Driving Your Players Crazy

Lately, I've been having a lot of experience with PCs going bonkers. There's a couple different ways to handle it, depending on what your goals are.

In 3:16 Carnage Amongst The Stars,  I just drove the whole group crazy. Hallucinations, multiple realities, glaring inconsistencies, characters and situations that obviously couldn't exist, etc. It was almost all improvised, and I made no efforts to correct "mistakes" or obvious contradictions. Each week I just dove down whichever rabbit hole struck my fancy. This works really well when you're okay with the game not being taken 100% seriously, and when you're not really focused on long-term viability of the campaign. Honestly, I never expected that campaign to run as long as it did.

My Gumshoe Continuum campaign, on the other hand, is one I take very seriously, and hope to be running for a couple more years at least. We're about a year and a half into the campaign at this point, and just last Wednesday, I finally revealed that one of the PCs was crazy. He'd technically been nuts for about six months, but we played it real subtle. There was a scene where he nearly got Fragged Out (think of Back to the Future when Marty's hand starts to fade away: Frag's kinda like that, but it'll drive you crazy, too) , took a lot of mental Stability damage and snapped. So, the other players and I (as GM) decided on his specific brand of insanity, and warped the campaign around it. (That is, after all, the way the Gumshoe insanity rules work.) There was a minor NPC, who (coincidentally) had only ever interacted with his PC. So we decided she didn't exist.

Her name was Beverly, and she would eventually be nicknamed Beverly the Wallflower. When she was first introduced, I had every intention of her being a real character. The PC, whose name is Declan McGee, met her at a speakeasy in 1928 New York. She was just a bit of local color, introduced to establish a scene and was but one of like 50 details added just to make 1928 feel really different than modern day. 1928 was the PCs first major trip back in time more than a decade, and so I put some effort into making it interesting and "real". I had Declan run across Beverly the Wallflower a couple times, and was considering introducing a subplot where she starts stalking him, but hadn't really put much work into it yet. Like I said, none of the other PCs had met her yet (though one had most likely seen her across a crowded room).

Shortly thereafter, Declan failed the big Stability test after being Fragged (zapped by paradox), and the rest of the group got to conspire behind his back about what manner of madness had afflicted him. My wife suggested the awesome notion that perhaps her character hadn't actually seen Beverly across the crowded room, because maybe Beverly didn't exist. It was brilliant, and especially devious because it's not something anyone would see coming. If I introduce a character in September and in December your PC fails a stability test, you don't expect the consequence to be that the scene back in September didn't happen. But indeed, that's what we ret-conned behind the delusional character's players back. Effectively, we decided that he'd dreamed up an imaginary friend. He met his imaginary friend this one night in 1928 at a bar where he was feeling a little left out. From there it followed that every time the PC felt left out, lonely, or imperiled, Beverly would show up out of no where to make him feel safe and loved, even if he wasn't.

What can I say? I'm a bit of bastard (and while I'm at it, I'll add that the Gumshoe insanity rules rock). After a few sessions, good ol' Declan McGee was alone for a bit chasing a personal project while far away from 1920's NYC, and Beverly showed up to keep him company. Of course this was a shock to him, as nothing in those first few scenes with her indicated she was a Spanner (time-traveler). So he of course asked about this, and so she (or rather, his subconscious, played by me) filled in details of how they were being kept apart by her direct superior, Alexander Graham Bell. Yes, that Alexander Graham Bell.

Why was Bell keeping Beverly away from Declan? There's a minor rule amongst the Continuum that Spanners are not supposed to procreate with one another. Imagine a small child with the power to invert causality, or worse yet a baby that can teleport out of the womb. Scary stuff, so the rule is fairly reasonable. Beverly explained to Declan that Mr. Bell, her mentor, was concerned at her obvious affection for Declan, and feared she lacked the willpower to keep things platonic. This is why should could only visit Declan rarely, and on the sly.

To his credit, my player chased after this plotline with gusto. He started up a relationship with Beverly, and would tastefully ask to skip ahead to the next morning whenever they were alone together. Which is something I'm very thankful about, because it means we aren't left wondering what was really going on in any compromising scenes. They snuck around outside of the watchful eyes of The Continuum, made secret dates, and complained about how A.G. Bell was forcing them to be all cloak & dagger.

