Insanity in a game is difficult, primarily because people tend to not play insane, they tend to play weird or eccentric.

But, Mikel, what the hell does that mean? I'll tell you.

Take a Malkavian from Vampire. They're insane. A lot of people end up playing Jack Nicholson as the Joker. He's goofy, he's loud, he does 'crazy' things, but he's not scary. Insane should be closer to Heath Ledger's Joker. That Joker was frightening. He laughed, he did outrageous things, but there was an air about him that made you think he might rip your throat out because, at the moment, it seemed like a good idea. Or he might torture you until you became like him. Or he might take your family and kill them.

Your average person can't just take a life--it's not as easy as games make us think. It tends to effect people on some level. Those who are eager to do it or have problems attaching emotional value to other human beings can be deeply terrifying because they're not playing by the rules of society.

To play a truly insane person, as far as an rpg PC goes, would require a 'code' of sorts. We need to understand how this character sees things, even if violent rages or jealous, viscous scheming is part of it. Many serial killers could be quite charming when they wanted to be. A crazy person doesn't have to seem crazy all the time.

This makes for a fine line a player that plays an insane character. There may be ways to make him or her unpredictable---every time a 1 comes up on their die, they suffer a psychotic break or something like that. Actually taking the choice to suffer the break out of the player's control some of the time, can lead to a character who no one is quite sure they can count on, even if they seem like they're doing well at the moment.

Unreality can be difficult but fun to do, especially if it's part of the game itself. A character who sometimes experiences a totally different reality than what is actually happening makes for a rough single character in a larger game.

However, if you structure it right, it can work beautifully.

We did a Changeling the Lost campaign, which is dark as fuck. One of the key themes of the game is that the Fay in our world are still somewhat lost in Arcadia---they'll see things that aren't there and have flashbacks. I found a way to make this work as a game.

I used Lost, the tv series, as a template. We would have flashbacks to their time in Arcadia. At first, I was very specific about when the changes happened. It was clear and we were exploring their time in the land of their kidnappers. As the game went on, I started to leap into Arcadia scenes with very little warning and a few key bits of description would see the players quickly shifting into Arcadia mode. I played honest with this for several sessions before I let it invade the real world.

One of the players had a knife and a chance to attack the Faerie who had brought them. He snuck in the room and made his stealth rolls. I asked another character, who was in the vicinity as well to make a perception check to see if he could discover what was happening. He failed and, when the PC who attacked his Faerie captor made his damage roll, it was applied to the character who failed his perception check.

There was a great, "Oh, shit!" moment and some great RP that came of that. Suddenly, they couldn't be sure if they were in the real world or Arcadia when those hallucinations came. I couldn't have it happen all or even most of the time---Arcadia still had to, usually, be Arcadia.

By the time the campaign ended (people moving, show schedules), I had just about blown through the possibilities of Arcadia. Kind of like how Lost did with their flashbacks after Season 1---I'd pretty much blown my wad. I think what I was going to start doing was to have things from Arcadia start appearing in the real world and making an open roll, in front of the PCs, to determine if it was real or not. Since not even I would know if something was actually happening until the die showed whatever it showed, it would have to be approached as a possible real thing. This would keep the players from easily discounting what they saw as either just being an illusion or being ill-timed for the current moment in the game. They wouldn't be able to think, "He's not going to spring it now because we're about to do _____ and that would be a strange thing to get in the way.' It would keep the tension every time it happened.

Some games will tie things like this into 1s the players roll on their dice, so when that happens, I insert some bit of unreality. I think it's important to keep it random and in full view of the players once it starts invading their world so that they can't relax.

Good example of kind of scary insane:
Luther, Dexter, Dark Knight, Silence of the Lambs, No Country for Old Men, there was an episode of Law and Order where the dude would have psychotic breaks and think he was a roman soldier---his final summation at his own trial (he was a lawyer)--- was kind of haunting.

I've used similar tactics as the unreality section for force users in Star Wars games. As they start racking up dark side points, they start interpreting things as more suspicious or sinister than they actually. One Jedi shot an old farmer drinking in a bar because of a dark side hallucinations. Later he attacked (but missed) a fellow NPC sneaking up on an enemy. Later, he hesitated when facing the real Big Bad, letting him get away and kill some innocents during his retreat.

If you're playing in the right setting, and have a good level of DM/player trust, these twists can add a lot to a story.

Malkavians are my favorite V:tM clan to play and my least favorite to hear about. There was a guy I was enlisted with whose Malk had a best friend that was a rusty door bolt. It would talk to him and give him advice. He once let it fly a plane because it knew how and he didn't.

Several people in my family have been diagnosed with mental illnesses. My ex-wife's mother was a paranoid schizophrenic who wouldn't come out of her bed because when she tried, the people she could hear whispering about her would hold her down and inject poison into her eyes. My biological mother would concoct ridiculous stories for attention and sympathy and was so convinced that they were real that she would lash out violently if you ever contradicted one of her lies (she was apparently 'Borderline Personality').

Neither of these are funny. If you laugh it's because you aren't sure what else to do.

Watch Catfish. We have a pathological liar who is a friend and we call it HIM: The Movie.

Interestingly, when you mentioned Malkavians, my first thought was that almost no-one ever plays them right. If your first thought when you think "insane" is "The Joker," regardless of which version, you're doing yourself a disservice.

