Here’s a small hack/house-rule that came up in my game last week that I wanted to run by all of you.
So the Lurk in my party had recently taken Ghost Veil as a special ability. He wanted to use it during an interrogation to freak out his captive. “Cool!” I thought, especially since I had a sweet Devil’s Bargain in mind and it would give him his first point of trauma, which everyone was excited about. Only problem was that he was at 8/9 Stress already, and Ghost Veil takes 2 Stress to activate. However, the crew’s Whisper was in the room and had plenty of stress to spare, so I thought of an alternative. The Lurk could take 1 Stress and the Whisper could take 1 Stress to project some of her ghost field power onto him to finish activating the ability. Essentially, she would Assist, except instead of giving +1d, she would let the Lurk activate an ability he couldn’t otherwise activate.
Obviously, there’s no provision for this within the game already, but what do you all think of this hack? It seems within the spirit of the game, for certain abilities at least. I probably won’t suggest it super often, but in situations like this, where a character doesn’t have the Stress to spare to activate an ability for a cool effect, it seems reasonable.
Thoughts?
I would have just let them push. The book doesn’t really say you can’t spend more stress than you have, you can you always can it’s just what causes you to trauma out. Like if you only have 2 stress left and you roll to resist something and you only get a 1, having to take 5 stress when you only have 2 available never stops you from being able to resist or causing it to fail. This is a little different as it’s a voluntary choice to go over stress, and I think the house rule allows for some cool teamwork and story options I just don’t know my line of thinking would have ever thought it necessary.
That’s a good point about Resisting actually. I think I prefer the house rule in this circumstance, but your ruling of just letting them do it would probably be fine too.
Thomas Berton I think the context of your ruling informs it a lot (as it should), it feels like a scenario where potentially the lurk could use a helping hand in their first ever activation of ghost veil and with the whisper there is makes sense to have their guidance and for both of them to be a little stressed out by it. I think the fiction sounds like it supported it as an option for sure.