Quote from: The Butcher;858236I'm not sure that's a fair characterization.

Bonds sound like ToC Sources of Stability.

That's not "Cthulhu punches you in the girlfriend." That's "your loved ones keep you sane, but as you keep seeing weird shit you lose the capacity to relate and spiral into madness."

Sounds tricky to implement, but it's not "dissociated" and something a good GM can manage.

I'll look into the playtest doc and report back.

The cheat sheet rules are linked.  If you will suffer from a Temporary Insanity, you can resist it by spending WillPower and losing rating from a Bond.  It's not so much "If I don't keep up my Bonds I can't use them to recover from a Mythos experience off-camera." it's "On-camera, right after seeing a Mythos creature, which would otherwise drive me temporarily insane, the player can choose to deny that insanity, but it will result in the lessening of the Bond, or "Denied Stress Causes Fallout" if you want to use terms other games have used.  

In the end, Cthulhu scared Spidey in the Mary Jane.

It's an absolutely brutal and brilliant OOC narrative genre mechanic, but I like roleplaying Charles Legrasse and Prof. Warren Rice, not HP Lovecraft.

Quote from: K Peterson;858235Sure, that's understandable. It does break the fourth wall of immersion by requiring out-of-character consideration. Personally, I think it's a very minor storywank inclusion - if you put it on the spectrum between CoC 6e and Modiphius, it's not going to be anywhere near the latter.

If you feel that way about bonds, you'd also probably want to also reject or modify the "Home" part of play (which is a little like Pendragon's Winter phase, I guess). Where agents can rebuild Bonds (or create new ones), or train skills, or research Mythos tomes, or get some psychotherapy. The former would also be fourth-wall, player storyboarding his character's downtime, type of experience.

I playtested this and I didn't really feel the downtime rules required stepping out out of character. It's really an easy decision to make in character. Are you spending your downtime with loved ones, or are you spending all your time poring over a book that you can never let them even glimpse, to give one example. It didn't feel any more meta than Runequest's training rules or spending XP at the end of a session.

It's worth remembering, that these are abstract downtime rules. Delta Green isn't a Spider-Man comic, where the story is about about his adventures and the time he spends with Mary Jane, with the two regularly overlapping.

Game sessions focus on the secret missions you perform for Delta Green. Mary Jane probably is never going to be "on-screen". The other PCs will probably never meet her. The downtime "mini-game" just lets you spend a few minutes at the end of every session to get an idea of what it going on with your PC outside of missions.

The system as a whole didn't feel any more meta than CoC already does, with its rules that dictate behavior at times. It simply felt like CoC with a more sensible, less randomly immersion breaking sanity system, and the PC felt a little more like they actually did things aside from investigate eldritch horrors.

Quote from: CRKrueger;858240The cheat sheet rules are linked.  If you will suffer from a Temporary Insanity, you can resist it by spending WillPower and losing rating from a Bond.  It's not so much "If I don't keep up my Bonds I can't use them to recover from a Mythos experience off-camera." it's "On-camera, right after seeing a Mythos creature, which would otherwise drive me temporarily insane, the player can choose to deny that insanity, but it will result in the lessening of the Bond, or "Denied Stress Causes Fallout" if you want to use terms other games have used.  

In the end, Cthulhu scared Spidey in the Mary Jane.

Of course, trouble connecting with loved ones is a very real symptom of PTSD, so I am not sure what your complaint there is.

Quote from: CRKrueger;858240The cheat sheet rules are linked.  If you will suffer from a Temporary Insanity, you can resist it by spending WillPower and losing rating from a Bond.  It's not so much "If I don't keep up my Bonds I can't use them to recover from a Mythos experience off-camera." it's "On-camera, right after seeing a Mythos creature, which would otherwise drive me temporarily insane, the player can choose to deny that insanity, but it will result in the lessening of the Bond, or "Denied Stress Causes Fallout" if you want to use terms other games have used.  

Or Mythos madness lessened your ability to relate to a fellow human being.

It's questionable psychology (the popular idea that you can "suck in" or "dam" stress instead of "blowing off steam" in a fit of temporary insanity, but the pent-up crazy will eat you), but it does make a certain amount of sense from a in-game-world perspective, without necessarily breaking immersion. We do have a degree of choice on how we deal with mental hazards.

Decapitalize the sentence between quotes and you'll see what I mean.

Quote from: Baulderstone;858242Of course, trouble connecting with loved ones is a very real symptom of PTSD, so I am not sure what your complaint there is.

The point is that a soldier can't choose to not freeze in combat and die at the expense of suffering PTSD later, it just happens.  The author of the story the soldier is in has to make that determination.

I want to RP the soldier, not the author and the soldier.  Pretty simple.