I think a lot of people confuse psychosis with psychopathy. As Nebish said, psychosis isn't funny. It's dark and sad and tragic and scary. It's not scary because the sufferer might decide it's a really good idea to blow up a bus full of kids, or stab you in the neck with a fork. It's scary because we can't imagine what it's like to experience things the way the sufferer does. We can't wrap our brains around what makes a person's own mind betray them like that. And the scariest thing? We have no way of knowing that it'll never happen to us.

I've yet to see anyone in any game play insanity that way. We came close in our group with a Dresen Files game. My wife's character took an Extreme Consequence to survive a fight with a servant of the Erlking, who wanted to convince her to serve him. We decided she had been "Mentally Bloodied by the Wild Hunt." She also took the Cassandra's Tears power, meaning she could now make future predictions that no-one else would believe.

She spent the rest of that campaign seeing things that weren't there, and the group was never sure when it was actually her psychoses acting up, or the Erlking was giving her visions to guide her to situations where her help was needed. She pretty much lived in an institution, getting out on day passes.

There was a woman awhile back who walked into a bank on her 50th birthday and demanded the 20,000 francs she was owed. She'd never been to the bank before. She didn't have an account. They had to call the police to come and take her away and she ended up being hospitalized and diagnosed as schizophrenic.

The shocking thing is that she hadn't snapped that day. She'd snapped thirty years before, when she was suddenly struck with the inexplicable notion that, if she remained a virgin for 30 years, the bank would pay her the aforementioned sum. For thirty years, this individual had lived a relatively normal life, despite having this bizarre delusion.

I think that we tend to confuse the symptoms of insanity with insanity itself. Delusions are, at their core, an attempt by an ill-equipped person to make sense of the world around him; to see meaning and pattern where either their is none or it is sufficiently complex to avoid detection or understanding by the individual in question.

Delusions are meticulously edited and adjusted until they coincide convincingly with reality, but the coincidence can only go so far. If a person thinks that he can make a particular TV show come on by snapping his fingers at a specific time of day, then he is faced with a rude awakening when that TV show changes slots or is canceled.

It is the failure of the delusion that leads to bizarre, desperate behaviour. Importantly, the delusion itself is preventative of psychological distress. Equally importantly, the delusion tends to be a coping mechanism - not a cause. A person is not crazy because she believes the bank will pay her to remain a virgin. Rather, she believes the bank will pay her to be a virgin because it is preferable (or, perhaps, more accessible or gratifying) than the truth.

If you want to capture the essence of insanity with your character, don't give him a handful of quirks that you've seen from movies. Make something wrong in the way he sees the world, and then provide him with what will ultimately prove to be an ineffective means to cope with reality.

I don't know if it's a local term or a thing from the VtM community or whatever, but I've heard cheap wacky-crazy Malkavians referred to as "fishmalks", from the archetypical example, "he talks to fish!"

I use the Joker example because that kind of insanity tends to be the kind played. The Joker is written and played, at least slightly in the Ledger version, for laughs, but that's not something that goes hand in hand with insanity.

If the player views the world in a different way (unreality), I think it's important to make sure at least part of it is truly random in when it manifests. If it's tied in with a die roll, the player can't make it come and go conveniently (see a lot of bad fiction for examples of this) or be an asshole and make it pop up at the most inconvenient time because they want spotlight time away from other players.

One of the most frightening moments of my life was hearing my friend's mother in her drive way, crying in the car and carrying on about how they were all going to leave her and then talking to someone who wasn't there. I was sleeping on their couch and when she stumbled in the house, still talking to herself, I got up and immediately had him drive me home. I was 15. That kind of insanity doesn't tend to be the kind that PCs play.

In my experience there are several different approaches that players seem to take that set my teeth on edge. There are the fishmalks, of course, or the fuffy bunny ears malks. But almost equally annoying are the folks who seem to think that it's a neat idea to just pull out the DSM and look up a disorder at random. This is usually the recipe for a very boring character, with a derangement so specific that it either A) never comes up (Believes that humpback whales are conspiring to steal their brainwaves, so they move to Nebraska), or B) comes up so often as to make the character unworkable (A vampire who's afraid of the dark? Really?).

Some tips that help focus things a bit when a player comes to me with a Malk concept:

1. The first question I always ask is: How does your character's derangement affect the way they view reality? The symbol of the Malks is a cracked mirror, which represents Reality-with-a-Capital-R. The cracks in the mirror are what allow them to see what others can't. If they can't answer the question, back to the drawing board.

2. The second question is not as important, but it makes for a lot of fun when addressed properly: How does your character's derangement make them unnerving or disturbing? One motif I push mercilessly is that Malks are invariably the scariest creeps in the room. They are the vampires that other vampires are afraid of.

-- Ben

Here's one that I had fun with: my Elvis impersonator Malk. In his youth, he was bland and easily overlooked. He started singing as a way to get attention and eventually started working as an Elvis impersonator. Taking roles was very easy for him and a lot more comfortable than actually putting himself out there and risking getting hurt.

After his embrace, he ended up with Sanguinary Animism - a V:tM insanity where you take on the traits of mortals you feed from. Mostly, he was afraid of this happening and didn't feed until he would frenzy. Afterwards he would pick up some minor (nonmechanical) traits like a stutter or a craving for certain things he never found appealing.

His insanity was pretty much a minor inconvenience, but it was the way he was deathly afraid of it that made it fun.

And the Elvis part was background only and never even got referenced during game.