Hi! We are a Norwegian group playing our first campaign of Scum and Villainy, tomorrow is our third session, loving the game! 🙂 A couple of questions have popped up, maybe you have some suggested answers?
1) It seems that you can purchase a ship module for 6 cred as an aquire assets downtime action, as long as it’s legal. Can you upgrade the quality ratings as well in this way? Our group spends all its cred buying modules, is this what most crews end up doing?
2) When characters drop out due to trauma, how do you usually narrate this? We had one character max out on stress close to the end of the session, they were all aboard the Cerberus and he Resisted a consequence to the ship. There didn’t seem like an obvious way to get him out of the action, so we just narrated that he was stressed out about the situation and didn’t contribute much to finishing the job. Would you usually narrate that the character is “physically” removed from the mission?
Stressed out is (literally) a fine way to handle being taken out of action. Especially if the player wants to role play it.
Could be physically removed. Like thrown off a platform and assumed to be dead.
Could be self-removed (such as fleeing to the escape hatch so they’re ready to escape. Or just going to their room to cry or take Valium or whatever),
or could be freaking out so much that they’re physically present but not useful (staring into space, going really vague and needing to be dragged along, getting stuck on an idea such as constantly checking the computer because you’re sure that you’re being hacked…)
Or could just be temporary incapacitated. (Injured from a fight and needs some first aid to get back to their feet. Maybe as little as just breathing too fast and they just need a moment to focus on breathing slower and getting themselves together.)
One important point about trauma-ing out: a character who reaches max stress is not removed from the mission, only from the current scene. Many people seem to get this wrong, and I think it’s not conductive to fun for someone to be sidelined for the rest of the mission.
Thanks for the comments! I had missed the part about only being removed from the current scene, that really makes this easier to incorporate into the fiction. Starting play in about an hour, excited to see if this Trauma-insigth will be put to use 😉
1) No. You can’t upgrade the ratings that way. Coin usually gets spent for repairs, and extra downtime actions (acquiring assets, working on long term clocks, tracking down future targets, finding jobs, reducing heat, training is a big one etc). If your average job gets 6 cred, and you spend 1-2 fixing up/maintaining your ship, you only have about 4 cred to float and that usually goes quickly on the above. PCs are not usually floating in money (and often they’re planning to increase crew quality which takes a fair chunk of cred). It hasn’t been an issue in any play-tests or games I’ve seen.
2) To resist a thing you usually have to give it your all. They can be trapped, fall offscreen, pass out, just be overwhelmed, be exhausted etc. When resisting try to think about what this looks like, and work together to make it fit (sounds like you did it right!).