Ok lets look at how I can mitigate SAN loss.

QuoteAdaptation
If you lose SAN from a threat three times without going insane, you become adapted. When adapted to a threat, you always succeed at Sanity tests for it. You cannot adapt to unnatural threats.
• VIOLENCE: Lose 1D6 CHA and the same amount from each Bond.
• HELPLESSNESS: Lose 1D6 POW and add the same amount to your Breaking Point.

Lets look at what causes Violence SAN loss.

QuoteSUFFERING VIOLENCE LOSS

• Ambushed or hit by gunfire - 0/1
• Surprised by a corpse - 0/1D2
• —It’s someone you love - 0/1D4
• Unexpectedly stabbedor strangled - 0/1D4
• Reduced to 2 HP or less - 0/1D6
• Tortured - 0/1D10

So if I am "Adapted to Violence" (either by starting that way, or successfully making three saves against that type of loss), then I automatically make a SAN save which means, the more violence I get into, the greater a chance of losing CHA and thus ratings in all my Bonds. So WAR will drive you insane or make you deadened to violence, then from that point on the more violence you survive, the worse your relationships will become.

Another way out...

QuoteProjection
When you lose SAN, you can spend 1D6 WP to reduce the SAN loss by that amount. Reduce one Bond by half that much (round up). The next time you interact with that Bond, describe the deterioration.

100% Pure Narrative Control.  I choose to reduce the SAN loss, I choose the Bond lost, I narrate how the Bond is reduced...as the character?  Obviously not.

Finally...

QuoteRepressing Insanity
When you suffer temporary insanity or an acute episode of indefinite insanity, you can try to keep control of your character by focusing on the people who depend on you.
• Spend 1D6 WP.
• Reduce one Bond by half the WP you spent (round up). The next time you interact with that Bond, describe the strain.
• Attempt a Sanity test, adding the Bond’s value as a bonus, to repress the insanity.

"you can try to keep control of your character" - again 100% Player facing mechanic meant to give the player narrative control over the Mythos Fallout affecting the character.

The key signature aspect of a Mythos game is how it deals with Sanity.  This game storywanks it.

Quote from: CRKrueger;858247The key signature aspect of a Mythos game is how it deals with Sanity.  This game storywanks it.

Well to be fair, Adaptation is a personality mechanic, but can simply be an in-setting effect.  It's the Projection and Repressing Insanity mechanics that bring the storywank, and again, to be fair, they are completely optional.

There's a more detailed playtest doc than just the Cheat Sheets, if you want to get more perspective on the rules. (This is linked off their Kickstarter 'campaign' page, so it's not secret knowledge or anything).

Hm... perhaps instead of continuing in this thread, we should create a new thread on the new Delta Green?  This is supposed to be about suggesting kickstarters, not dissecting them.

Quote from: CRKrueger;858364Well to be fair, Adaptation is a personality mechanic, but can simply be an in-setting effect.  It's the Projection and Repressing Insanity mechanics that bring the storywank, and again, to be fair, they are completely optional.

I have just read the relevant headings in the full playtest doc linked by K Peterson, and I stand by my previous assessment. It's questionable psychology, but not storywank.

Quote from: The Butcher;858384I have just read the relevant headings in the full playtest doc linked by K Peterson, and I stand by my previous assessment. It's questionable psychology, but not storywank.

You have a different definition of "In-Character" than I do then.

But I'll stop threadjacking, we can debate how a character can possibly choose to defy going insane by offloading the damage onto a specific NPC relationship of their choice in a different thread.

While not an RPG. The 7th Continent a new Kickstarter game was pointed out to me today.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1926712971/the-7th-continent-explore-survive-you-are-the-hero?ref=card

A bit pricy at 100$ though. But they have the rules up for examination before you back. Which is usually a good sign.

Interesting premise and system.

Thule 5e is still accepting late backers for a limited time.

The $20 digital package gets the pdf campaign book (273 pages), which has become available for download in the past couple of days, as well as upcoming pdfs for three 24 page adventures, three 8 page adventures, a 32 page player's companion and a 24 page GM companion (mostly with additional monsters.)

Hard copies can also be ordered, but the pdf package is a great value at this point.

7 Sins is entering its final 24-hour phase (which is usually fun to watch), and has about $1.18m in funding.

Looks like a decent board game on its own, but with over 100 minis, that's less than $1 a piece and many of them are generic weird-azz monsters that could act as stand-ins in a variety of sci-fi, horror or urban fantasy rpgs.  Verrrry tempting.

And the Norse god biker gang add-on also looks wild.

another non-RPG. But the same people that did the Shadowrun PC games has a Kickstarter up now for a Battletech tactical PC game. Looks vaugly reminiscent of Crecent Hawks Inception.