As GM, I just kept upping the dramatic ante. Beverly eventually showed up (all in Declan's mind) as an Exalted (one of the top ranks of the Continuum) based out of Atlantis (a big floating prehistoric battle platform to protect mankind from the time-traveling bad guys). Or so she said. There were a couple bits that didn't quite add up, and so Declan decided to get Further Information. I believe the player wanted to make sure that his sweetie wasn't a Narcissist (essentially a temporal terrorist), but the in-character motivation was basically to confront A.G. Bell and get everything out in the open. You know, pursuit of maximum drama. :) So he tracks the inventor of the telephone down, and starts interrogating him about Beverly.

"Who?!" Alexander Graham Bell asks.  "Young man, I'm afraid I have no clue of whom you speak."

So Declan goes off on him. Lots of in-character yelling, and then a couple sessions dedicated to proving that A.G. Bell was lying to him. As that seemed to fail, he asked some NPCs for help spying on Beverly to make sure she wasn't up to no good. As you can imagine, hiring private eyes to investigate someone who doesn't even exist eventually lead to help of another sort. Some Psyches (time-travelling psychiatrists) caught up with Declan and took him somewhere remote to get some much-needed rest and counseling.

One of the awesome things about a time-travel RPG is that you can advance the plotline or timeline for one PC without it affecting the others. If you were playing some other RPG and one character went nuts, you'd either have to retire the character, or come up with some miracle cure. Instead, Declan spent 3 years in therapy in a Boxed (really really really remote, both temporally and physically) facility, conquering his own inner demons. We talk a bit about therapy, introduce a few NPCs he meets at the asylum, and then, 3 years older and wiser, he spans right back down to just a couple seconds after he left the party. That's a useful tool / implication of time-travel that has never before proven as immensely useful as it did last session. What could have been a campaign-wrecker instead became a puzzle with a quick and painless solution.

Now, it occurs to me there's a lot more I could have done to keep the truth from him. As I understand about schizophrenic delusions, most people inflicted with them go a long ways towards rationalizing and justifying their visions. Anyone who tries to tell them they're crazy stands a good chance of being labeled "part of the conspiracy". But ultimately, that would make this entire campaign a game about how this one PC went nuts. I just recently did a game (3:16) about people going nuts. I didn't want to tank or warp this campaign entirely around it, unless it was really an exciting concept to the players.

So, rather than come up with more convoluted defenses for Beverly (as if "I've been spending time in Atlantis because Alexander Graham Bell doesn't trust me around you" isn't convoluted and ridiculous enough), I decided to just throw things in the player's court. If he wanted the quick 10-minute solution, which he did, it would just cost a couple years of his character's life. If he'd instead told me "No, I want to be like Baltar", then I would have continued to play his imaginary friend on-and-off, but kept it secondary to the plot, just a minor character quirk. In the real world, when you can't tell reality from imagination, it's all but "game over", but this being an actual game, I need to make sure it only enhances the fiction. This may be Gumshoe, but it ain't Trail of Cthulhu, and I feel no need to ride the road to madness and despair in a streetcar named tragedy... at least not if it's not what the whole playgroup thinks would be the most fun. When the insanity is over, the game must go on.

Meanwhile, one of my other PCs is busy having The Last Supper with Christopher Marlowe and Derren Brown, but that's a tale for a whole other blog post some other time...

Stability Chart for Gumshoe Continuum

My Monday and Wednesday game is a Continuum campaign, but using the Gumshoe mechanics. Which meant that I incorporated stability from Gumshoe, but had to come up with values for stability losses for all sorts of Continuum-related scenarios such as the Time Combat Stratagems. Here's the modified version of the Stability chart that we use for that campaign.

Most entries come from the Trail of Cthulhu or Esoterrorists rules, duplicated here without permission. You would need one of those books, plus the Continuum rulebook, to use the following. I'm listing it here to save some work for other GMs that might want to try out a Gumshoe/Continuum hybrid game.

