[UA] New GM - help me

[Timothy Groth]

About madness meters I have a top of my head suggestion about massive trauma 
(say 4+ ranks above you're current Hardened nothces):

Fail - You go bug shit, too much stress is too much stress and you react.  
For really screwed up things you may be more likely to have memory gaps 
along with you're nice new sanity scar but really once something presses you 
to the point of flipping out you can't flip out more.  What really fucks 
people up (especially in UA) is prolonged conditions of slowly escalating 
trauma that mess you up again as soon as you calm back down.

Harden - Gain 2 Hardened Notches and 1 Failed.  You simply can't integrate 
that much that quickly and while you are numbed you are also more likely to 
break when things do get through.  Massive trauma is going to mess people up 
faster because it always resaults in move a step closer to being crazy.

With this system if you have a player with no Unnatural Hardened or Failed 
notches encounter minor weirdness first, for instance a statue that seems to 
be smiling at them one moment and frowning the next with no neat art trick 
explanation, they can get used to it.  If you dump them straight into an 
Unnatural Servant convention they may flip out or manage to go numbly 
forward with what ever they want to do.  Regardless of the roll's outcome 
the character is messed up, and with success the only compensation is being 
able to shrug off the minor stuff because "After what I saw this shit 
doesn't fucking make a difference."

This is fairly unfair to players, but really it is hard to set it up so that 
greater stress checks are more dangerous without doing this.  As they exist 
now the stress rating really indicates who is freaked out, the lower the 
rating the less people are freaked out.  High stressers naturally come later 
in most plots and can thus still make an impact on calloused PCs.  When they 
come earlier it does not mess the character up more than a more typical 
stresser and this allows very powerful events to be used as plot pivots 
without making the players feel like they're characters are being 
psychologically damaged for the amusement of the GM.  Conversely minor 
events causing stress drive home the vulnerability of those who are 
sheltered and the difference between those who have been through serious 
shit and those who haven't.

If you don't care about that balance, or know that you're players won't mind 
more rapid loss of control of their characters in someway or another, then 
you should think about what you want the madness meters to capture that they 
currenlty don't and shift the mechanics accordingly.

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