Alternate Rules for Tome Sanity loss

[SamS]

Has anyone figured out the alternate rules for sanity loss when reading tomes, that is cover in the 1st Keepers Companion?
It makes my head hurt.
But I like the idea of not loosing all the sanity at once. If you haven't looked at it, it's on page 204. Please give me your take on it.

[hastur]

it'll make sense when you've lost all the SAN.

[SamS]

Well I'm just not sure I understand it correctly.
Here is an example:
The Tome - Cthaat Aquadingen
Here are the stats for the tome.
Sanity loss 1D4/2D4, Cthulhu Mythos +6%, 29 weeks

Then I loss immediately 1 sanity, because the Cthulhu Mythos is a +6% and I divide that by 10 and get 0.6 and then round up to 1.

The total sanity loss (2D4), I roll a 5.

Okay here is where I'm not sure.
At this point you divide the remaining sanity to loose by 5. Which in my example it is 5 - 1 = 4 left to loose.
So 4 divided by 5 equals 0.8. It say then to round down which means zero, so they loose no more sanity?
That don't seem right, because you still have 4 points to loose.


And now my head hurts.

[Dr. Gerard]

And now so does mine.

I think there is some poor wording in the text that might be causing the headaches. The short answer is that I think you should round up, not down, for the losses after the first. Alternatively, you could round down but say that 1 is a minimum. I think this was just an oversight in the editing of the book.

But here's my overall take. There are some interesting ideas here, but I find the mechanics to be unreasonably fiddly.

The way I read the description is that the investigator will eventually lose all of the total points rolled for the tome's SAN loss. They lose a small amount immediately, usually one or two points. And then when certain triggers occur, like increased Mythos scores and successful Knowledge rolls or certain skill increases, the player loses another small part of that total amount that they're destined to lose. However, if the investigator encounters something that the tome speaks about, they lose the whole remainder of the SAN points all at once.

All of this is meant to simulate what happens when an investigator has their fears confirmed by real life experience. It simulates the connecting of dots; the correlation of the mind's contents.

I can read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe quite comfortably, but if I stumble on a snowy wood in the back of my cupboard, having read the book only makes my shock worse. Because it means that maybe beavers can talk. Imagine. Shudder.

The narrative effect of this mechanic is that when an investigator reads a tome, it unnerves them. Then as they discover more about the Mythos, they remember passages and references in the tome and that increases their anxiety. Could this silly book be a window into the true nature of things? Surely not! Then, the investigator comes face to face with something truly supernatural, something they can't rationalize, and the strange fruits of all their previous research come rushing in, amplifying the effect of the Mythos encounter. No! It's all true! Dear Heavens, we are doomed! Because of your previous reading, you are more likely to experience temporary insanity (5 or more SAN points) when you face your first Ghoul, and more likely to hit the Indefinite Insanity threshold at the supernatural climax of a scenario. In effect, the smaller losses that you get along the way are pressure releases that reign in the final bang that you'll get during your first tome-related encounter.

I like the idea, but unless you really master these rules,I feel they're going to get in the way. However, I think the same ticking-time-bomb effect can be achieved in simpler ways.

An alternative: Determine the total loss for reading the tome. You lose one point when you finish reading it. You lose two points each time you discover something disturbing that could be related to the contents of the tome. If you encounter something that is referenced in the book -- including magic, creatures, entities or convincing evidence of the supernatural -- you loose whatever is left in one lump sum. If there are sanity losses already associated with any of these things, the extra points are added to the result immediately.

This feels more fluid and more manageable to me. I prefer to replace mechanical crunch with intuition and context when possible.

[SamS]

Yes, I like the idea of adding to the horror of finding a monsters, magic, or an "idea" from the book you just read.
I think your right that you can't let the mechanic of the rule take away the fun of the game.
So I will try your alternative, it sounds good to me.

[fox01313]

Another alternative that I can think of is to just roll up the total SAN loss & then divide it per week of reading so every week they will be losing more SAN. That or do some other kind of scaling incremental SAN loss, I think that it's not going to create SAN loss at first glance unless that bookmark or title page is really REALLY horrific. The SAN loss is just going to happen as the cosmic dread happens as they start piecing more & more of it together, things start getting more & more dreadful.