![]() ![]() ![]() Basically if you can't convey something to the player, make it a hamhanded number crunch to reinforce a description, or a hinderance in a computer game. I guess my big problem is that I don't think anyone has done it right, and a lot of times it seems like a design crutch. The idea being to portray the characters as being unusually frail and vulnerable (besides the mechanics and all the physical threats), but in many cases it wound up being sort of annoying, and while Lovecraft's mythos was full of many insane fellows who went crazy dealing with the mythos, it also involved some pretty heroic stuff at times. My opinion goes back as far as PnP RPGs like "Call Of Cthulhu" which while a decent game used the idea of a "SAN" point system, which work like Hit Points in most RPGs except you lose them simply by seeing scary or disturbing things, and if you lose all of them your character goes bonkers to the point where they are unplayable and basically "dead". Having not played any of the "FX" games like Eternal Darkness I can't judge them fairly, but I'll be frank in saying that if a game faked turning off on me and got me to ruin my game and go back to a save point by tricking me into getting up to turning it back on (and accidently turning it off) like many people did, I would probably be less than amused (I guess I'd have to be in exactly the right mood). but then again that was pretty tongue in cheek. It was possible to kill yourself by say lifting the lid of a covered platter on a table to reveal a severed head and have your heart basically explode. The "Elvira" games also had a mechanic where you could die of fright and even had a heartbeat counter to register how scared your character was. Though admittedly it mostly worked based on fright, I believe the sanity aspect mostly came into play when you went through a vortex into a parallel dimension (it's been a while however). The first game I saw that really used it on the computer was "Legacy: Realm Of Terror" which would have your character panic or freak out when confronted by monsters and such to prevent you from taking effective action. Well to be honest I've never been a huge fan of the mechanic, as it seems mostly to create an artificial sense of vulnerability. ![]()
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