where running through the jungle only to find a big anti-aircraft gun on the other side and the sudden realization that the air support you were going to relieve is doomed and you have no way to call them off. Plus, even if you do, you and your entire platoon are dead men without that support.
Everyone reacts to extreme stress in a different way so there's no real way to do it "right"
>>47806130
I like the multiple sanity meters system Unknown Armies uses. You've got five gauges: Violence, Helplessness, Isolation, Self and Unnatural. Every time you encounter a stress you have to roll to resist it. Succeed, you get a Hardened Mark, fail, you get a Failed Mark and have some sort of freak-out. Each stress has a rank from one to ten, if you have more Hardened Marks than the rank you automatically succeed. If you get to ten Hardened or five Failed in any gauge, your character goes some manner of insane based on whichever gauge it's in (so ten Hardened in Violence would make you a violent sociopath, while the same in Self would make you a personality-less robot. Five Failed in Violence would make you flinching at everything, while five in Self would make you completely unsure of your identity and probably develop a dissociative disorder). There are also roleplaying guides for how your character might act at any given level in each gauge. It's a neat little system.
>>47806381
OMG that sounds amazing. What would pic related be?
>>47806130
>How does one accurately portray the mental degradation that comes from killing another human or realizing you are doomed?
Imagine guy working the same dead end job just to get by, with no chance of promotion, no chance of better life. Imagine he eats trash food and is heavy smoker. He knows he shouldn't he has some general idea cardiovascular problems or ling cancer will probably kill him before he is 50, but he doesn't have enough willpower left to quit. Image he has been like this for couple years, more years than he wants to count. That's your man. Killing people is job just like any other, unless it drives you to quit early on, you get used to it, as a matter of fact you might get used to it so well you would have problems returning to peaceful society.
What actually breaks people is large sudden trauma, shell shock, witnessing whole villages getting wiped out. But routine of shooting at the other dudes day after day becomes just that, routine.
ITT: characters that have seen some shit.
Seconding UA Madness which is also found in the faster and more generic Nemesis. You can simply use Nemesis. It mods really well. Find guns and stuff in Godlike.
I'd rename the unnatural track into something like sense of reality and roll it for things like seeing the devastation of a fuel bomb up close or witnessing a nuclear explosion. Also roll for violence, etc.
See one tank crush a child? Roll violence and helplessness.
See 30 tanks advancing on your position in formation with no way to stop them? Roll helplessness and sense of reality.
Every time awe can displace revulsion and anger, add sense of reality to the roll.
And unless your scenario is uniquely suited to isolation, throw that track out. Nemesis already did. It's basically the 'stay with your party' track and hard to apply narratively.
>>47807564
Just reading this is fucking with me.
I'm stealing this. Thanks anon.
I was going to post something about the Humanity stat in oWoD but then I read about the UA stuff. I'd go with UA.
>>47807797
Nemesis is free. I think Greg has it up on Arcdream.com
>>47806130
it's different from person to person.
Some watch their mother and grandfather fade into death on cancers bead, and all they do is shrug their shoulders, drink themselves half comatose for a month straight only to go back to life as normal.
Others try to keep it together for years only to finally collapse due to some miniscule and only perceived problem,
still others will collapse outright and desintegrate on the spot.
the list goes on: It is a very personal thing.
Me? I did the first.
The other two I described where of close relatives I watched, after both grandfather and my mother died in quick succession to cancer.
You really can't predict it.
My Uncle was a Businessman, and he tried to soldier on, keep it together and try to remain professional. But he has been a lesser man ever since, weaker and more vulnerable, incapable of taking the stresses of leading a 150people company.
My father flipped totally and is dependend on female comfort, after my mother died, extremely emotional which he had never been before when I was growing up.
My brother just kinda acts like that shit never happened, total blank.
etc
etc
Oh, in regards to the killing:
I had watched my grandfather die and wither away for 6 months, spending the nights by his side, comforting him while he puked out his lungs.
