I have struggled with how Trauma, Vice, and Stress fit together.

I have struggled with how Trauma, Vice, and Stress fit together.

I have struggled with how Trauma, Vice, and Stress fit together. I’ve come up with a number of possible solutions, some more radical and complex than others, and discarded them one by one.

What’s my problem anyway? Here are some of my base assumptions that don’t fit with how these things work in the game as it is (and I don’t expect the game to change to fit my assumptions.)

* Vice is a threat to rogues, even as it comforts them. It is not an unmitigated good. You can get lost in it, brittle and destroyed.

* There are ways to clear stress that are not vices, and sometimes vice can add stress (by which I mean damage, system strain, and pushed luck.)

* I disagree that the more damaged you are, the easier it is for you to relax and clear stress; the more damaged you are, the more helpful vices are to you.

I have FINALLY come up with the rough draft of what I think is a workable alternative. As I continue working on my own hack of Blades in the Dark, this is the foundation of what I think will be a better fit for me.

DISCLAIMER: I don’t need you to love it! I don’t hate Blades in the Dark because we disagree about these issues! All is well. I’m experimenting. If you have useful comments I’d love to hear them, and clarifying questions are great. No abuse please.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pFXfro-ngx51VYVRjjisbcoMrO0K5NmE1ct4cbWwO70/edit

9 thoughts on “I have struggled with how Trauma, Vice, and Stress fit together.”

  1. One thing I like here is instead of tracking trauma, you track resiliency. So, instead of a flow of terrible events mounting in your trauma, the flow of terrible events wears down your resiliency.

    Instead of separating trauma and stress, you make “stress” filling a clock to knock out a point of resiliency.

  2. Boy; This is way complicated and confusing as it sits, and I’d have to say “Bad idea” based on that alone right now.   Maybe you could do some revisions for clarity?  Because I’m really struggling with it as written.

  3. Hmm. I think I have to echo the complexity critique, but I understand that’s because this is written a certain way. These are your notes; they’re written as longhand reminders more than rules. That’s cool. 🙂

    So, if I understand this right; stress and trauma are combined into resiliency; you fill clocks and check them off instead of filling a meter that increases a meter. Vice is now an expendable resource, with it’s clock ticking up every time you use one for a bonus. Too much vice lowers your maximum clock size, and reducing the vice requires taking some hefty game penalties in a dramatic way.

    The things that stick out are, first, the difference between nested clocks (vice clocks affecting resilience clocks affecting health, effectively) and vice clocks reducing max stress and affecting trauma, look superficial to me. I don’t know how valuable it is to represent this with clocks over dots or points; does that change how players interact with it, in your experience?

    The second and less important thing is, the language is semantically vague. Specifically, I thought “full vice clocks reduce resilience by two segments” meant that filling your vice HEALED you by two points, instead of reducing your max. I was confused and had to reread!

    It’s interesting. If nothing else it helps me recall what I found so valuable about clocks when I first stepped in and backed the game. Thanks!

  4. I haven’t bothered to refine it because I don’t have anyone to play the theory with. My only “campaign” style table group wanted minimal house rules and to freeze the changes so we don’t keep up with updates–it was too confusing to have different rules every time we played.

    And there was pretty much no interest in the direction in the community.

    So, I’ll save the bother of refining it until I’ve got a place I can use it. I might come out with a version of Blades in the Dark after the official one is out, but I’m already overcommitted on game design projects for now.

    The basic idea: instead of filling a clock that increases a rating, you empty a clock that reduces a rating. Your resilience is how you naturally bounce back from stress. That’s what gets damaged when you take trauma; it goes down, so you regenerate less stress when you do stress recovery.

    I wanted to uncouple it from vice. Using vice is interesting, so I put it off to the side as another tool that can help you blow off steam but also wears you down. I really don’t like suggesting that vice is how we clear stress, indulging our chosen addiction being the only way to recover.

    I really dislike the idea that trauma makes you better at recovering from stress, and that vice is how you reduce stress. I feel that addictions make you more brittle and weaker, though they can provide temporary refuge the cost is high. Even though this is a game, not a simulation, if we’re after a flavor of rogues burning bright instead of fading away, portraying vice as positive is just baffling, as that’s the main source of “grit” in every VH1 “Behind the Music” special, right? Artists and musicians destroying themselves by crawling into vices to avoid the pressure of their work.

    Rather than just whine about it, I tinkered with how I’d do it differently.

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