Trapped in an MMO Hack: Courage
One thing that many people dislike about Blades in the Dark as a system is Harm. Harm is a very hard thing to get rid of, often taking multiple downtime sessions to get rid of entirely and wasting many coin and downtime actions in the process.
For my hack, Glitch in the System, Courage (a remap of Stress) will be the main tracker of harm. In my hack, harm isn’t perminent and is fairly easy to recover from given they’re in a video game setting. Courage does all the same things as stress would, until you’re in combat.
When you enter a combat situation, any harm dealt to you is taken away from your Courage. This means that if you used up a lot of courage earlier in the quest or during freeplay, it could make you an easier target to eliminate in combat, not necessarily because your narrative hit points are lower, but because you don’t have as much emotional stamina as usual to deal with the situation and remain calm.
If your Courage hits 0 during combat, your avatars dies and respawn later. If it hits 0 out of combat, you’re removed from the action for a short time. Either way, you suffer Trauma. Death isn’t perminent in a video game.
In combat, damage is resisted through the Aggro system (described in a previous post of mine); and pushing/assisting/other teamwork actions are also taken over by Aggro during this time, giving the players a little more breathing room to fight with.