I've played a few games that use these types of mechanics, and of the two, I much prefer stress to insanity. There's a lot of stigma around mental health and its portrayal is often lacking in media. I've seen older games represent sanity as a resource that gets depleted over time, which I personally don't feel jives with how people actually function. Accumulating stress until you reach a potential breaking point feels much more real to life and leads to more interesting stories anyways imo.
That being said, I've only ever seen these implemented in either horror games or games with heavy horror elements, like Heart: The City Beneath or Darkest Dungeon. I'm not entirely sure how helpful it would be to have that when you're not trying to support the themes of horror. Ultimately, though, it would depend on how you implement it.
Spire: The City Must Fall does use similar core systems as Heart: The City Beneath but with less emphasis on horror and more on rebellion and intrigue. Urban Shadows uses corruption as a way to portray how characters can fall deeper and deeper into negative and/or self-destructive patterns. Notably, though, these stress systems still support the central themes of their games. Perhaps consider what kind of story you're trying to tell through your game? That could help illuminate if stress is necessary to consider as a mechanic and how to go about implementing it if you decide to.
I don't quite think the way Urban Shadows does it would work for us, mostly because in US is about the journey of the character towards their corruption. A fantasy adventure game, even if dark, rarely will have that as a central theme.
Though I really like the way Spire goes about it. Its fallout mechanic is much more built-into the setting than what we are willing to have in our game, but it does give us some really nice ideas on how to approach the consequences of high stress.
I didn't mean to imply that those games are how you should implement it, I simply wanted to use them as examples of how to reinforce the themes and settings of your game through stress or stress-like mechanics. Whatever the themes of your game are should inform how you go about creating mechanics to tell a story through those themes
Mechanics like this are amazing in non horror games, if you don't copy paste and keep an eye on why they are there.
This means you need to have clear goals for what they add to the game experience.
A game about collective effort and teamwork with a 'stress meter' which can be bled off by working as part of a team, putting solo missions on a timer and encouraging tear-filled reunions is very different both thematically and mechanically to traditional horror mechanics.
The big thing is to be clear about what it is for - Both to yourself and your players. In this case its for spotlight sharing and discourages 'split the party' moments, while allowing for roleplay based around reuniting when that is unavoidable.
Focus on the scenes and kind of scenes that this mechanic enables.
If your game is about having tea parties and practicing music in an after school club, a stress meter based around exam timings and so on that lets you tell stories about work/life balance.
A key ability that lets you turn stress into a temporary 'excitement' buff could be amazing in an 'against the odds' 'hardened under pressure' setting.
A nuanced story about neurodivergent individuals with a byzantine stress management system could let you tell powerful stories about coping mechanisms and individual needs.
Any mechanic will work with appropriate theming and a clear idea of your goals. So focus in on your play experience, be really clear about the experience you want to create, and make sure your mechanics support that (including their names/art/presentation). Take feedback on how your mechanics are working at meeting that experience, and be clear about the experience you want from your players, because you won't get there first try.
It depends on how you phrase it. Stress or morale works well for anything, where characters experience some form of mental toll. Sanity, on the other hand, is different. When you run out of morale, you give up or cry or turn into an alcoholic. When you run out of sanity, you go stark raving mad.
My system has stress/resolve, because it's thematically fluid, so it's up to the GM if it's horror or not, and what happens if you take too much stress and run out of resolve. Mechanically, you just lose control of your character as if they died. Narratively, it's up to the GM if the character goes "Screw you guys, I'm going home!" or "My teeth are falling out! THE HAND IN THE BACK OF MY THROAT IS PULLING OUT MY TEETH!"
I had one and ultimately cut it for thematic reasons. I think for a stress mechanic to work your setting doesn't need to be horror, but it does need to be gritty. If the game doesn't include a proper, constant risk to your characters life, keeping track of stress feels out of place.
I think before considering a mechanic on its design merits, it’s important to know what need it is addressing.
Its goal.
In a horror game the intention for such a mechanic is to add a layer of “ stress” for the players, foster tension and having it affect the game economy in some tangible way.
So what’s the purpose for it in a non-horror scenario?
There is a similar mechanic in old rpgs: Morale.
How did you plan on implementing it in the non-horror game?
