[UA] Sociopaths

[Matthew Rowan Norwood]

Okay, here's one of my biggest beefs with the UA rules, and it's smack
in the middle of one of its biggest strengths: the Madness meters.

Madness should always be about tradeoffs in a game system, IMO.  Getting
Hardened, when you take a look at personality indicators, is not a good
thing.  Your life begins to suck, big-time.  But the game rules only
reflect this when you have all five gauges filled to the max.  Think for
a minute about what this means.  This means that someone has to go
through at least one event of _each kind_ mentioned on the charts to
become a sociopath.  "Yeah, I've killed ten dozen men with my bare
hands, smashed infants' heads against rocks, spent months at a time in a
sensory deprivation tank, been tied down and tortured by aliens every
weekend for six years, had my whole family turn against me one by one
and been forced to gouge their eyes out and eat their brains raw; I've
realized that I was an android, only later to realize that I'm a vampire
yeti who rapes small children in his sleep, and that the Earth is
actually an apple turnover.  But the last two times I was transported to
Tartarus to have my skin flayed off by the Cruel Ones, I failed my Mind
checks, so I still cry at weddings."

For that matter, how the hell did Eponymous manage to accrue all those
checks?  Look at those level nine and ten events!  With an average Mind
score, someone has to be exposed to two level nine and two level ten
events in _each_ category, at _exactly_ the right time (i.e., when that
meter is at  level eight or nine, respectively.)  The biography detailed
above probably wouldn't do the trick.

IMUAC, someone would lose access to their Passions much earlier -- say,
five hardened ranks in each meter, or something more complicated.  I
think someone should lose access to their Fear passion DEFINITELY when
they fill up all ten notches in the corresponding meter: if my Fear
passion is being left alone in the dark (Isolation), don't you think
that successfully resisiting that fear through a few dozen of the events
described on that meter would prevent it from affecting me?  I'd
probably set the cutoff a little lower in most cases -- or only allow a
person to use the
Passion when the stimulus causes a stress check or is only one or two
notches away from doing so.  I'd probably have a similar rule for Hate
passions.  Maybe I'd let noble passions stick around a little longer...

I'm interested in exploring some of the ways that Kult and UA differ on
Madness.  UA's whole setting rests on a humanocentric, postmodern value
system, while Kult draws very fundamental lines of good and evil (or at
least stable/chaotic, or evil/more evil) around its Madness system.  I'd
like to incorporate ideas about mental function from
mystical/psychological systems like Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity,
Jungianism, and Freudianism to a greater (or different) extent than
either UA or Kult does.  I think that UA is a better starting point,
since it avoids a lot of the messy dualities that all try to dress up as
each other in Kult (evil/good = passionate/passionless = profane/sacred
= dionysian/apollonian = dark/light = body/mind =
uncontrolled/controlled = deluded/enlightened ?????????)  At the same
time, I think that a lot of Kult's coolness rests on that very duality,
and the way that it loops back on itself to allow for feces-eating
baby-killers who are on the road to enlightenment in order to save the
human race from the lies spread by a coalition of angels and devils.
It's cool in that it takes Hermetic themes and throws them into an
unstable world of shifting values and increasing moral relativity,
resulting in a richer postmoderism than UA in some ways, but a more
limited setting in other ways.

Matt Norwood




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