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[Orange-of-Cthulhu]

I always found it underwhelming with only 4 kinds of madness in the game. I also find it underwhelming that mad dwarves die pretty fast - I'd find it neater if a dwarf could live a long and weird life while being mad.

Ages ago I found a game that had a mechanic that could be usefull - phobias. It was just, whenever a madness-inducing thing occured, you'd roll a d100 on a table of a ton of phobias and you'd get a new one.

It resulted som fun emergent gameplay - I think also in DF it could create some really unpredictable situations.

I think a phobia should be gotten like if a dwarf is #under a lot of pressure# and uo then has a an intense negative emotion. Then they dwarf would get a random phobia from a long list of phobias. It should be possible that it went away, maybe in the opposite condition than getting them (great mood and intense positive emotion)

The list can be made with the relevant one from say https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_phobias or any book with a nice list of phobias.

In DF Bibliophobia (books) or Equinophobia (horses), Emetophobia (vomiting) or Gephyrophobia (bridges) could result in some interesting situations.

I think a phobic character would just run away from the phobic trigger if they saw one. So if a bibliophobic dwarf comes across a book, he'd just instantly run away and hide for a while somewhere, then he'd calm down and be normal again. So in many situations it wouldn't matter, an it would just be this little thing that made a dwarf stand out because he's crazy.

Wouldn't it be fun if a scholar got bibliophobia? Or if this one dwarf just couldn't cross bridges?

[Eric Blank]

While this isn't inherently a bad idea, random phobias probably isnt a great implementation. People usually develop phobias related to trauma they've experienced, right, so it would be more well recieved if phobias were related to whatever happened stress wise to create that phobia, such as developing a specific fear of bridges because they witnessed somebody get crushed by a drawbridge or fell from where one was retracted. And you'd have to tell the player of the development of phobias somehow, so they know why their dwarf is behaving oddly.

[betaking]

Sets of phobias generated by civilization and selected from curated lists until such a time that civ generation is competent enough to select from a broader range.

[Azerty]

Ages ago I found a game that had a mechanic that could be usefull - phobias. It was just, whenever a madness-inducing thing occured, you'd roll a d100 on a table of a ton of phobias and you'd get a new one.

Was it Cyberpunk? Because I found this page and this page in French about extended effects for Cyberpsychosis, and they are very detailled.

[Orange-of-Cthulhu]

Ages ago I found a game that had a mechanic that could be usefull - phobias. It was just, whenever a madness-inducing thing occured, you'd roll a d100 on a table of a ton of phobias and you'd get a new one.

Was it Cyberpunk? Because I found this page and this page in French about extended effects for Cyberpsychosis, and they are very detailled.

Not it was a Lovecraft game - paper & dice RPG from the 1980ies. It might have been called "Call of Cthulhu" but I'm not sure anymore what it was called.

(Funny my username is Lovecraft now - I forgot about Lovecraft for like 20 years, and then went back to his stuff.)