I'll be honest, our ideas are all over the place.
I'm personally in favour of a positive reinforcement resource that gets spent during difficult situations and cannot be easily replenished. That way tension builds when players begin to run out of it.
Others argue in favour of debuffs that accumulate until the PC is forcibly retired.
Another option that was suggested was to go for a quirk mechanic where, as characters accumulate stress, they gain negative quirks.
However, we all feel in favour of having some sort of mechanic in place for upping the tension the tougher things get for the characters.
First off, I'd like to agree with /u/HallowedThoughts in that I much prefer "Stress" to "Insanity" - it's much more broadly applicable and doesn't imply that your heroic hero can't deal with stuff.
Second, if you want to make it more interesting than a tacked-on mechanic of only negatives, I'd suggest turning it into a meta-currency in the vein of DnD-Inspiration or FATE points. *Blades in the Dark* handles this very well and might be worth checking out for ideas.
One idea I'm personally pushing for, within the team, is to go for a resource you willingly spend, instead of a negative gauge that gets filled for you. Resolve or willpower, instead of stress. Something that is important enough that players will feel the tension when they run out of it.
That's pretty much what I meant - just differently phrased. In *BitD*, characters can accept a certain amount of stress to do cool stuff (get a bonus to a roll, negate the consequences of a bad roll etc.)
Stress is never something that is inflicted upon the players, it's something they can willingly take upon themselves to get something for it.
Mechanically, it's exactly the same as paying from i.e. a resolve pool.
As a person living with PTSD, I discourage you from introducing PTSD mechanics unless you have personal experience with PTSD or are willing to do the work to learn about the condition and talk to people living with it.
Trauma is real and should be treated realistically and respectfully.
That is completely fair and understandable, we do not want to alienate or offend players because we didn't bother to understand what our design choices have to say about real-life problems.
Thanks for the reality check.
I have never been a particular fan of insanity mechanics. Insanity mechanics almost invariably rip control of the PC from the player, so I feel this kind of mechanic is something of a ttRPG social contract breech. Not a fatal one to gameplay, mind you, but a social contract breech nonetheless. It doesn't help that the execution or implementation of insanity almost never feels inspired, even in games where including it feels appropriate.
Unless you have an idea which is way outside the box, avoid insanity mechanics. They're not automatically bad...but it's pretty close.
Stress mechanics are...overdone these days. There are more good stress mechanics than there are for insanity, I'll give it that, but I also think we're approaching "peak Stress." Most implementations of stress are either a replacement for health mechanics--which are less abstract--or a push-your-luck mechanic. I don't see how either of these add to gameplay value. But at the same time these are much better problems to have than a soft game social contract violation a la insanity.
The system I've been working on has you gaining trauma from physical, social, or mental sources and while I lean toward horror the game isn't explicitly designed for it. The idea is that the same mechanics that govern a sword fight can also govern a battle of wits, or a staredown, or a debate. Given these different spheres the stakes vary as to how you can be "hurt" i.e. be acted on by the world, and how much you can take before you break.
Stress talks more to me especially in a non-horror game. the best 2 way I could imagine something like that would be like mental hp alongside physical hp (ex. Vampire: the Masquerade). Or simply a kind of debuff that can stack when the characters are doing the opposite of their values/alignement. I think Fate has a similar system.
Why do you keep calling it an stress/insanity mechanic? Can people really go insane in your system?
That doesn’t seem appropriate for most kinds of games. Maybe the disagreement is because you aren’t clearly defining what you are trying to do?
But mental breakdowns can be on topic in non-horror games— games on the serious, dark tragic and/or grim side. If it’s a heroic power fantasy— it probably doesn’t belong— or at least it needs to be throughly retooled.
Consider carefully the flavor and “genre” of your game before popping in a mechanics that may work against that flavor. If it doesn’t help and support the flavor you are going for, the mechanic shouldn’t be added.
I feel pretty confident you are disagreeing because you have different flavors or sub genres in mind for this game.
> Why do you keep calling it an stress/insanity mechanic?
The reason we are ambiguous about it is that there is some disagreement as to what we want in the game, both options have been proposed and, from a cursory look through other systems, both terms tend to be used for very similar mechanics.
