Burn sanity for narrativism?

[Callan S.]

Split from [CoC] and thoughts about the genre

Not sure if this is worth a thread or not.

Chris wrote:

Ron: it's also entirely possible that the 'solutions' to CoC some combo of the above. A player may strive for Sanity loss during one scene, then pull back and play it strategically or tactically for a while, to prolong the experience.

I plan on pushing the hell out of the Sanity envelope at our next session. I'm actually very curious to see how the game functions if a player concentrates on burning Sanity, rather than the push-me-pull-you I mentioned earlier. Does it break? Does the simulation break down?

It looks like a strategic placement of resources to say "This is important to my character". But rather than how narrativism focuses on making choices right now and defining character by those, it's more like your just passively responding to the appearance of the mythos. Is that nar?

Okay, rather than get into GNS, what about an entirely different supportive technique for nar? A technique that, rather than your character making a choice now, what we have is that he already made his choices years ago. Choices about how he thinks the world works...in fact, in what things he's heavily invested.

And when the player basically says "I'm willing to burn sanity on this, rather than turn to tactics like covering my eyes, running, shooting, whatever" it shows just what will crack that PC's mind, by cracking just what he's chosen to believe in.

A way off technique? Possibly a very destructive one, where just as you've found how the character works, it's all been wrenched apart.

[Bankuei]

Hi Callan,

It might help to remember it's always the player making choices right now.  Every time the GM presents a new situation, it's the player choosing to hold to something about the character or not.  It doesn't matter if the character is considered to have made a choice as the player made the choice, or made that choice retroactively- either way, the point is that the player is using the character's actions now, as a way of addressing premise.

Chris

[Mike Holmes]

Way out technique? Humanity from Sorcerer.

Mike