Ideas for sanity recovery

[ANTiGRAV]

Hey people, I’m running the deluxe Doomvault map in my (just updated!) Exiles campaign finale over the next few weeks, and since this is going to be the LONGEST dungeon they are facing, i’m including some Darkest Dungeon sanity mechanics I created on my own.

Because the place is so large, they may begin feeling it affect them. The base number of sanity points, 20, adding wisdom and intelligence bonus, then subtracting a d6 if somewhat crazy already (that’s for our ranger who is currently best friends with a skull and nobody else) - half this total is the breaking point, causes them to gain a quirk. Sanity works like a mental health pool, so there also needs to be some way of regaining sanity (which is the reason for my thread). Quirks would remain, but at least you won’t go insane at 0.

(you’ll see what parasite points are about in the finale, don’t worry about that now)

Sanity rolls: you are looking to roll under your current sanity. If rolling above, you go catatonic for a round.

So, any ideas aside from resting that could give them some mental health back?

[James_Horn]

I currently run a stress system in my game.

When all enemies in a room a defeated everyone heals stress by 1d8 each

If the cause of individuals stress is defeated like say an orb of madness, then heal stress by 1d8

Doing an action where the Player specifically wants to heal stress by, praying, looking at a memento from a loved one, Rallying speech, anything that could give them or others courage they roll CHR (which is the vanilla resist fear stat) and on success they heal stress.

The biggest problem I’ve encountered with trying to make stress matter, is that horror is when the characters are victims and heroes charge after danger not run away from it.

I personally will not be doing this stress system in future campaigns because of that reasoning myself. But I’m glad I tried it and I hope it works out for you and your players.

[ANTiGRAV]

Yeah, I thought about introducing it earlier in the campaign but abandoned that idea because I knew it would be too much for new players to keep track of. That said, now that they’re ten sessions in and I’ve really put them through their paces I’m taking off the training wheels and making things more interesting, so I think they can handle it.