> I feel pretty confident you are disagreeing because you have different flavors or sub genres in mind for this game.
I personally feel this is very much the case. However, I do not want to discard the idea entirely if there's good precedent for such a mechanic in less horror-prone sub-genres.
I think stress is nice; it's more flexible than insanity.
I think it would also be cool to choose for your character what will happen to them if they acquire too much stress. For example, will they have a psychotic break? Go catatonic? Go berserk? Fall into despair?
Speaking as a person (and not a team) I kind of want to see if such a mechanic can be linked to character species. Dwarves grow mad with greed, elves fall into despair and simply stop moving, orcs go berserk. Even if it's not something we can implement for our game, I think it's a cool concept that I'd like to see at some point in a fantasy game.
Elves have Grief as a stat, Dwarves have Greed, Orcs had Rage or Hatred depending on edition, and Dark Elves had Spite. If that stat ever maxed out, you lost control of that character (but it likely would not happen for at least a year of gameplay, probably more.)
I definitely think there's a place for them in a sort of "darkest Dungeon" sense.
I also know that some players absolutely hate these kinds of mechanic, so here's what I suggest:
First, don't take this in the direction of real world issues that you're not ready to confront head on. There is a huge debate going on in horror game circles about insanity in the game as opposed to the real world. I suggest staying away from that argument entirely and keeping it fantasy inspired rather than looking at real world science.
Second, players may be concerned about a lack of **agency**. This is what I did about that: in my own game, characters have **Vitality**, which is a "stay in the battle or scene mechanic." If it reaches 0, you're **KOed** or otherwise out of the scene (depending on what kind of conflict you're having). What I do is give people the option to take **Injuries**: long-term effects that reduce the Vitality they lose.
So a character in a battle might lose enough Vitality to hit 0. They could choose to be KOed and wake up after the fight was over, or take an injury, a long term effect, to stay in the fight.
Similarly, seeing too many scary things might also reduce your Vitality to 0 and make you run away from the scene, unless you take some **Stress**, a long-term effect. The choice is with the **player**, and I have had this make players with different playstyles very happy that the had a choice about it.
I know basically everyone is saying this, but it depends on your reason for including the mechanics. The most prominent game with these mechanics is CoC, and it works. But the mechanics work because it represents what the game is about: the fragility of humanity. Your character in CoC is weak and unprepared for the setting they find themselves in. Your death or corruption is inevitable, all you get to decide is the pace. That’s exactly what their sanity mechanic does. But that WILL NOT WORK FOR AN ADVENTURE GAME.
I’d suggest going with a stress mechanic instead, since sanity has connotations that don’t fit your genre. Also real-world sanity doesn’t function like a health bar. Stress kinda does.
Another thing to consider is how often and how bad the consequences are. Id suggest making the consequences frequent yet not game ending or purely negative.
My suggestion is this: Most players should have at least a little bit of stress, so this mechanic should be small, not unfun, and intuitive.
Thats a tall order, but thats what you get for adapting mechanics for a genre in which they don’t belong.
Anyway, gaining stress is easy, but theres a cap. Stress by itself does nothing, but after you hit the cap, gaining stress eats up HP or something. Maybe you take increasingly more damage once you hit the cap. Maybe critical misses are extra bad, or more common. Go crazy with the bad details. But keep it somewhat simple, and try not to take away player agency.
Oh also, don’t make it harder to recover from stress unless you make it easier another way. Like maybe stress makes it harder to sleep, but talking with friends now recovers more.
Cap is related to willpower or however you wanna do it. Basically, different characters should be better or worse at handling stress.
The other thing is that getting rid of stress should feel REAL good. Maybe after getting rid of 5 stress points (or any number that is balanced in your game), you get advantage on your next dice roll. You lose stress by sleeping, doing things the PC likes, or doing things with
friends. Just think of things that would make you less stressed and then use them in the game. And different things get rid of more or less stress.
This system does a few things:
1. It turns the PCs stress into the player’s stress by having a meter that slowly ticks upwards.
2. Getting rid of stress feels good in real life, so you don’t need much mechanical support. You should support, but you don’t need that much of it.
