I have a question about trauma. It says when a PC fills their last stress box: “you’re taken out of action. You’re left for dead or otherwise dropped out of the current conflict, only to come back later, shaken and drained.”
How long do people usually make “later”? It seems like dropping a player out of the action for too long will disengage their interest and decreases the chance my players will risk getting stress up that high more than once.
We’ve always played it as “until the end of the score” – though I’d have to say there’s no reason why that character couldn’t participate in flashbacks as long as they don’t cost stress.
It’s situational in my games. If a score is developing over a period of time, I’ll have them come back in a later scene. If the whole score is taking five minutes, they’re probably out for the whole thing. (Incidentally, I’ve run two different games over the past two days and had both of those things happen. To the same player in different games. :P)
“Later” is up to the group. Some people love to pick up a new character and play them for a bit while their traumatized character recovers off-screen. Other people want to get back in to the action as soon as they can.
I’d say the minimum amount of time to be “taken out” is one scene/conflict. If you’re fighting the Red Sashes, and you get taken out by trauma, you can’t just pop back up in that fight and keep going. You’re defeated in that struggle.
If you’re really not sure and don’t want to simply decide as the GM, ask the player how long their character will need to recover from what’s happened.
That makes a lot of sense. I like asking the player; I think mine is already getting excited about how he will fall to his vice out of stress. Tangentially, the different Forgotten God descriptions give some awesome inspiration for such things.