Clarity Revisited: Stress Meters

For ““You Can't Go Home Again” I want to tweak the morality/integrity game system. Two weeks ago I gave a rambling account of what I might replace it with. This week let us look at some of the specifics what is being added to each meter, where they start, and how one recovers.

Madness Meters for Changeling: the Lost

The concept (and general layout) of Madness Meters I stole liberally from Unknown Armies. The five meters and sample ranks are described below. When a character encounter a stress on one of the stress meters, they roll the lesser of Composure or Resolve to resist it. As they do they either Fail and grow closer to insanity or become Hardened and become more of a sociopath. I've fitted in the Clarity Breaks from Changeling: the Lost in where I feel they fit. Each stress also contains roleplaying guidelines for high levels of hardness or failure.

Helplessness Stress

This covers dealing with the stress of losing control over yourself, your life, and your relationships.

Sample Helplessness Checks

1. Unintentionally humiliating yourself in public. Minor unexpected life changes.
2. Getting fired from a job you love. Taking psychotropic drugs.
3. Fail at something you have to succeed at. Serious unexpected life changes.
4. Being trapped in a vat of maggots. Extreme unexpected life changes, developing a derangement.
5. Spend a month in jail.
6. Watch a video tape of your spouse committing adultery.
7. Be placed in a situation where you must saw off one of your limbs or die.
8. Watch someone you love die, mortal identity is suddenly and unexpectedly destroyed, totally abandoned, or otherwise fundamentally changed.
9. Watch someone you love die because you tried to save them and failed.
10. Be possess yet conscious as your body commits horrible acts against your will.

Failed Helplessness Checks

1. At this level you are mostly normal. Perhaps you are finicky or meticulous, trying to eliminate the possibility of things going wrong.
2. You tend to get flustered when small things go wrong.
3. You have an intense dislike for surprises, even good ones.
4. You find it difficult to trust anything, even yourself. You constant double-check your actions and prepare for every eventuality.

Hardened Helplessness Checks

• 4‑6: You are somewhat fatalistic and when things go badly wrong you are unaffected.
• 7‑9: You expect things to randomly go wrong for you. Even the most suspicious of mishaps are attributed to bad luck.
• 10: You don’t make a difference between intentional and accidental. Maybe everything is predestined or perhaps it is all chance. You have no control over what happens.

Isolation Stress

Isolation is a subtle danger that corrodes your sanity by denying you input. Becoming Hardened to isolation means ignoring social mores and rules because you have forgotten to conform to the expectations of others. Failed checks indicate an increased neediness, a desire for human contact.

Sample Isolation Checks

1. Spend a day without seeing anyone you know. Go a day without human contact.
2. Spend five hours in a sensory-deprivation tank.
3. Spend three days without talking to another human being.
4. Be institutionalized by a loved one. Go a week without human contact.
5. Spend a week in solitary.
6. See someone you thought you knew intimately behaving completely out of character. Go a month without human contact.
7. Spend a month in a country where no one speaks your language and you can’t make yourself understood no matter how hard you try.
8. Be deeply and violently betrayed by someone you love.
9. Be treated like a stranger by your closest friends.
10. Spend a month in a sensory-deprivation tank.

Failed Isolation Checks

1. At this level you are mostly normal, if perhaps a bit shy at first.
2. You are nervous around new people and try to make a good first impression.
3. You suffer insomnia when sleeping alone. You avoid silence when you are alone. Sometimes you talk to yourself or think out loud.
4. Sometimes when you are all alone you suffer panic attacks.

Hardened Isolation Checks

• 4‑5: You can be unthinkingly rude such as breaking into the middle of conversation or telling the truth in an indelicate fashion.
• 6‑7: You lack patience with people who don’t understand what you telling them immediately. Your first inclination may be to repeat what you said word for word or to give up.
• 8‑9: Unless you concentrate, you lack dialogue skills. You interrupt others but hate being interrupted. You also don’t see the point of many social conventions.
• 10: You don’t care what others think of you and no longer understand how someone could care.

Self Stress

This measures your guilt and self loathing as well as your alienation from who you think you are.

Sample Self Checks

1. Break a minor (mundane) promise.
2. Be confronted with evidence that your self-image is incorrect. For example, thinking you are responsible and being confronted with a list of failed promises. Changing courts.
3. Secretly gratifying an urge that is unacceptable to your upbringing and background. For example, spit on a cross for a devout Christian.
4. Lie to conceal some aspect of your personality from a close friend or loved one. Like being not human...
5. Deciding not to fulfill your Virtue because it is too dangerous. Breaking a formal oath or pledge.
6. Deliberately deceive someone you love in way that causes them pain if they find out. Killing your fetch.
7. Discover you inadvertently committed cannibalism.
8. Deliberately act against your Virtue.
9. Kill someone you love.
10. Destroy everything you’ve risked your life to support.

Failed Self Checks

1. At this level you are mostly okay. Sometimes you feel an eerie moment when you feel alienated from your own motives and character.
2. You have frequent “who am I?” moments.
3. Half the time your words and actions feel oddly forced, fake, or rehearsed to you—as if you are an actor playing you.
4. You frequently feel like your watching your every action from the outside as if you are a passive observer of your own life.

Hardened Self Checks

• 4‑5: Even when you tell the truth others tend to think you are lying, unless you try to act natural.
• 6‑7: You’ve lost a sense of connection to those around you. You no longer know exactly what you feel about them.
• 8‑9: Half the time you only know you are telling the truth if you stop to think about it. Truth and lies no longer seem so important.
• 10: Life has been pared down to essentials for you. You no longer have opinions about food, music or fashion. There is too little “you” left to determine those opinions.

Unnatural Stress

This covers those things that undermine your faith in how the universe works. Or that confirms that the rules of fairy tales apply to everything.