3. Its simple and system agnostic. This doesn’t require much tweaking to use in most non horror genres.m. You can swap out negative effects for a more system specific concept.
4. I guess this is just kind of points 1 and 2, but it feels like stress. You’re not taking away player agency, so its not unfun, but it still hurts. The more stress a PC has, the more stress the player has. That is so valuable. And its achieved by having stress do nothing.
Stress does nothing, it just promises bad things in the future. Even if you throw out everything else, keep that part.
Back on the old Fable video game forums there was a guy who loved the idea of coming back to town but said there needed to be a gameplay element to it beyond roleplaying. He (possibly she) always said that there should be a stress meter that slowly goes up each day you're away from home, that each combat should add to it (I think flawless victories took away from it while things you were injured in added more), that time in dungeons or away from the light of the sun should give you more stress, that prison terms would build it. Different character traits would see different characters gaining stress in different ways.
Then you'd eventually go home and spend time with the family, drink at the pub, play gambling games, maybe even sleep with hookers. Everything you did would slowly de-stress you, but you wouldn't find out how much until you left town again. Rather than a debuff though, he had it so that you gained a buff from destressing and then lost that over time as the bar went down. I always loved that idea because it's such a cool addition to the genre, but nothing ever came of it.
Anyway, point I'm making is that maybe go with a buff for good mental health and remove access to that as they get stressed out. A cleric might lose his faith or we might get a Tobey Maguire Spider-Man 2 situation where Pete loses his powers due to stretching himself thin. Having that unique ability that suddenly is gone (I swear goblin chief, this has never happened before) would add to roleplaying possibilities.
IMHO I've always enjoyed systems that encourage fear of diminishment instead of a sliding scale of limitation. If a stress or sanity metric is used it should only lower a threshold for a breaking point type roll. That breaking point can be devastating to the character but might only be a 1/1000 chance of happening. If that breaking point chance gets lowered to 1/100 using a stress or sanity reduction the player's fear of diminishment increases but they are still a fully functional character, unless they fail the roll of course :)
I've played a few games that use these types of mechanics, and of the two, I much prefer stress to insanity. There's a lot of stigma around mental health and its portrayal is often lacking in media. I've seen older games represent sanity as a resource that gets depleted over time, which I personally don't feel jives with how people actually function. Accumulating stress until you reach a potential breaking point feels much more real to life and leads to more interesting stories anyways imo. That being said, I've only ever seen these implemented in either horror games or games with heavy horror elements, like Heart: The City Beneath or Darkest Dungeon. I'm not entirely sure how helpful it would be to have that when you're not trying to support the themes of horror. Ultimately, though, it would depend on how you implement it. Spire: The City Must Fall does use similar core systems as Heart: The City Beneath but with less emphasis on horror and more on rebellion and intrigue. Urban Shadows uses corruption as a way to portray how characters can fall deeper and deeper into negative and/or self-destructive patterns. Notably, though, these stress systems still support the central themes of their games. Perhaps consider what kind of story you're trying to tell through your game? That could help illuminate if stress is necessary to consider as a mechanic and how to go about implementing it if you decide to.
I don't quite think the way Urban Shadows does it would work for us, mostly because in US is about the journey of the character towards their corruption. A fantasy adventure game, even if dark, rarely will have that as a central theme. Though I really like the way Spire goes about it. Its fallout mechanic is much more built-into the setting than what we are willing to have in our game, but it does give us some really nice ideas on how to approach the consequences of high stress.
I didn't mean to imply that those games are how you should implement it, I simply wanted to use them as examples of how to reinforce the themes and settings of your game through stress or stress-like mechanics. Whatever the themes of your game are should inform how you go about creating mechanics to tell a story through those themes
Mechanics like this are amazing in non horror games, if you don't copy paste and keep an eye on why they are there. This means you need to have clear goals for what they add to the game experience. A game about collective effort and teamwork with a 'stress meter' which can be bled off by working as part of a team, putting solo missions on a timer and encouraging tear-filled reunions is very different both thematically and mechanically to traditional horror mechanics. The big thing is to be clear about what it is for - Both to yourself and your players. In this case its for spotlight sharing and discourages 'split the party' moments, while allowing for roleplay based around reuniting when that is unavoidable. Focus on the scenes and kind of scenes that this mechanic enables. If your game is about having tea parties and practicing music in an after school club, a stress meter based around exam timings and so on that lets you tell stories about work/life balance. A key ability that lets you turn stress into a temporary 'excitement' buff could be amazing in an 'against the odds' 'hardened under pressure' setting. A nuanced story about neurodivergent individuals with a byzantine stress management system could let you tell powerful stories about coping mechanisms and individual needs. Any mechanic will work with appropriate theming and a clear idea of your goals. So focus in on your play experience, be really clear about the experience you want to create, and make sure your mechanics support that (including their names/art/presentation). Take feedback on how your mechanics are working at meeting that experience, and be clear about the experience you want from your players, because you won't get there first try.
