I’m putting my thoughts together for my first run as a Blades GM, and wanted to ask for a little clarification on “trauma” from the community:
In one of my play sessions, we viewed trauma as “scene death” – When you spent through your stress you dropped from the scene only to show up later, traumatized. As a player approaching the trauma threshold, i didn’t want to fail the mission and started avoiding stress.
On reading it again, the phrase that a player “may” choose to drop out of the scene stands out. This makes me think the player could take on an appropriate trauma and balance their stress out to zero, and could stay in the scene unstressed but hindered by a new traumatic injury.
Have your groups played it either or both ways, and which do you prefer?
Also, what are good practices when imposing trauma? Presumably, any except the final trauma incurred should leave the scoundrel functioning well enough to continue to thrive in the cut-throat streets, so melting all their limbs in acid seems pretty severe. But a paper cut seems pretty light. Should the trauma essentially turn into a one die penalty in relevant situations, with appropriate fictional impact?
Does anyone have a cool non-physical trauma to share? Fear of clowns? Ghost-magnet? Insomnia? How have these affected game play?
thanks!
If my memory doesn’t fail me, in GoT the hound has suffered two cool trauma: face burned (-1d on all mask rolls) and a fear of fire (essentially fictional, maybe transforming some risky roll to desperate, or just roll played by an active player ). Maybe it can be inspirational
A character could be imprisoned, and given a clock to bribe/pressure to get the character out (on bail, if not cleared of charges.) Then another clock to avoid conviction.
Or, a faction could imprison the character until a release was negotiated.
A serious drinking binge (or drug bender) could be triggered, where the character crawls into a bottle and has to be coaxed and/or forced out to be functional again.
We play it as dropping your from the scene and showing up later traumatized in some way. They might even have a related lasting effect that is the surface effect of the trauma, but that can be recovered relatively quickly. I read the text you refer to that the player “may choose” to be left for dead or something else in the sense that the player’s choice is between that and alternative of being actually dead or actually irreversibly insane, etc.
On a side note, I’d be careful about necessarily mixing trauma with lasting effects. Trauma could be like permanent lasting effects that you can’t recover from, but that could get crippling, which might be awesome, but maybe not for the tone of all games. I’m running trauma more as largely non-mechanical spirit-breaking baggage that scoundrels build up until they call it quits. With every trauma, the PC loses grip on a key piece of themselves (health, mind, soul, relationships, etc). The result is that by 4 trauma, the PC may be less in the full control of the player than they were at 0 trauma, similar to how Dicaprio’s character’s baggage/trauma brought a freight train into the dreamspace in Inception. In the meantime however, I’m reticent to attach too many -1d’s to trauma.
Heng benjamin I love the idea of a phobia elevating risk, rather than simply affecting die count. thanks for throwing that on the table!
Adam Minnie I love the idea of attaching each trauma to a part of the character, and when you get 2 of a kind you get flushed. The categories of “health, mind, soul, relationships” are a great start. So instead of ending when you get a certain number, you end when you get two of a kind; in the meantime, with one trauma in a category, your situation is tenuous.
That’s WAY more interesting to me than a flat number of traumas to accumulate before the end.
Andrew Shields Andrew, i like the idea of an opposing faction ransoming a PC, but would this be trauma? It seems like trauma is intended to be permanent, mechanically, as a countdown to when the scoundrel retires with whatever coin they have squirreled away.
The imprisonment sounds like a good way mechanically to explain why they “fall out of the fiction” temporarily. but the trauma itself maybe would be an injury to their body, psyche, or pride related to the captivity?
Andrew Fish Trauma also has no mechanical effect. I think it’s safe to say that it could be a check point, a jar to the confidence, maybe provoking the character to make promises to loved ones, or other fictional consequences.
Really, it’s up to the player and GM collaborating to figure out how that might leave a lasting strain on the character’s capacity to adventure.
Adam Minnie i can see the interpretation of the player’s choice merely being some agency to describe how they leave the scene. That is how we played it, generally. Seems to me that this would make stress equivalent to HP, with trauma being HP death on a particular score, and a character gets to “die” on four scores before retiring. Is that a fair assessment?
As for permanent mechanical effects of trauma, i’m inclined to agree that too many get cumbersome and discouraging. I like Heng benjamin’s suggestion above about giving a fear of fire that escalates risk of an action when fire is present.
i could see that really impacting play, but giving the players options to try to avoid or mitigate exposure to their phobias,and giving opposing factions who learn of phobias an interesting bit of leverage against our lovable scoundrels.
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Isn’t trauma the four part count down to player retirement? Increasing trauma level also increases vice level. I think it has a mechanical effect clearly in these regards.
If stress is taken to avoid the effects of a danger in the fiction then reapplying similar effects with trauma seems harsh.
Travis Geery that is a good warning about not using trauma as double jeopardy. Acquiring trauma is a result of stress, which is often the result of choosing to avoid a lasting effect.
I may be getting caught up on the word, and equating it to suffering a permanent traumatic injury of some sort.
Perhaps it is more appropriate to view it as a 4 segment retirement clock that escalates Vice.
Dammit… must play more to conduct copious amounts of resesrch!
We view trauma as a major fictional effect on the character. This may in turn have mechanical ramifications, but Mr. Fish’s clock analogy is apt. Its a countdown to retirement. How you fictionalise these checkpoints is largely up to the group and delightfully variable by design.
Although related to stress ‘HP’ and lasting effects, it is not a direct consequence of said effects, simply a fictional marker.
That is not to underestimate the power of fictional positioning! Suffering a Trauma is a huge deal in the story and deserves to be unpacked a little at the table.
Incidentally, I made the choice to take trauma in the very first session last weekend (I had armour that I chose not to use). All for that extra point in Vice! It was in the final scene while fighting the leader of the Red Sashes, so it was appropriate I thought, and didn’t affect the character’s inclusion because it was the end of session. We didn’t think about it too much.
I had a player who did similarly in our first session Dan Hall. Now he’s a bit more cautious about stress, but is better at recovering that stress, and has a more positive relationship with its usefulness and always defends it as “actually not bad, but can be good” to the other players when they have a healthy heaping at the start of a score after a lousy vice bender during downtime. I like that attitude and the clever mechanic.
My players are also just discovering the power of getting desperate ticks. It’s great. 🙂
Yes, methinks the ‘fresh’ green scoundrel becomes so much more embittered (and fun to play!) when stressed, tempted by vice, wealthy and traumatised to the hilt. The fictional hooks at that point are just waiting to be played out. I love it. The system gears for progressively more fictionally powerful characters full of vince and inequity that can have far reaching effects on those around them.