My mother however got hit hard and fast. She asked the doctors to be euthanized, becuase she did not want to end like my grandfather. Naturally they refused. So I talked to her calmly, we sent my brother and father away, and then I suffocated her with a pillow upon her own request.
.
You just cannot predict how people will react or act.
>>47807970
Party van incoming
>>47808015
don't think so brah :) :D
>>47806130
Standardized rules for this sort of thing aren't really accurate. People react to death and suffering in a lot of different ways. PTSD and other stress related illnesses are obviously common, but plenty of people can come out the other end relatively unscathed. Other people come out worse than most. Moreover, prior experience doesn't really temper how people turn out as much as you'd expect. A kid who grew up in a broken home in a rough neighbourhood might crack the first time he sees someone blown the fuck up, and a mild mannered school teacher who's never been in a fistfight before might be shockingly unfazed.
I served as an infantryman in Iraq 04-05. I feel no remorse over shooting enemy combatants who were trying to kill me and my buddies. Most haunting are friendly KIAs and innocents.
>>47808123
this, tbqh, is the worst.
Normies can't relate, but one day out doing MOUT in some improvised containervillage on some range shooting blanks in a confusing situation, and suddenly maybe they can understand how and why it happens and why it's so crazy in combat.
>>47807564
Another approach that is more applicable to character history and dissociation than tracking details of trauma is found in the new CoC7.
San loss has stages: an immediate effect, a lasting less severe effect, possible indefinite effects, and ways to deal with them.
The immediate effect is fun. Particularly because you can delay it. You can have the character run screaming or whimpering in a corner, but you can also keep them going until the party goes to bed and then describe how they wake up the next day with mud on their feet, blood on their hands, and no memory of what happened.
Then you can use that character's perception to describe something wrong. For instance describe how they spy out a bar and explain how everyone in there looks shifty and on the edge of violence, distrustful of strangers, and possibly ready to murder them. Then when the others come in it's a normal place with normal people doing normal things. Players can roll to dispel such an episode if they suspect it, but they risk more san loss.
The sheet has detailed information about the character background in bullet points or short sentences. Things like important people, memories, locations, items, or assumptions are written down. With a san trauma the keeper gets to rewrite one. This can even go so far as to include other PCs. Remember that watch your dead gave you on his death bed? It's been missing for years. You are now sure that the other character stole it!
It's very narrative and offers a lot of ideas how to mess with characters (and players). It doesn't provide so much of a readout of how the character is doing at any given time like the Madness Meter, CoC only has the single SAN number. But it's no longer a mere countdown but a vivid way to flesh out character decay/development.
San is regained by beating back the supernatural (finishing a scenario), beating creatures in combat, spending quality time with loved ones/beverages, or consulting a professional.
>>47806130
Read memoirs from the Iran-Iraq war, those who gunned down the human wave assaults.
>You just want throw your weapon away, you want to scream "These are human beings!"
>>47808729
That is also why most propaganda artists try to dehumanize the enemy.
>>47806130
> the mental degradation that comes from killing another human
What?
This doesn't happen. At most it's temporary and like 30% of people don't experience it at all.
> realizing you are doomed?
Men and women react differently to that.
Men will try to find SOMETHING of value to accomplish
Women will try to protect their children or their husbands
Or both will just flail around in a blind panic.
>>47806381
Q. Are there any guides on how to roleplay if IRL you've only experienced one of the extremes?
I literally can't feel any negative effects due to isolation unless I've been given hallucinogenics.
Cultural differences are everything here.
The doomed warrior is an ancient pagan meme that survived well into Christianity, and it somehow conferring insanity as the norm is a novel idea. Men were expected to grab their balls and go down with the ship, as it were, and that being the culture, that's usually what they did; instead of freaking out and going into shock.
So too is the cultural prejudice that killing other humans is inherently bad – while the idea isn't new, it's acceptance as normal in mass culture is.
