It''s an interesting idea, and could be a very useful feature in the game, but the meter does indeed seem a little ham-fisted.

Everything you want this system to do would be a positive contribution to a game, and so your ends are good. It''s the means that bother me a little bit. Psychological instability is a complicated thing, and a wide variety of conditions fall under the umbrella term "insanity".

For instance, there should be a variety of neuroses in the game, but a simple "sanity meter" would have to either apply them randomly or stack them hierarchically, since it''s a one-dimensional value. One option might be to have such events impact stats like will and intelligence, and then have symptoms arise epiphenomenally from that imbalance, but it would require both an absurdly nuanced model of a "healthy" mind and some kind of modelling system for neuroses. A little too complex, I suspect.

Perhaps the simplest compromise between too much complexity and ham-fistedness would be to use an algorithm similar in structure to your existing systems for loyalty and other psychological conditions. You could have a handful of psychological conditions, say "Dementia", "Paranoia", "Phobia", and "Amnesia"(maybe not, these are just for sake of argument). Different situations would impact one or more of these variables, and when they reached certain levels, symptoms would manifest themselves to varying degrees.

I think that a model similar to your other psychological systems will be more intuitive both for you as a designer and for the player, in the end.

As to actual conditions, I think that showing players something weird, that may or may not really be there, is a great idea. Swapping images for demented paranoia, juggling sounds around, or otherwise getting wacky would be terrific. However, for things like manias or phobias, player characters would be harder to affect than NPCs. Tough work.

I like the "vow" system. Avoiding in-game attribute penalties by effectively trading them for more mission objectives is a terrific idea, and this is an elegant application of the principle. The ability to cope with stress by promising yourself some kind of specific experience is a stroke of genius. You could have your record for keeping vows to yourself have an impact on how effective the exercise is. If you promise yourself revenge and just use the promise to cushion the psychological blow until you''ve gotten over it, then next time you won''t be as comforted by what you know is probably an empty promise. This way, in certain instances, it''s as though the event itself is less stressful than the feeling of impotence that comes of not being able to do anything about it. Isn''t that the way it is for all of us?

One final note: If you''re going to model these negative conditions, might it be worthwhile to build in positive psychological conditions as well? Throw in things like love, friendship, and other things. Give a character bloodlust so that he enjoys battle to the point at which his stats actually improve when the ship is being boarded, or train an astrogator to love math.

Really, this and the loyalty system and a number of other things might be unified into a single overarching psychological profile for each character. Instead of building a loyalty system, an insanity system, and a work ethic system, you could pick a dozen or so psychological traits and implement continua on which to evaluate them.

The simplified sanity meter in Eternal Darkness on Gamecube made for interesting gameplay. I''m sure you''ve heard it mentioned before, so I won''t need to tell you about what it did .

Ive never seen it in any real RPG, so this is quite interesting to me

There was a single player mod for HL released a few weeks ago called Cthulu (its based on an h.p lovecraft novel i think), which had a sanity meter (replacing your HL armour level). Using spells drained it. When it reached 0, it went to a cut scene of you losing your mind and you lose the game. The only way to restore it at any all was by defeating cultist plots, which only happened once or twice in the entire game, so you were always very sparing with your sanity .

once the novelty wore off, I found I was treating it just like any other game variable, sort of like an ammo count for magic, and nothing more.

Sounds cool. I don''t have anything to add to your system, but I''m wondering how you will handle sanity effects for NPC crew? Should everyone get a visually disorienting effect as the result of one crew member losing it?

how about subverting RPG expectations, and as the PC becomes more unwell they start to hear their weapons say that they need blood to become more powerful (ie. weapon XP), or getting subquests from things like talking dogs. Things which you would normally expect to do in a normal fantasy RPG.
Creepy.

I absolutely love the idea of the character's lose of sanity being transparently transmited to the player.

But it truly needs to be done in subtle, ellegant ways, otherwise it'll look forced, and the atmosphere will be destroyed. Such thing is perfect for horror games: the game slowly and subetly distrubs the player, creating the proper atmosphere.

As example, the map could suffer subtle to drastic changes depending on the sanity level. That could also be used to portray the characters' attention level and allucinations.

As example, the player enters a corridor with 5 doors (including the one he came from). When he enters one of the doors to, takes a look at the room and come back, there are only 4 doors. Then he enters another door, investigates the room, and come back. Now there are five doors. WTF?
Player then enters the first room he investigated. Wait, wasn't the wallpaper supposed to be blue? Then BLAM! The sound of a door being slammed comes form the outside.

That'd be very cool to play during a cold night, with all lights off...

[edited by - M3d10n on March 21, 2004 9:59:39 PM]