What ideas have people advanced for curing trauma damage between campaigns?

The rule I’ve been toying with: Each point costs 1-2 xp to remove.
(Thematically this would be having actual medical/psychiatric care, ala the various RPGs)

1 hour ago, Derrault said:

What ideas have people advanced for curing trauma damage between campaigns?

The rule I’ve been toying with: Each point costs 1-2 xp to remove.
(Thematically this would be having actual medical/psychiatric care, ala the various RPGs)

Forgotten Age prices it at 5 per trauma. I don't think that's unreasonable, the benefit of healing a trauma is going to be highly variable.

I think there's an opportunity to trade XP for curing being poisoned between two scenarios in the Forgotten Age campaign. If memory serves, it's a 5XP cost.

Does 1-2XP to cure a trauma seem balanced against this established inter-scenario health recovery notion?

12 minutes ago, Buhallin said:

Forgotten Age prices it at 5 per trauma. I don't think that's unreasonable, the benefit of healing a trauma is going to be highly variable.

So if you play forgotten age you can cure the mental and physical trauma? Is that a scenario specific thing, or just something you could implement for any?

2 minutes ago, Derrault said:

So if you play forgotten age you can cure the mental and physical trauma? Is that a scenario specific thing, or just something you could implement for any?

It's an option during a specific interlude, not a generally available thing. But if you're looking for a cost measure, there's the official implementation

15 minutes ago, Buhallin said:

It's an option during a specific interlude, not a generally available thing. But if you're looking for a cost measure, there's the official implementation

Fair enough, my pricing was based on the XP and trauma differential between the two “best” outcomes of the core set campaign.

2 hours ago, Derrault said:

Fair enough, my pricing was based on the XP and trauma differential between the two “best” outcomes of the core set campaign.

Yeah, every outcome of every campaign gives you some trauma; it kind of reinforces the idea that these characters aren't superhuman, and after facing enough mind-altering abominations, they will crack.

The 5xp price point seems reasonable enough, or you could save up a bunch and then run Forgotten Age to do it "legitimately" :D.

1 hour ago, SGPrometheus said:

Yeah, every outcome of every campaign gives you some trauma; it kind of reinforces the idea that these characters aren't superhuman, and after facing enough mind-altering abominations, they will crack.

The 5xp price point seems reasonable enough, or you could save up a bunch and then run Forgotten Age to do it "legitimately" :D.

Eh, Lovecraft would be the first to admit that too much weird stuff and a person just becomes blasé about it. (See his own comments about the Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath)

12 hours ago, Derrault said:

Eh, Lovecraft would be the first to admit that too much weird stuff and a person just becomes blasé about it. (See his own comments about the Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath)

That's an interesting point. The Call of Cthulhu role playing game functions that way. If you see enough byakhees, you eventually stop being shocked.

13 hours ago, Derrault said:

Eh, Lovecraft would be the first to admit that too much weird stuff and a person just becomes blasé about it. (See his own comments about the Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath)

I really don't think this is supported by the source material. I mean, I haven't read everything, but I recall the, "it drove me/him/them to madness and eventual suicide" ending being a lot more common than the, "and then I was fine with it" ending. Mostly the protagonists who survive wish they could forget everything they learned and pray for death. Am I missing the stories where at the end they're like, "neat; let's go find more"?

36 minutes ago, SGPrometheus said:

I really don't think this is supported by the source material. I mean, I haven't read everything, but I recall the, "it drove me/him/them to madness and eventual suicide" ending being a lot more common than the, "and then I was fine with it" ending. Mostly the protagonists who survive wish they could forget everything they learned and pray for death. Am I missing the stories where at the end they're like, "neat; let's go find more"?

I’m talking about his literal commentary on his contemporaries and his own work. He voiced concern that too much weirdness essentially inured a reader to any further weirdness being effective. Ie you the reader stop feeling any sense of Horror when everything is horrible.

11 hours ago, Derrault said:

I’m talking about his literal commentary on his contemporaries and his own work. He voiced concern that too much weirdness essentially inured a reader to any further weirdness being effective. Ie you the reader stop feeling any sense of Horror when everything is horrible.

Oh, that's a totally extradiegetic commentary then; it's not something he applied or meant to apply to characters in his stories. He's taking about the readers themselves and their acclimatization to weirdness.

Like, someone could describe the horrors of war, and it might inure you to it somewhat, but it won't give you PTSD like it did to those who experienced it. In this metaphor, our investigators are the ones actually experiencing it, so trauma is to be expected.

