I have two questions about downtime activities:
1. You get +1d for doing a downtime activity with the assistance of a contact or friend. But Recover, a downtime activity, requires the help of a contact or friend. It seems silly to get +1d on every Recover, and the example doesn’t seem to have one, but the overall downtime rules seem very clear on this.
2. Likewise, you can spend 1 coin to turn a 1-3 into a 4/5 or a 4/5 into a 6 or a 6 into a critical. This works for most of the downtime activities…but what about Indulge Vice? It isn’t divided into tiers of success. If I roll a 1 on Indulge Vice and spend a coin, what do I get? Does it become a 2? Maybe a 4? Perhaps a 5?
Recover doesn’t require the assistance of a contact or friend. It’s a common situation, because it’s the easier way to do it, but you can also Recover with help from a Leech with the Physicker ability, or simply Acquire an Asset to find someone to heal you.
As for the second question, I’ve always ruled that you can spend 1 coin on an Indulge Vice roll same as any other Downtime action. In this case, a 1-3 becomes a 4 or 5, depending on which the player wants. A 4 or 5 just becomes a 6 and criticals don’t mean anything for Indulge Vice, so you just ignore that.
AFAIK, getting proper recovery (not gutting it through) requires a healer of a sort, who doesn’t need to be a contact or friend, just a healer. If they are a contact or friend I would say you get the +1 die as they take better care of someone they’re invested in.
As far as spending coin on indulging your vice goes, I’d say that each coin pushes you up by one. Since the results go from 1-6 and stress is a premium commodity, each stress recovered is worth it.
Thanks.
That still doesn’t totally answer Question 1 though. If it IS a friend or contact, do you get the +1d? The example pretty strongly suggests that you do not. The text at the beginning of downtime activities suggests that you do.
As for stress, I think I’m inclined to rule like you do Thomas. Otherwise that makes increased effect via coin a mostly terrible way to regain stress – you’d get get 1 stress for a coin, meaning it’s almost always better to just spend the coin to indulge again instead, and only ever a good idea if you’re really concerned about overindulging for some reason. It also seems to help with the problem of players who start with 0 in one of the attributes – they can pay a coin to lose a reasonable amount of stress (4 or 5) rather than having to scrimp by on 0d indulge rolls or 1d with a friend/contact.
Huh, just read the example and you’re right. I think in that case though, it’s because Quellyn is the friend of a different PC, not Cross, who’s getting the healing. So the +1d from a friend or contact doesn’t apply in that case.
For indulging vice, I don’t think it’s supposed to be predictable or controllable enough that you can fine-tune the amount of stress you recover with coin. I’d run it so if you spend a coin you get a second ‘indulge vice’ action, roll and all, since you can also spend coin for additional actions.