I like to to use the example of two great literary works about the first world war. All Quiet on the Western Front portrays war as horrible, intolerable, meaningless. Storm of Steel depicts war as sad, but what duty requires; not meaningless, and sometimes even glorious.
Here's the difference: All Quiet on the Western Front was written by a rear-echelon man who barely saw combat before sitting out the rest of the war. Storm of Steel was written by an infantryman who lived on the front lines, returned to battle after being wounded, and repeatedly saw some of the thickest fighting in the war.
People who think war is inherently 'insane' are usually the people who have the least experience of it.
>>47807970
I didn't care much when my mother died.
I was self-reliant at that time, and I still had me, so her death wasn't particularly relevant.
If anything I was annoyed that I had to sort out her will. Such a pain in the ass. I hated THAT more than any sense of loss (which I didn't really get).
I don't understand why people get so caught up about life.
Life only has value because we believe it has value, or we assign it value. Purely virtual. Circular agument.
Why do people care about an "afterlife"? You die, you don't need an afterlife. Do what you can IRL for the other IRL people that come after you; what happens to you personally is irrelevant.
I also don't understand why so many people are against slavery, grooming, and mind-altering substances. I imagine it's related, but I don't see the value in human consciousness either.
>>47809194
>>47807970
>>47807564
>10 violence: Death has no intrinsic significance
But it doesn't. How is this a 10 and not a 0?
>8 unnatural: Things that average people consider "meaningless coincidences" strike you as deeply, intensely funny because you see the connections that they do not.
This is /pol/, and there is literally nothing supernatural about it.
>4 Failed Self: You feel like you're watching your every action from the outside. You have little or no sense of will or volition; it's as if you're a passive observer, along for the ride while your body goes through the motions
Isn't this literally how every single human being thinks and acts, though?
>6 self: People think you're lying even when you're telling the truth, and you can predict the actions of those close to you, but don't know how you feel about them
Huh. Guess I have 6 hardened self notches IRL.
>>47809312
"edgy" means you do things because they are shocking.
I do not do things because they are shocking.
I couldn't care less if things were shocking or not.
I say things because I believe them and I do things because they seem worthwhile.
What I'd like to know is WHY in fuck's name people find this stuff shocking.
Literally there is no reason to put value in the human life or human consciousness or human freedom or any of that!
You can put plenty of value in the things people do, but all the mindshit is just pure theoretical meaningless virtual circlejerkery.
>>47809452
Oh, you're hitting the nihilism phase, kid? That's cute. You'll get over it in a year or so as your need to have those questions answered leads you to eventually start answering them yourself, it's pretty natural.
>>47809452
Most people still run on a narrative-based mentality, not a phenomenalist/materialist one; because while science undermined the religious memes of narrative as inherent to reality, it has not yet (but expect it to as neural imaging improves) applied that scope of analysis to the mind directly.
Also, some people just value things like life, civilization, etc and find them worthwhile. And it's only natural to exert benign social pressure against free-riders who exploit those norms without contributing to uphold them.
>>47809378
>how is this a 10 and not a 0
because whether or not it's 'true', most sane people tend not to believe that.
>Isn't this literally how every single human being thinks and acts, though?
not unless you unironically use the word Sheeple
>>47809509
I'm 30! I'm not a kid! ^^
>>47809525
>Also, some people just value things like life, civilization, etc and find them worthwhile.
Well yes! Lives are very useful and civilization is very useful! Because they let you do all sorts of neat stuff like drive fast cars and play tabletop games and build huge cities and plant your flag on the moon!
> And it's only natural to exert benign social pressure against free-riders who exploit those norms without contributing to uphold them.
I'm not a free rider :[
The reason I want to overthrow all this "muh agency" stuff is because people often make bad decisions and end up wrecking themselves, and those around them! Take womens' voting patterns for example. I want people to not do that, and instead to do stuff that builds buildings and plants flags on moons.
So if someone, by themselves, makes a bad decision, then can't society as a whole make decisions FOR them?