8 hours ago, SGPrometheus said:

Oh, that's a totally extradiegetic commentary then; it's not something he applied or meant to apply to characters in his stories. He's taking about the readers themselves and their acclimatization to weirdness.

Like, someone could describe the horrors of war, and it might inure you to it somewhat, but it won't give you PTSD like it did to those who experienced it. In this metaphor, our investigators are the ones actually experiencing it, so trauma is to be expected.

That’s actually a part of the RPG as well, veterans, violent criminals, and medical professionals don’t suffer sanity loss from seeing corpses unexpectedly because of their life experience, and having already gone through it. And, as @CSerpent notes, the characters become inured to Mythos creatures in the same way they’d become inured to seeing an elephant if they’d never seen or heard of one before.

I don't specifically remember the exact conversion we used, but me and a friend did a 4 investigator run of TFA and wanted to use the same investigators when trying out Return to Dunwich, and wanted to heal some of the trauma to make it manageable. The problem behind the idea of healing trauma is that eventually XP becomes kind of useless once your deck is fully upgraded. So healing trauma on an upgraded investigator without any additional payment or consequence kind of breaks the game. What we ultimately decided on was a combination of spending XP and acquiring additional basic weaknesses. I just can't remember the exact conversion rate we used between trauma and XP/weaknesses. But that's my personal recommendation. Adding weaknesses to remove trauma at least makes it so that you aren't teetering on the verge of death at the start of every scenario, but it also means that your deck becomes less and less reliable as time goes on. I think it's a fair trade-off and one that actually makes for a more interesting playthrough if you want to keep using the same investigators.

I've been doing a lot of solo runs with 2 investigators (Thanks, COVID.....). Most of my runs start with a Night of the Zealot campaign before a full campaign, as it gives me some time to learn decks and get a start on XP. I've been toying with how to deal with this and while 2 Trauma was healed if NotZ was won (sidebar, if it was lost, I didn't kill the investigators, just give them at least one of both trauma and no XP gain). But I like @Annette Soleil 's idea. The ruling I'm working on for my campaigns is:

"Spend 4 XP and gain 1 random Basic Weakness -OR- Spend 2 XP and gain 2 random Weaknesses = Heal 1 Trauma. This can only be done at the end of a Campaign or Interlude."

Not 100% sold on the 2 XP / 2 Weakness part but I also wanted to make sure that if the Stuff hits the fan, the team can still heal. Might tweek it.

The text in Forgotten Age's relevant scenario vis-a-vis healing trauma says "the investigator can spend 5 xp to heal a single point of physical or mental trauma"...seems to me that feels like it's only one point that can be healed, you can't bank 10xp and heal 2 trauma.

12 hours ago, Krysmopompas said:

The text in Forgotten Age's relevant scenario vis-a-vis healing trauma says "the investigator can spend 5 xp to heal a single point of physical or mental trauma"...seems to me that feels like it's only one point that can be healed, you can't bank 10xp and heal 2 trauma.

That's my reading also.

I have a TFA run frozen before The Boundary Beyond because I can't decide whether I want to heal one of Leo's two mental.

Depends on what, if any, healing your party has. If you've got Hallowed Mirror and/or Wish Eater, you'll probably be fine. If you've got the upgraded Enchanted Blade, you'll definitely be fine (since you'll be killing things with it just to get them dead, so the horror heal is effectively free). If you're using a slower method of healing, or if you're relying entirely on soak, I'd take the therapy if I were you. Four starting sanity isn't a disaster, but you're one run of bad luck away from three starting sanity, which can be a death spiral.

(Though, bear in mind, I've only ever had three starting sanity as Roland; I could be underestimating just how strong Leo's tankiness is. It just seems really risky from my perspective.)

7 hours ago, CSerpent said:

That's my reading also.

I have a TFA run frozen before The Boundary Beyond because I can't decide whether I want to heal one of Leo's two mental.

Neat...Leo's mental resistance isn't bad and I guess it depends on your allies, but IMO healing one mental trauma when you've got a chance - especially in TFA, is a good idea based on what's to come.

The rules for standalone decks set a "cost" of a basic weakness for 10 xp. So perhaps trauma could be traded for basic weaknesses at a rate of 2 trauma for 1 basic weakness.

Of course that does not really solve the problem of what to do with all that xp, but it still gets rid of some trauma at a cost of loading yourself up with weaknesses. Also, there is distinct lack of physical injuries weaknesses, specifically only Internal Injury and that is it.