[UA] New GM - help me

[Hammons, Jade]

I believe, as mentioned before on this list, that the reason for that 1%
was not a fluke, but rather the only advantage to involving yourself in
close personal combat. It was a benny. Check the recent archives, I
believe the insta-kill has been brought up recently, with the
aformentioned answer from Greg. 

Jade Hammons

"Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be
normal." - Albert Camus




-----Original Message-----
From: ua-bounces at lists.unknown-armies.com
[mailto:ua-bounces at lists.unknown-armies.com]On Behalf Of Timothy Groth
Sent: Saturday, February 21, 2004 1:21 PM
To: ua at lists.unknown-armies.com
Subject: RE: [UA] New GM - help me


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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