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| art from Lovecraft: The Blasphemously Large First Issue by Daniel Govar and Mat Lopes |
In Delta Green, if a Great Old One makes a big enough appearance in the game for you to have to make a SAN roll, the game's usually over. But sometimes it's not the end. Maybe a Shan only briefly exposed your mind to Azathoth as a punishment, or like Johansen, you ram Cthulhu in the face with a steamboat, who understandably decides to go back to sleep. You've still lost 1D10, 1D20, or 1D100 SAN, which is an awful lot. Just because Yog-Sothoth didn't let the Old Ones break through and trample all over the earth doesn't mean you survived. There's a good chance you're babbling at 0 SAN or some other number low enough for an exit from field work. In this post, I'm going to crunch the numbers to find the probabilities of the different results of a 1D10/1D100 or 1D20/1D100 SAN test.
The probabilities are going to be pretty fuzzy because I'm ignoring the Projection mechanic and the fact that even if plunging from 60 SAN to 3 SAN counts as 'survival,' it's not the same as only dropping to 48 SAN. My hope is that because these two confounding factors pull the analyses in opposite directions, by ignoring them both, they'll just cancel out.
But if you're wondering how likely it is for a Agent to pull themselves from the brink of 0 SAN by using the projection mechanic, here are some numbers. If an Agent starts with 90 SAN and the SAN test ends with them losing 90+ SAN, they only have a 20% chance of projecting actually making a difference. This is because they can easily lose 94 SAN (or more), where even if they roll a 4 on the D4, that's still not enough to leave them with 1 point of SAN. This drops to an 11% chance if the Agent has 80 SAN, then to a 7% chance if the Agent has 70 SAN and so on.
Agents with 90 SAN face a 3% risk of being effectively 'lost' via reduction to 0 SAN. They have an overall 58% chance of suffering a temporary insanity if the SAN loss is 1D10/1D100 and a 75% chance if it's 1D20/1D100. Since I am going by increments of 10 SAN, the average SAN loss on a success will always be the same because of how critical successes work; 5.05 for 1D10 and 9.6 for 1D20. These are less than the flat averages of the two different dice because of the possibility of a critical SAN test in which only 1 point of SAN is lost. For a failed SAN test, an Agent will be losing an average of 60.4 SAN.
If an Agent suffers a temporary insanity and wants to try to keep it together, they can always attempt to repress the blind panic. The rules for this can be found on page 75 of the Agent's Handbook, but the gist is that the Agent must make a successful SAN test with the new SAN score they have after losing 5+ points. With 90 SAN, an Agent has a 85% or 81% chance of repressing temporary insanity if they succeeded on the SAN roll. On a failed SAN test, they only have a 45% chance of repressing temporary insanity on average, but this is assuming that they don't fall prey to the 29% chance of being reduced to 0 SAN.
80 SAN
Lost: 5% chance, temporary insanity: 63% if 1D10/1D100 or 77% if 1D20/1D100, average SAN loss on failed test: 57.9 SAN, chance to repress on a success: 75% or 71%, survival chance on a failure: 67% (40% chance to repress on average). It may seem odd that the average SAN loss on a failed test goes down. But we have to remember that with each 10 SAN down we go, we gain 9 possible D100 rolls (when you roll against your SAN) where 1D100 SAN is lost vs only 1 more roll where 100 SAN is lost.
70 SAN
Lost: 12% chance, temporary insanity: 67% if 1D10/1D100 or 79% if 1D20/1D100, average SAN loss on failed test: 57.1 SAN, chance to repress on a success: 65% or 61%, survival chance on a failure: 60% (35% chance to repress on average).
60 SAN
Lost: 19% chance, temporary insanity: 71% if 1D10/1D100 or 82% if 1D20/1D100, average SAN loss on a failed test: 56.7 SAN, chance to repress on a success: 55% or 51%, survival chance on a failure: 52% (30% chance to repress on average).
50 SAN
Lost: 28% chance, temporary insanity: 75% if 1D10/1D100 or 84% if 1D20/1D100, average SAN loss on a failed test: 56.4 SAN, chance to repress on a success: 45% or 41%, survival chance on a failure: 43% (25% chance to repress on average).
40 SAN
Lost: 39% chance, temporary insanity: 80% if 1D10/1D100 or 87% if 1D20/1D100, average SAN loss on a failed test: 56.3 SAN, chance to repress on a success: 35% or 31%, survival chance on a failure: 35% (20% chance to repress on average).
30 SAN
Lost: 51% chance, temporary insanity: 84% if 1D10/1D100 or 89% if 1D20/1D100, average SAN loss on a failed test: 56.2 SAN, chance to repress on a success: 25% or 21%, survival chance on a failure: 26% (15% chance to repress on average).
20 SAN
Lost: 66% chance if 1D10/1D100 or 67% chance if 1D20/1D100, temporary insanity: 88% if 1D10/1D100 or 92% if 1D20/1D100, average SAN loss on a failed test: 56.1, chance to repress on a 1D10 success: 15%, survival chance on a 1D20 success: 95% (10% chance to repress on average), survival chance on a failure: 17% (10% chance to repress on average).
10 SAN
Lost: 83% chance if 1D10/1D100 or 87% chance if 1D20/1D100, temporary insanity: 92% if 1D10/1D100 or 94% if 1D20/1D100, average SAN loss on a failed test: 56, survival chance on a 1D10 success: 90% (5% chance to repress on average), survival chance on a 1D20 success: 45% (5% chance to repress on average), survival chance on a failure: 8% (5% chance to repress on average).
I hope this gives Handlers a better idea of the mental aftermath of a god (or anything that prompts a SAN test where the price of failure is 1D100 SAN), whether for their Agents or any unlucky NPCs. It can also serve as a guide for creating NPCs who encountered a god in their backstory
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