Question – how hard can one play post-trauma results?

Question – how hard can one play post-trauma results?

Question – how hard can one play post-trauma results?

One of my player’s character got himself captured by the Red Sashes in the fiction. His last pre-trauma action was to resist getting stabbed in the throat, which put him in trauma range, and he was so helplessly out of position and without support that the only natural thing was to consider him caught and “interrogated” (don’t feel bad for the guy, what goes around comes around). The trauma rules say that you “come back later, shaken and drained,” so at the time, I thought that I was following the rules as written when I finangled the fiction to have a friendly-ish bouty hunter rescue him from the predicament.

Was I right in doing so? Or is saying “you can’t play this character until you do a mission of getting him out of there” the better option?

I know this is primarily a judgement call, but I’m still interested to know how “heavy” that particular rule is intended to be.

11 thoughts on “Question – how hard can one play post-trauma results?”

  1. I’m with John on this – discuss with the player of the character, and possibly the group as well as they may have ideas that can be bounced around and intrigue the player. In most RPGs I play, when my character dies or something major happens – it’s the result of decisions made and discussions had, not dice.

  2. What the others said, also there is the old left for dead (I recall Lucky Luciano who had his throat cut and was hanged on a butcher’s hook by the throat and somehow survived): Blades is a world where the dead come back, so it seems more appropriate that sometimes the living refuse to die.

  3. What would be the impact of having players who reach Trauma NOT get taken out? Like, congrats, you are now +1 Basket Case, please carry on with your mission…

  4. Well, I think it’s a choice of complication – character with more flaws, or introducing new character.  When looking at plot twists, I always like to go for the one I haven’t tried recently.

  5. Cool cool. Just as a point of clarification, I am not interested in death here (Blades handles that well enough already – you are about to die, you take stress instead. Full up on trauma? Well, then, it’s your choice, player – retire as a basket case or die in a dramatic fashion and I hand you your Ghost sheet so you can haunt what killed you), nor taking a player’s control over his character away, both of which are a Group Huddle Deal, sure. What I intended to (but didn’t actually) do was to talk about something a little bit softer than that.

    For me the, choice was between:

    a) traumatized character gets back to his crew, them’s the rules and we’ll make fiction dance to their fiddle! (What I actually did)

    b) traumatized character does not get back, because the fiction overrides the rule, such as it is, and we start next session with him in dark basement and the other characters wondering where he done went. He gets back on his own, or gets rescued by his crew, or something. (What I kind of wanted to do).

    I just want to know what the default setting is so we can be wary if we stray from it.

  6. That’s what I was endeavoring to answer.

    That said, I don’t think the rules or the fiction necessarily imply that the character blacks out then and there, which seems to be what you are using as your default operating assumption here. 

    You’ve got a character who has just taken more stress than he can handle.  He’s no longer going to be contributing to the score, or directly controlled by his player for the time being. But it doesn’t mean he falls over like he just hit zero hitpoints.  He can freak out, howl, scream and run around like a terror.   He can turn very pale and book it back out the entrance.  He can beat the crap out of the guy he was fighting and just sit there punching the corpse while his buddies have to go on without him.   He can just stop responding to stimuli and go lurk in a dark corner.  Whatever.

    So I guess what I am saying is “The fiction in this situation is less binding than you think, so you didn’t really do anything too weird by adhering to the rules.”

  7. Hm, would the following be fair to say?

    The rule is intended to protect player protagonism, so that stuff that makes the game unplayable for an actual person doesn’t happen. And so, you do not generally mess with that rule.

    However, there are times when the players may themselves be interested in exploring fiction where their usual capacity for control is fairly diminished. That is generally not the case, so you make sure to see that they are well on board with that, as well as offer them a more directorial means of control (“So, how does he get out?” instead of “So, how do you try to get out?”) they usually do not have access to as players, before you twist that particular safety valve off.

  8. Here is how I do Trauma:

    The process is a back and forth between player and GM, and it is guided by the fiction so far. It is one place where the player can’t resist, but they volunteer twists that upset their characters which are believable, ironic, or simply tragic.

    So its sort of about “how he/she gets out”, but also “how do you, the player, want him/her to be affected by being taken down”, and is a departure from the usual narrative power balance in this game. Once you get that far, we have a discussion about what happens along the way (Vice plays a role, but how?). I have noticed that this flows best from an understanding that “something happens that effectively removes his/her ability to be useful- and it’s sort of a big deal – so let’s take a minute to talk about that and get him/her back in”

    For me, how far to take that is largely a group decision. I tend to redress it with probing questions, which basically are beginning a metagame discussion about “What should happen next?”

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