That’s actually kind of a good point, if a horror is far enough literally beyond our comprehension. Is it really a horror?
I’ve seen this image floating around for a while, which breaks down the reasoning - or lack thereof in certain media - pretty well.
The point regarding seeing the world from anothers view reminds me of ‘Story of your life’ by Ted Chiang, a brilliant short story that also has a movie based on it (Arrival) which is also my favourite movie despite the, imo, botched ending.
Spoiler alert:
As the lead character learns the aliens language and can now interpret time and generally the world they do, you get to a different kind of consciousness.
As I type this out I relaize its actually kind of off topic after all lol.
“This is madness”
Meaning, a unique viewpoint?
Knowing the causes of BSE and Alzheimers, the effects of mercury poisoning, real madness loses it’s scare as a mere, although a bit weird, sickness.
I think they’re talking about “justified” madness. Realistic madness is just seeing things that aren’t there, or reacting extremely to mundane stimuli, but if you had somehow been given comprehension of some higher truth about the world that nobody else would ever believe, the actions you take as a result of that knowledge might seem crazy to those around you, even if they’re perfectly logical from your enlightened perspective.
for a sample of such madness please try arguing with someone about a topic you’re very familiar with, and they clearly know fuck all about but refuse to learn or listen to anybody but themselves and their echo chamber!
just have to let it sink in - it will eventually trigger the internal horror response
6 years later: AAAAAAAAA!
More like: aaaahhhhhAAAAAAHHHHH
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In the USA, recently more people died of “excess deaths” than from all wars combined, and this on top of our regularly scheduled culling of kids in schools, our democracy is already converted into a totalitarian regime due in part to an infamous SCOTUS (court) ruling, but it’s probably climate change that will kill us all within it lifetimes, oh yeah and virtually nothing on the internet works quite correctly anymore.
Today is Thursday btw, and you know what that means - looking forward to the weekend, whoo-hoo! :-P
Yeah, so what’s with all the tentacles?
Must be one of them hentais
I played a one-shot of Call of Cthulhu where the DM had you roll an intelligence check if you saw a horror. If you rolled over your intelligence, you had no idea what you were looking at and were unaffected. If you rolled under your intelligence, you knew exactly what you were looking at and had to roll against your sanity to see if it drove you insane.
In other words, you could have no idea what you’re looking at, know what you’re looking at but handle it, or know what you’re looking at and not like it!
I like your DM
I thought those were just the rules?
It could be, I only ever played the system once and I’m not really familiar with the rules. At a glance, it looks like the intelligence roll usually happens after losing a certain amount of sanity?
I like the concept, I guess I’m just confused at why a higher intelligence roll would mean a “lower intelligence” as in you don’t know what you’re looking at, but I guess it’s so that a lower intelligence roll is more potentially punishing?
The thought was that the higher your intelligence, the higher the chance you know what you’re seeing. So if you have a high intelligence of say 19, then you need to design the check such that it’s very likely you’ll “succeed” in recognizing it, so with a D20 that means rolling under 19 (a 90% chance). A lower intelligence would actually be a good thing in this case, someone with an intelligence of 2 only has a 5% chance of “succeeding” and rolling under a 2.
Probably the confusing part here is that you still want to roll high, but it’s strange that a high roll, in some way, isn’t a success; you don’t successfully recognize what you’re looking at and that’s a good thing. Even writing this comment I kept getting it mixed up, but I think mechanically it fits the theme well.
Oh that makes way more sense thank you.
They were thrillers beyond my comprehension at best
You know that’s interesting turn of phrase that doesn’t make much sense.
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