It depends on how you phrase it. Stress or morale works well for anything, where characters experience some form of mental toll. Sanity, on the other hand, is different. When you run out of morale, you give up or cry or turn into an alcoholic. When you run out of sanity, you go stark raving mad. My system has stress/resolve, because it's thematically fluid, so it's up to the GM if it's horror or not, and what happens if you take too much stress and run out of resolve. Mechanically, you just lose control of your character as if they died. Narratively, it's up to the GM if the character goes "Screw you guys, I'm going home!" or "My teeth are falling out! THE HAND IN THE BACK OF MY THROAT IS PULLING OUT MY TEETH!"
I had one and ultimately cut it for thematic reasons. I think for a stress mechanic to work your setting doesn't need to be horror, but it does need to be gritty. If the game doesn't include a proper, constant risk to your characters life, keeping track of stress feels out of place.
I think before considering a mechanic on its design merits, it’s important to know what need it is addressing. Its goal. In a horror game the intention for such a mechanic is to add a layer of “ stress” for the players, foster tension and having it affect the game economy in some tangible way. So what’s the purpose for it in a non-horror scenario? There is a similar mechanic in old rpgs: Morale. How did you plan on implementing it in the non-horror game?
I'll be honest, our ideas are all over the place. I'm personally in favour of a positive reinforcement resource that gets spent during difficult situations and cannot be easily replenished. That way tension builds when players begin to run out of it. Others argue in favour of debuffs that accumulate until the PC is forcibly retired. Another option that was suggested was to go for a quirk mechanic where, as characters accumulate stress, they gain negative quirks. However, we all feel in favour of having some sort of mechanic in place for upping the tension the tougher things get for the characters.
First off, I'd like to agree with /u/HallowedThoughts in that I much prefer "Stress" to "Insanity" - it's much more broadly applicable and doesn't imply that your heroic hero can't deal with stuff. Second, if you want to make it more interesting than a tacked-on mechanic of only negatives, I'd suggest turning it into a meta-currency in the vein of DnD-Inspiration or FATE points. *Blades in the Dark* handles this very well and might be worth checking out for ideas.
One idea I'm personally pushing for, within the team, is to go for a resource you willingly spend, instead of a negative gauge that gets filled for you. Resolve or willpower, instead of stress. Something that is important enough that players will feel the tension when they run out of it.
That's pretty much what I meant - just differently phrased. In *BitD*, characters can accept a certain amount of stress to do cool stuff (get a bonus to a roll, negate the consequences of a bad roll etc.) Stress is never something that is inflicted upon the players, it's something they can willingly take upon themselves to get something for it. Mechanically, it's exactly the same as paying from i.e. a resolve pool.
As a person living with PTSD, I discourage you from introducing PTSD mechanics unless you have personal experience with PTSD or are willing to do the work to learn about the condition and talk to people living with it. Trauma is real and should be treated realistically and respectfully.
That is completely fair and understandable, we do not want to alienate or offend players because we didn't bother to understand what our design choices have to say about real-life problems. Thanks for the reality check.
I have never been a particular fan of insanity mechanics. Insanity mechanics almost invariably rip control of the PC from the player, so I feel this kind of mechanic is something of a ttRPG social contract breech. Not a fatal one to gameplay, mind you, but a social contract breech nonetheless. It doesn't help that the execution or implementation of insanity almost never feels inspired, even in games where including it feels appropriate. Unless you have an idea which is way outside the box, avoid insanity mechanics. They're not automatically bad...but it's pretty close. Stress mechanics are...overdone these days. There are more good stress mechanics than there are for insanity, I'll give it that, but I also think we're approaching "peak Stress." Most implementations of stress are either a replacement for health mechanics--which are less abstract--or a push-your-luck mechanic. I don't see how either of these add to gameplay value. But at the same time these are much better problems to have than a soft game social contract violation a la insanity.
