I decided to revise the healing and sanity rules for my horror campaign.
Revised Healing: I use seperate saving throws (DND 5e), instead of defense in ICRPG (I’m used to playing like such)! Whenever a terrifying event occurs that threatens to shatter one’s sanity, they make a wisdom save. On a failure, their wisdom modifier is permanentally reduced by 1.
They then roll on a sanity table (3d6 + Wis mod). Higher results indicate that the victim is merely unsettled, with lower results being more dangerous and crazy. A 3 or lower indicated the victim is clinically insane, no therapy can help them unless through a miracle. A week of therapy increases their wisdom modifier by 1, up to their max.
Healing: The recover action is removed. The healing kit is reworked: It can also be used to heal 2d4 hp for a ally, with no check needed. Then you roll a d8, a 1 indicating that the kit is empty
Would this be a good rule for my horror campaign? How would it play out? Any issues with such rule? Thoughts?
Consider what wisdom represents in your game; now, a missed wis save makes the character more likely to miss the next save and go crazy - which I guess is intended - but it also makes the character worse in all wis-based skills. If this is also intentional, then cool. Otherwise, you might want to tweak it.
Personally, I tend to like settings where the horrors are more real, not less real, than normal reality (cf. kult, CoC). Thus, I think it’s more interesting if “going crazy” is associated with higher wisdom, instead of lower. So if it was my game, I would probably make wis (or the sanity save) increase on a failed roll. A higher wis character would then be less likely to get scared when encountering horrors, but more likely to be taken out of game if they fail their check. But that’s the kind of dynamic I prefer, YMMV.
Thank you for the advice. Increasing the wisdom modifier is quite a interesting take on the system. I’m considering one of the results on the table should allow ability checks to notice things to become easy.
I think I will stick to the spiraling insanity of my campaign. The decrease in wis-based skills will represent the victims slow distortion of reality.