A question about flashbacks for downtime activities:
1) What downtime activities can you flash back to, if any?
2) Does that flashback cost stress (0, 1, 2) in addition to the coin or rep cost?
ex) player: I want to have just the tool to crack this safe, can I flashback to a downtime action and acquire asset for a special tool? The coin could be either bribing someone to get access to it, or just buying it outright.
ex) player: I totally would have prepared my ritual for this, I’ll mark the stress to cast it and spend the coin to purchase the necessary reagents.
Lastly, if you can flashback for any downtime activity and they never cost stress, why even bother with the downtime portion of play?
You can definitely flash back to downtime actions–whichever ones make sense. I’m not sure about indulging, but the rest are fine. And they should cost stress if they’re involved (I’d charge 1 for both examples).
Especially since downtime has to happen at some point, and if players can hold their actions into the score (for no stress cost), they’d have to use them before the score ends, and the end of a score is the absolute worst time to resolve a string of downtime actions. “Yeah, but before we kill this guy I want to flash back to some training I did earlier.”
Also I’m not sure players are generally allowed to hold their downtime actions into the score. I would definitely strongly discourage it, myself. Too disruptive to the flow of play otherwise.
Page 132: “If a flashback involves a downtime activity, pay 1 coin or 1 rep for it, instead of stress.”
Thanks! (rtfm, me)