Incident	Stability Loss
You Frag someone (Accidental or deliberate)	1
Reveal to a friend where and when you Hide	1
View a particularly shocking work of art	1
A nasty argument or social drama, unexpected stress	1
You see a fresh corpse, or witness a killing	1
Fragged (Accidentally or unknown cause)	your Frag total
Dream Haunted	1d6
Isolated by 3 or more foes	1d6, plus effects of fragging
Attacked with evident intent to do serious harm	2
Car or industrial accident imperils you	2
Witness to acts of torture	2
Unexplained phenomena and sensations	2
Caltrop Stratagem foils and frustrates you	2
Fragged deliberately by an enemy	2 + your Frag total
Attacked with evident intent to kill	3
You kill someone in a fight	3
Reveal the time and place where you Hide to an enemy or rival	3
Harbinger threat made good against you	1d6+2 initially, subsequent efforts just 3
See a particularly grisly murder scene, accident, or battlefield	4
Learn a friend or loved one has been violently killed	4
Invitation To Dance	4
Attacked by a friend or loved one	5
Committing murder or torture	5
You Fragged someone to Lost Cause or worse	5
Unnatural and threatening phenomena - witchcraft, haunting, etc	5
Learning of your own death via Iron Man	1d6+4
Fragged deliberately by a friend or loved one	5 + your Frag total
Discover the corpse of a friend or loved one	6
Tortured for an hour or longer	6
Spanning for the first time	6
Attacked by a T-Rex or Alien	8 minus your Span, to a minimum of 3 stability
You see a friend or loved one killed	7
You see a friend or loved one killed in a particularly gruesome manner	8
You kill a friend or loved one	8
Fragging a loved one out of existence	9
You witness your own Elder death	9
Realizing you are a Lost Cause	9
You witness your own Junior death!	8 + your Frag total (so, 10 at least)

With the exception of the modified chart, we use the Stability rules from Esoterrorists, as opposed to the more complicated Stability-and-Sanity rules from Trail of Cthulhu.


Looking over the chart, I realize that I probably need to add an entry for when someone is rendered Graceless. Having that happen to you is probably worth a 2-pt to 4-pt test. Hasn't happened to PC in my game yet, so I hadn't considered it.

Hmm... I could probably reorder that a bit. In general, it's in order from least impactful to most devastating, however, the way the  d6 for Isolate is added to whatever other fragging stability loss happens, making it a lot more potent than it's placement on the table would suggest. Most typically, frag loss from an Isolate is going to be at least 5 points and could easily hit 10. 1d6 + 2 + Frag total, at least. That's why the narcissists call us The Swarm.

Infallibility in Trail of Cthulhu

The other night, we wrapped up the second mystery/adventure of my Trail of Cthulhu campaign. This session exposed elements of the mechanical base of ToC's GUMSHOE System that I hadn't really noticed before. I knew that it was "impossible" to fail at an investigative task if you think to use your skills, but I hadn't really realized just how much power the players have in regards to combat mechanics. I guess I knew it in theory, but seeing this in action had more impact than I imagined. If anything, I would have imagined this to be a "bug", but I now think it's one of the coolest features of a system I'd already fallen in love with. (That said, this feature I'm raving about works best in the Pulp idiom, and would seem a lot less wonderful if I were trying to run a game within the hard-core Purist idiom.)

The adventure revolved around a fairly nasty monster that had, until recently, been human. There were several possible solutions / conclusions to the adventure. There was the firepower solution, the spellcasting solution, and the noble sacrifice solution - not to mention the very real possibility of failure and death.

Given the nature of the player character in question, Sarah decided the noble sacrifice was the best way to go. An Elephant Gun, a Tommy Gun, and a Tome containing the spell that summoned the critter were all available in the scenario, but she felt the character was most inclined to go the "I can save you" route, which was essentially a "bell the cat" scenario.

Thing is, neither of us realized that the noble sacrifice solution really didn't require a sacrifice. I'd previously established, during a spend of Cthulhu Mythos Lore, that there existed a magic amulet that would protect a person from becoming possessed by a particular entity. The amulet forces the entity out of our dimension, basically. An NPC casting a dangerous spell without that amulet had resulted in the creation of the monster in the first place. Therefore, putting the amulet on the monster should at least greatly weaken the monster. However, first you have to face down the beast, and get close enough to bell the cat.

Difficulties in Trail of Cthulhu range between 2 and 8, with hitting a target typically being a 3 or 4. I set the belling action at a 6, knowing that the monster would get at least one attack first. I was certain it was suicidal, but if the PC wanted to go out in a blaze of glory, she could. Wanting to keep a sense of mystery in the conflict (she was about to wrestle an inhuman monster, after all), I kept the difficulty secret. If she wanted to bell the cat, it'd take a leap of faith.