Why do we cling to the whole "Your life and your mind and your consciousness and your personality and your choices and your feelings belong to YOU" mentality,
when we could be doing a lot better off if we worked together with that stuff?
>>47809651
>not unless you unironically use the word Sheeple
To use the word "sheeple" implies there is an alternative, i.e. that "sheeple" is different to "people".
Thus I do not use the word "sheeple". "people" will do.
It is important to note that I am a person ("sheep") myself. But I'm an intelligent sheep, with different ideas of morality and ethics to the other sheep!
>>47810290
People nowadays think human beings are separate - that "You" stop at the edge of your skin, and other people don't overlap with "You".
This isn't true! We share our ideas, and our ideas are an important part of us.
So there's a part of me in everyone I talk to. And a part of everyone I talk to in me, as well.
"You" overlaps with other "you"s.
But we can't make the full use of this when everyone's stubbornly "muh right to my own personality" and shit.
>>47810290
>Why do we cling to the whole "Your life and your mind and your consciousness and your personality and your choices and your feelings belong to YOU" mentality, when we could be doing a lot better off if we worked together with that stuff?
We used to, in the agricultural era; because it worked.
In the industrial era...it no longer works as well. The benefits are smaller while the drawbacks are much higher.
And values differ. In order to minimize conflict, the hope is that by only enforcing the lowest-common-denominator of values, destruction to any given set of ideals will be minimized.
That obviously hasn't worked out (the "market of ideas" turned out to be white culture, not universal; diversity turned out to increase conflict, not reduce it, etc) but it was a good idea for the time and it doesn't have failure modes such as"purge the kulaks" that collectivism succumbs to.
This was a thread with potential, but it became a blog. /r9k/ would be so proud.
>>47810783
>potential
Nah. False Premise threads are always pathetic. How Do I GM My Own Worldview threads are even more pitiful. This one was actually improved by the unironic humour of that "things must be stupid if even a monumental intellect like mine can't understand them" kid.
You're not wrong about the /r9k/ thing, though ...
>>47806130
Why is the PaK88 the sexiest fucking gun around?
>>47811590
Errr, Flak 41
>>47806130
On my 2nd deployment, my company got stationed on an outpost about 7 miles north of Camp Fallujah. Outpost Delta, it was a tiny compound in a little town named Al-Karmah. Hostile as fuck. Ex Republican Guard Snipers; lots of former professional soldiers with military equipment. It was rough, we got beat up pretty bad before we were able to get things under control.
Anyways, guys started to crack, including myself. We had guys refusing to go on patrol. Guys crying, unable to sleep. Guys fighting each other. One kid took a walk off a 25' high roof and broke his leg just to get out of there.
I developed some kind of OCD that still hasnt gone away (this deployment was 06-07).
The first I remember realizing something wasnt right was when we'd come back from a patrol or mission, Id have to check the .50 or 240 over, and over, and over. And over. I would be out there for an hour just making sure it was cleared.
Then Id have to check my m4 at random times making sure my mag was locked and loaded properly, or making sure it was clear (if we were back). I would be on patrol, in the turret, fucking with the ammo belt or fucking with my m4.
A constant, unquenchable feeling that something wasnt right. And that Id either have a malfunction that would cost someone their life - or that Id have a negligent discharge and kill someone at the OP.
Then it progressed to literally everything. My shoelaces. My belt, gloves. The velcro on my body armor. I was constantly and obsessively fidgeting and checking my shit. And I would sometimes be talking to myself as I did it. Eventually my platoon Sergeant had me go stay at Camp Fallujah and see medical staff. I was embarrased as fuck and spent a week there before going to straight to the Battalion Sgt. Major and asking if I could get back to my unit. I went back the next day and just powered through the rest of the deployment. But 9 years later I still have to check stuff like light switches, doorknobs, silverware, etc.
>>47811841
So I know that was a long rambling mess, but maybe you can take something from it that you can use.
This pic was taken before my first patrol. Im on the left.
>>47811613
Because Germany made so many variations of it you can easily pick one that suits you.
