Stress and Sanity

Stress and Sanity

Our campaign frequently references Sanity as a statistic and stress damage. If you use these optional rules, characters gain a seventh ability score, Sanity. If you're building using the standard array, each character gains an additional 10 (i.e. 15, 14, 13, 12, 10, 10, 8). If you're using point buy; each character gains an additional 2 points to spend on their ability scores. If you are rolling for stats; simply roll a seventh score instead of the standard six.
Sanity represents a character's ability to cope with the horrors they experience within an adventure, we can't all be as well accustomed to gruesome scenes and horrifying iconography after all. Spells which would otherwise effect saves or checks, also apply to sanity.
Stress damage acts as a seperate pool of 0-200 and in most cases, characters will start with a nominal amount of stress, somewhere between 5 and 20 depending on how tragic or difficult their time before the adventure was. Characters may recover some stress damage through comforting activities unique to themselves, we all cope differently. This stress is recovered in increments decided by the DM, typically 1d4+1, 1d6+1, 1d8+1, or 1d12+1. 
Unlike health, stress counts up, the more stress a character has, the worse the effect on their psyche. 

Stress	Effect
50	The character starts to experience minor visual and/or auditory hallucinations. They may see something out of the corner of their eye, or hear a voice calling in the distance. They may also be more likely to believe minor illusions or be more susceptible to charm.
100	The character starts to confuse friend from foe in battle and occassionaly strike an ally inadvertently. They are also more likely to follow the growing madness in their mind and touch or interact with things that they typically would logically know better than to do so.
150	Characters start to become a larger threat to the party as paranoia and madness set in. They make accusations over simple events, strike out for little reason, or otherwise become more difficult to travel with. In moments of clarity, the character may request to be tied up or bound in some other way to prevent from harming their friends.
200	No one ever died from stress huh? Have a heart attack for your struggles and roll a death save. If the character fails, they die from stress, this is a single death save event unlike the typical system for death by combat or other mishap. If the character succeeds this death save, they must immediately make a sanity check, DC 15, or lose grip on reality and attack anything and everything within site. This can be stopped with a lesser or greater restoration, but all saves and checks must be re-rolled each time a sanity check is failed.

Note: This article is not of my own creation but that of the minds of Fool and Scholar Productions. Credit for this segment goes to Travis Vengroff and those of Fool and Scholar productions and Dark Dice.