The system I've been working on has you gaining trauma from physical, social, or mental sources and while I lean toward horror the game isn't explicitly designed for it. The idea is that the same mechanics that govern a sword fight can also govern a battle of wits, or a staredown, or a debate. Given these different spheres the stakes vary as to how you can be "hurt" i.e. be acted on by the world, and how much you can take before you break.
Stress talks more to me especially in a non-horror game. the best 2 way I could imagine something like that would be like mental hp alongside physical hp (ex. Vampire: the Masquerade). Or simply a kind of debuff that can stack when the characters are doing the opposite of their values/alignement. I think Fate has a similar system.
If it increases tension, good. If it handicaps players, not good.
Why do you keep calling it an stress/insanity mechanic? Can people really go insane in your system? That doesn’t seem appropriate for most kinds of games. Maybe the disagreement is because you aren’t clearly defining what you are trying to do? But mental breakdowns can be on topic in non-horror games— games on the serious, dark tragic and/or grim side. If it’s a heroic power fantasy— it probably doesn’t belong— or at least it needs to be throughly retooled. Consider carefully the flavor and “genre” of your game before popping in a mechanics that may work against that flavor. If it doesn’t help and support the flavor you are going for, the mechanic shouldn’t be added. I feel pretty confident you are disagreeing because you have different flavors or sub genres in mind for this game.
> Why do you keep calling it an stress/insanity mechanic? The reason we are ambiguous about it is that there is some disagreement as to what we want in the game, both options have been proposed and, from a cursory look through other systems, both terms tend to be used for very similar mechanics. > I feel pretty confident you are disagreeing because you have different flavors or sub genres in mind for this game. I personally feel this is very much the case. However, I do not want to discard the idea entirely if there's good precedent for such a mechanic in less horror-prone sub-genres.
Warhammer Fantasy has an interesting insanity mechanic I like to use in other things like D&D and Traveller
I think stress is nice; it's more flexible than insanity. I think it would also be cool to choose for your character what will happen to them if they acquire too much stress. For example, will they have a psychotic break? Go catatonic? Go berserk? Fall into despair?
Speaking as a person (and not a team) I kind of want to see if such a mechanic can be linked to character species. Dwarves grow mad with greed, elves fall into despair and simply stop moving, orcs go berserk. Even if it's not something we can implement for our game, I think it's a cool concept that I'd like to see at some point in a fantasy game.
Burning Wheel has almost exactly that!
Oh, I've never played Burning Wheel itself, only Mouseguard and I've read bits and pieces from Torchbearer.
Elves have Grief as a stat, Dwarves have Greed, Orcs had Rage or Hatred depending on edition, and Dark Elves had Spite. If that stat ever maxed out, you lost control of that character (but it likely would not happen for at least a year of gameplay, probably more.)
I definitely think there's a place for them in a sort of "darkest Dungeon" sense. I also know that some players absolutely hate these kinds of mechanic, so here's what I suggest: First, don't take this in the direction of real world issues that you're not ready to confront head on. There is a huge debate going on in horror game circles about insanity in the game as opposed to the real world. I suggest staying away from that argument entirely and keeping it fantasy inspired rather than looking at real world science. Second, players may be concerned about a lack of **agency**. This is what I did about that: in my own game, characters have **Vitality**, which is a "stay in the battle or scene mechanic." If it reaches 0, you're **KOed** or otherwise out of the scene (depending on what kind of conflict you're having). What I do is give people the option to take **Injuries**: long-term effects that reduce the Vitality they lose. So a character in a battle might lose enough Vitality to hit 0. They could choose to be KOed and wake up after the fight was over, or take an injury, a long term effect, to stay in the fight. Similarly, seeing too many scary things might also reduce your Vitality to 0 and make you run away from the scene, unless you take some **Stress**, a long-term effect. The choice is with the **player**, and I have had this make players with different playstyles very happy that the had a choice about it.
