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Fright Check Table Notes

From the forums…. So something that always bothered me about the Fright Check table (even as a GM) is the way its effects are frequently permanent and un-fun, particularly when there's nothing preventing the GM from dropping the same supernatural Terror attack on the PCs again and again and again (even with bonuses for repeated exposure, 13s fail a lot) until they're all rolling against both Claustrophobia and Agoraphobia every time they move, and they dislike everything in the animal kingdom because the GM ran out of ideas for quirks to give them.   It doesn't make a lot of sense, and is inappropriate for high fantasy adventure games (in ways that it isn't for, say, Cthulhoid horror games where you're SUPPOSED to gradually slip into gibbering insanity).   Proposal: Debilitating Fright Check results are like crippling wounds, and you recover from them in a similar manner. Roll Will after any encounter where you failed a Fright Check and acquired a 'permanent' quirk or disadvantage.   On a success, the disadvantage will fade after the character has a reasonable period of safe rest - a night huddling in camp while Noisy Things move around in the woods outside of your vision probably doesn't count, but a return to a nice safe well-patrolled base camp might, and a week carousing In Town certainly should. ("Bob really had trouble with bugs for a while after that encounter with the slime-spewing tentacled beetle-men, but he got over it once he had a chance to think it through and work out the difference between a mosquito and a Horror from Beyond Time and Space.")   On a failure, the disadvantage will fade after 1d+1 months, assuming similar bad things don't continue happening to the character. Few situations are so terrible that the human mind cracks permanently, and healthy people get over these events as they fade with time. A good therapist can help a lot (GM's judgement). ("It took Jerry a long time to get over the sight of his friends' animated corpses trying to break down the door and eat him; he was suffering terrible nightmares for a long time, and was really easily spooked. He definitely needed that vacation, but Doc Hawkins says he should be okay to return to duty.")   On a critical failure, the disadvantage is truly permanent; therapy and CP expenditure (or magic) will be needed to repair the character's fractured psyche. ("Eric was never the same after watching that Care Bears marathon on Teletoon. I don't think he's sleeping at all, and he'll barely touch food. He keeps muttering about that STARE.")

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