I have been replaying Bloodborne and recently been running Burning Wheel with a group of players that are majorly magic users. Both of these have got me thinking about Insight and risk-reward style systems in rpgs.
I’ve been toying around with the idea of Insight as it exists in Bloodborne, and I think I have came up with something I want to toy around with more. Here’s the basic top-of-my-head version with no amount of play-testing or really running it by other people for quality control.
Insight is an attribute all characters have initially at 0. Anytime a character is witness to the true horrors of reality, unknowable dark secrets, bear the terrible gaze of the gods, etc. they increase this score by 1 (maybe they also need to make/fail a save or something, right now I’m not really thinking of specific systems).
A character may use their Insight in appropriate situations – maybe during investigations, maybe knowing about the horrors that lurk beyond the veil helps then with a particular skill or tasks, or maybe it even assist their magic – they take a number of d6s up to their Insight score (but may optionally use lesser).
For each die that comes up 1-3 – the character has misinterpreted the true nature of reality, and they lose 1 point of Insight for each die that came up this way.
Every die that came up a 4-5 adds to the characters relevant roll in a minor fashion – perhaps they get a +1 bonus for each 4 or 5 in D&D, for example.
And any die that comes up as a 6 – gets the above bonus, but they also grasp just a but more about the world – their Insight goes up by 1.
Out of the entire pool, any doubles or triples of a number spells bad news for the character. A double means that the character peered on some facet of nature that horrifies them – maybe they are stunned, maybe they take psychic damage. Whatever it is its a big downside, but not severe.
Triples however, are severe. The characters will and understanding has torn a gap between the veil, and the horrors from beyond leak out. Maybe some transdimensional entity pours forth, or maybe a massive psychic storms spills into the scene. Either way its big, and it’s a bad event for the players.
I definitely want to try this out more, and maybe even attach a magic system to it, very similar to GLOG which this obviously takes a lot of inspiration from.
Tell me what you think!