First, she sets up a safe haven, and invokes the once per session refresh of traits, returning her athletics pool to 7. Then lays an ambush of the monster. It shows up, and smells her. Having a higher action pool, it acts first. Being a big powerful monster, it rushes straight at her. The attack eats up her health points, not enough to knock her out, but enough to raise the difficulty of all the PCs actions by 1. Then she takes the very nasty Stability test for being attacked by a supernatural creature. This drops her into "Shaken" territory, which applies another +1 to the difficulty of all actions. Finally, it's the PCs turn - and the difficulty has risen to 8, on par with the most difficult of possible actions, and both her Health and Stability are in the negatives. It's all or nothing time, if she were to fail, she'd be dying in vain. So she spends all 7 athletics, which, unbeknownst to her is exactly the amount needed to succeed even on a roll of "1".

It was a beautiful thing to behold. Like a perfect moment out of the movies, the hero who faces down the Big Bad without dodging, and takes a serious wound without flinching, surviving out of pure willpower. Breathtakingly cinematic, yet with no fear that one bad roll would have undone it all. The PC lost a little Sanity in the process, and the contorted former-monster is irretrievably insane, but the player got exactly the win she deserved, and didn't have to die to get it. She had just enough points left in other skills to get out of the monsters path while the amulet did it's thing.

Afterwards, I just sat there going "wow, these mechanics are cool." I wish I could say I'd planned and carefully orchestrated this - but honestly, I'd been hoping she'd take the ritual sorcery solution. This sort of scene is how I'd always wanted Scion to work, but instead I get it in a Cthulhu game. Not sure what to think of that... other than "GUMSHOE rocks!"

Using Cthulhu Mythos (aka Mythos Lore to us Old Schoolers)

The cliff hanger I left off with in monday's session of Trail of Cthulhu was the realization that a monster was creeping up behind her, and she's got a long hard sprint back to the boat. On the plus side, the PC did spend Cthulhu Mythos to figure out what the monster was, which also clued her in to a possible weapon against it if she can just escape this encounter. It cost her 4 Stability and 1 Sanity to pull that clue out of Cthulhu's butt, and she hasn't even seen the monster yet. Which is creeping up behind her.

Prior to this session, I was a little dubious about the Investigative Ability called Cthulhu Mythos. It seemed to me like a cludge, a way for the Keeper to skip out on making a well-layered mystery with interwoven clues. I understood that some GMs might need that (he says, looking down his nose as if he himself never had a plot hole, deus ex machina, or mystery that was beyond the PCs ability to solve), but it struck me as cheap. Now I understand the real purpose of it, and I wish the rules had spelled it out just a tiny bit more clearly.

As the GM, you never want to set up your mystery so that PCs have to spend Cthulhu Mythos to put clues together - that'd be cruel and unfair since doing so saps their Stability pretty hard. Neither is it intended to let PCs skip doing legwork and jump ahead of the plot. Instead the Cthulhu Mythos spend exists solely as an escape valve for PCs, who have already jumped ahead of the plot by dumb luck or clever intuition.

Normal police procedures involve raids and arrests, but that's not always an option in Cthulhu. Cops just have to figure out whodunnit, then call in the cavalry. A Cthulhu investigator has to figure out whodunnit, whatdunnit, whether or not their weapons can hurt it, how to banish it without going crazy in the process. You're on their own, and you have to work fast - or else the world might end! Once you know whodunnit, there's a lot of motivation to confront them before they can grow any stronger (or summon something stronger). When you've figured out who the villain is earlier than the GM anticipated you would, you may no longer feel any need to track down seemingly unrelated clues. In Cthulhu, though, those unrelated clues are what usually hides the means to foil the the cultists plans, defeat the monster, etc.

If, in your rush to solve the mystery you've put yourself in dangerous proximity to some nasty thing without being properly prepared for it, Cthulhu Mythos is the emergency shut-off valve. Either it gives you the weapon you need, or suggests where you can find that weapon, or points back to the line of clues you skipped over that will eventually lead to that weapon, or it just hits your sanity enough that you faint and don't have to worry about the monster for the moment.

In other words, you don't spend Cthulhu Mythos because you aren't getting anywhere - you spend Cthullu Mythos because you got too far, too fast.