Sample Unnatural Checks

• Experience a preternaturally strong deja vu.
• See a monster that while inhuman is not impossible. For example, crocodile men, a horse sized wolf, and a 5 pound spider.
• See a ghost, dreamwalking.
• See someone or something do something physically impossible. For example, something flying without wings or a human being lifting a car over his head.
• Be successfully attacked with magic, using tokens or other mystical items.
• See someone you know killed by magic without any visible or rational cause, using Contracts.
• Have a conversation with a loved one whom you know is dead.
• Visit an alien dimension, entering the Hedge.
• Learn that the reason planes don’t fall out of the sky is because a madman claps every half hour.
• Realize that the reason you and your spouse of ten years have never had children is that he or she isn’t really human, intimate contact with True Fae, spending time in Arcadia.

Failed Unnatural Checks

1. You are little superstitious.
2. You have some nightmares and are suspicious and/or fascinated by occult and religious objects, places and people.
3. You feel as if you are always watched. Sometimes you hear voices in “white noise” such as the wind or traffic.
4. You have frequent nightmares which seem utterly real. You sometimes catch glimpses of someone watching you.

Hardened Unnatural Checks

• 4-5: You listen closely to those discussing the paranormal, trying to figure out if they know something.
• 6‑7: You know and accept that there are alien forces governing the universe. You know people are not truly in control of their lives.
• 8‑9: You see amusing connections in seemingly unrelated events.
• 10: Everything is normal to you: talking foliage, spontaneous combustion, rains of tentacled horrors.

Violence Stress

This stress meter covers dealing with the stress of hurting people, watching others get hurt, and getting hurt yourself.

Sample Violence Checks

• Be attacked with a weapon.
• Witness an act of torture, Injury to another (accidental or otherwise).
• Get shot at, randomly.
• Killing a person (or changeling or fetch), manslaughter.
• Participating in a massive battle with hundreds of deaths on both sides.
• Perform an act of torture.
• Deliberately kill a helpless target.
• Tortured for an hour or longer.
• Witness a brutal execution.
• Watch as someone you love is tortured to death.

Failed Violence Checks

1. At this level you are mostly okay. Perhaps you are edgy when a knife in a room is pointed in your direction.
2. You are hyper-aware of violence, both real and fictional.
3. You get uneasy every time you see blood, even badly faked blood. Sometimes you have nightmares about the violence you’ve seen.
4. You instinctively take a defensive posture whenever there is a loud noise or raised voice. You have nightmares frequently and constantly worry about being attacked.

Hardened Violence Checks

• 4‑5: Your attitude to violence is apparent in conversation unless you keep it hidden. It might be an intensity, nervousness, or grim silence, depending on how you cope.
• 6‑7: Violence in fiction or discussion no longer affects you in any way.
• 8‑9: Your callousness shows in conversation unless you make constant pains to hide it. You might be bitter and harsh, feverish and vehement, or icy cold.
• 10: Life no longer means anything to you. You may choose to stay alive but it is a personal preference. You come off as tense and guarded if you choose the hide this.

Starting Stress

Obviously Changelings are going to be making lots of stress checks in play but they should also start with some Hardened levels. In general up to 3 Hardened levels in any category is fine, even 4 with some justification (at least to shut those callous killers up). Let the players choose what they are willing to accept (but point out the downside below). Same thing if they want to start off with some Failed levels.

The main exception is Unnatural stress. Due to the fact they know magic is real, all Changelings should start with 8 or 9 Hardened levels in Unnatural stress.

Consequences

If someone gets 5 Failed levels in a stress they develop a Derangement as a permanent Condition. They no longer roll when encountering that stress. If the trigger exceeds their level of Hardened, they automatically fail.

Conversely if they reach Hardened at level 10 for a particular stress, nothing in that category will affect them. This has consequences.

Mental stress makes one vulnerable but also makes one human. Become too Hardened and you can’t feel fear anymore. You also become unable to emotionally connect with human beings. You are well on your way to being one of Them (i.e. the Gentry).

When you max out 2 Meters or have a total of 35 Hardened marks, bad things happen as you begin a transformation into a True Fae. I don't have a system for this yet but initially you suffer a -3 penalty to Empathy rolls and Switch how you regain Willpower. You no longer regain Willpower via your Virtue. You don't see the point. Using your Vice to regain Willpower now requires actively harming people but restores all spent points. From there expect things to be tempted fully to the dark side.

Recovery

Unlike Integrity or Clarity recovering from Failed rolls or Hardened levels is completely separate from the experience system. Charging experience for the consequence of playing the game seems as right to me as charging experience for the ability to heal damage.

Assuming the character has not yet become permanently insane, they can receive counseling to help with their accruing Failed and Hardened check boxes. To do so they need a psychotherapist, social worker, or other professional they trust. Obviously for Changelings this involves a serious risk (at least of being committed).

After a few introductory meetings to establish trust, each session allows the character to roll Resolve + Composure. Success allows them to remove a Hardened or Failed mark. Even a failure allows them to remove a Hardened level (they can choose not to but they will be lectured on resisting therapy). An exceptional success allows the character to remove up to 3 Failed or 3 Hardened marks from any one Meter.

Recovering from permanent insanity is a process that takes months or years to overcome. it is also best accomplished under close psychiatric care, something that a Changeling would hard pressed to endure.

Bonus: Hedge Condition

Here is a free condition to work with this system inspired by a play that is on my mind at the moment.

Into the Hedge

When a character is the Hedge, they find it hard to tell right from wrong. They often act on their impulses, ignoring social convention or their own ethics as the thorns tear away their moral structure.

Beat: Every time you make a Self test earn a Beat.

Resolved: N/A (ends once out of the Hedge)