>Please note that we are not trying to mirror current psychological theory in the real world. What we've provided are intended to be dramatic, disturbing magical insanities for people on a fictional, flat world, not accurate portraits of the mentally ill in our time. If you'd prefer to play with more realistic mental issues, we suggest that you study a copy of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder and design your own effects from there.
I did just skim over the majority of this, but this quote really hits something! "If you'd prefer to play with more realistic mental issues"... read the DSM to keep it a game or read too much stuff like the Zizians' blogs to make it uncomfortably real...
lol! Yes, fair enough. When we wrote that paragraph all those years ago, we were (unfortunately) primarily in the mindset of trying to avoid liability.
It’s also worth noting that most other White Wolf games, like Vampire, are based in a setting more similar to the modern USA. In those settings, Derangements are generally explicitly modeled on the DSM and other current psychological theory.
When I read this today, however, what I notice is that the elemental model of unbalanced elemental energies leading to derangement is close to, eg, the Ayurvedic model in our “real world.” And that’s interesting to me now, partially because the way we wrote the Derangements here was largely Dustin’s brainchild and not my own, and I don’t think he was familiar with Ayurveda or anything along those lines, at the time.
>Please note that we are not trying to mirror current psychological theory in the real world. What we've provided are intended to be dramatic, disturbing magical insanities for people on a fictional, flat world, not accurate portraits of the mentally ill in our time. If you'd prefer to play with more realistic mental issues, we suggest that you study a copy of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder and design your own effects from there.
I did just skim over the majority of this, but this quote really hits something! "If you'd prefer to play with more realistic mental issues"... read the DSM to keep it a game or read too much stuff like the Zizians' blogs to make it uncomfortably real...
lol! Yes, fair enough. When we wrote that paragraph all those years ago, we were (unfortunately) primarily in the mindset of trying to avoid liability.
It’s also worth noting that most other White Wolf games, like Vampire, are based in a setting more similar to the modern USA. In those settings, Derangements are generally explicitly modeled on the DSM and other current psychological theory.
When I read this today, however, what I notice is that the elemental model of unbalanced elemental energies leading to derangement is close to, eg, the Ayurvedic model in our “real world.” And that’s interesting to me now, partially because the way we wrote the Derangements here was largely Dustin’s brainchild and not my own, and I don’t think he was familiar with Ayurveda or anything along those lines, at the time.