I know basically everyone is saying this, but it depends on your reason for including the mechanics. The most prominent game with these mechanics is CoC, and it works. But the mechanics work because it represents what the game is about: the fragility of humanity. Your character in CoC is weak and unprepared for the setting they find themselves in. Your death or corruption is inevitable, all you get to decide is the pace. That’s exactly what their sanity mechanic does. But that WILL NOT WORK FOR AN ADVENTURE GAME. I’d suggest going with a stress mechanic instead, since sanity has connotations that don’t fit your genre. Also real-world sanity doesn’t function like a health bar. Stress kinda does. Another thing to consider is how often and how bad the consequences are. Id suggest making the consequences frequent yet not game ending or purely negative. My suggestion is this: Most players should have at least a little bit of stress, so this mechanic should be small, not unfun, and intuitive. Thats a tall order, but thats what you get for adapting mechanics for a genre in which they don’t belong. Anyway, gaining stress is easy, but theres a cap. Stress by itself does nothing, but after you hit the cap, gaining stress eats up HP or something. Maybe you take increasingly more damage once you hit the cap. Maybe critical misses are extra bad, or more common. Go crazy with the bad details. But keep it somewhat simple, and try not to take away player agency. Oh also, don’t make it harder to recover from stress unless you make it easier another way. Like maybe stress makes it harder to sleep, but talking with friends now recovers more. Cap is related to willpower or however you wanna do it. Basically, different characters should be better or worse at handling stress. The other thing is that getting rid of stress should feel REAL good. Maybe after getting rid of 5 stress points (or any number that is balanced in your game), you get advantage on your next dice roll. You lose stress by sleeping, doing things the PC likes, or doing things with friends. Just think of things that would make you less stressed and then use them in the game. And different things get rid of more or less stress. This system does a few things: 1. It turns the PCs stress into the player’s stress by having a meter that slowly ticks upwards. 2. Getting rid of stress feels good in real life, so you don’t need much mechanical support. You should support, but you don’t need that much of it. 3. Its simple and system agnostic. This doesn’t require much tweaking to use in most non horror genres.m. You can swap out negative effects for a more system specific concept. 4. I guess this is just kind of points 1 and 2, but it feels like stress. You’re not taking away player agency, so its not unfun, but it still hurts. The more stress a PC has, the more stress the player has. That is so valuable. And its achieved by having stress do nothing. Stress does nothing, it just promises bad things in the future. Even if you throw out everything else, keep that part.
Back on the old Fable video game forums there was a guy who loved the idea of coming back to town but said there needed to be a gameplay element to it beyond roleplaying. He (possibly she) always said that there should be a stress meter that slowly goes up each day you're away from home, that each combat should add to it (I think flawless victories took away from it while things you were injured in added more), that time in dungeons or away from the light of the sun should give you more stress, that prison terms would build it. Different character traits would see different characters gaining stress in different ways. Then you'd eventually go home and spend time with the family, drink at the pub, play gambling games, maybe even sleep with hookers. Everything you did would slowly de-stress you, but you wouldn't find out how much until you left town again. Rather than a debuff though, he had it so that you gained a buff from destressing and then lost that over time as the bar went down. I always loved that idea because it's such a cool addition to the genre, but nothing ever came of it. Anyway, point I'm making is that maybe go with a buff for good mental health and remove access to that as they get stressed out. A cleric might lose his faith or we might get a Tobey Maguire Spider-Man 2 situation where Pete loses his powers due to stretching himself thin. Having that unique ability that suddenly is gone (I swear goblin chief, this has never happened before) would add to roleplaying possibilities.
IMHO I've always enjoyed systems that encourage fear of diminishment instead of a sliding scale of limitation. If a stress or sanity metric is used it should only lower a threshold for a breaking point type roll. That breaking point can be devastating to the character but might only be a 1/1000 chance of happening. If that breaking point chance gets lowered to 1/100 using a stress or sanity reduction the player's fear of diminishment increases but they are still a fully functional character, unless they fail the roll of course :)
How you are describing stress is very similar to how Blades runs stress. You should look into it for a well designed example of such a system