Author: Cpl Ferro (---.sympatico.ca)
Date: 07-25-2003 09:18
I had a discussion with a woman from Gamer Chick Planet months ago, about the Phoenix Command Mental Damage System I wrote, and she brought up this Madness Meter business. In continuance, I submit my thoughts on the concept of gaming insanity here.
I run my games using an augmented Phoenix Command Combat System (PCCS), making it the most complex beast of a system anyone I've ever known has ever used. Take this as within the practical upper range of complexity, or crunchiness.
I've tried importing other games' sanity systems, but they felt too simple, too linear, and didn't jive with the grit-under-the-fingernails feel of PCCS. So, I studied some choice fright-films, and set out making my own system, on the premise that if combat could be so finely detailed, mental health could be too, at least in terms of tracking the curve. The actual specificities of madness would have to remain a function of the character personality, as the only realistic specific madness table would be the DSM-IV.
My difference with the Madness Meter, though, is in the idea of how a person becomes a psychopath. I don’t agree that a person will necessarily become hardened in a certain way. A heart has to choose to harden itself, at some point, and it’s this choice that I retain in terms of human free will, not in terms of a dilemma.
To that end I split the system into mental damage versus moral fitness. Mental damage is resisted by the person’s natural presence (here, the Leadership stat, termed Power in C.o.C.) augmented by his learning ability and his moral fitness. Moral fitness, as civilised concern for all mankind as a sacred species, helps a person resist ghastly spiritual insults which would otherwise drive a man, were he a mere primate, back into the jungle, raving mad. But moral fitness is tied to the player’s own decisions in the game; he can increase it. Freely acting like a psychopath, gives the game a moral limiter, by putting a cap on the character’s moral fitness. A psychopath will be naturally shakier, more animalistic, when resisting mental shock, because he has no /reason/ to resist it.
The notion of being hardened to things, I put in a separate category; think of a soldier, growing numbed to carnage. In the MDS, I treat it as an anti-phobia: additional shocks are muted. The idea of either becoming a killer, or going insane, is a false moral choice: if the mental damage is intense enough, he will go insane to a degree anywhere from shell shock to gibbering in a rubber room, but numbing oneself to shock is not the same as becoming less morally fit.
True psychopathy is in essence, permanent Satanic possession, or possession of a spirit of evil. This is not a supernatural thing (though in RPGs it can be – the rules in the MDS are the same), but instead spirits, like a spirit of benevolence, etc.. The spirit waits until the human personality is off-balance, has been jarred into insanity by a shock, perhaps by self-inflicted shocks like obsession with murder simulators, animal torture, and the like. That’s when the rules for possession come into play, at which point a mind so brainwashed can flip into this schizophrenic, psychopath personality to greater (Jeffrey Dalhmer) or lesser (Robert Steinhauser) degrees. The key is, the decisions to /be evil/ up until that point, /do not make a psychopath/. Rather, they help destroy one’s humanity, like a destroyed immune system, to the point that being possessed by a psychopathic spirit becomes a glib option.
The overall differences between the two are twofold. First, the MDS treats the subject in a crunchy fashion, trying to evoke its intricacies just as other crunchy systems do for combat. The philosophy is similar: if the subject is interesting, and the game is akin to the fright-genre, then a complex system can work. And second, the MDS treats the subject as inextricable from real-life morality, that humanity as a trait is identical to morality, and thus the opposite of humanity is animality, to the extreme of Satanic possession, as animal lust and wrath. The Madness Meter is more in vogue, because it conflates psychopathy with inuring, making for an interesting choice, portable to the typical existential RPG setting.
This second difference is perhaps best shown using Lovecraft’s mythos. The MDS is premised on the rationality of the universe, the existence of a cognitive God, and so on. Were the Mythos true, then a single point of shock, the equivalent of stubbing your toe in PCCS, actually assimilated and understood, would act like an acid, eventually corroding one’s entire sanity. If true chaos existed in the universe, there can be no partnership with it in the mind; it is the equivalent of cyanide for the rational mind. The Madness Meter, as an example of an existentialist design philosophy, predicates on the idea of moral relativism to begin with, and thus, is really not dealing with sanity at all, but merely clashing mental fashions, for everyone in an existential universe is already equally sane/insane, there being no universal standard.
Hopefully, then, some, rare types will find the MDS useful. I know it has already come it quite handy and fascinating in my own Gamma World campaign. It turns out, usually, that it’s the little things that get you – a hundred little stresses building up, so that one bad thing happens when the character is in a delicate state, he cracks.
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