GMing my first Downtime phase, a player’s Hound suffered a level of Trauma during an Entanglement (a bluecoat interrogation). The rule for Trauma states:
“When you suffer trauma, you’re taken out of action. You’re ‘left for dead’ or otherwise dropped out of the current conflict, only to come back later, shaken and drained.”
This rule is easy to interpret during a score, but we had trouble figuring out what to do during a Downtime phase, since time is much more nebulous and abstracted. What — other than the fiction — determines “taken out of the action”? The end of the Entanglement? The end of the whole Downtime phase?
The player was worried if it was the latter, because he had significant injuries that he wanted to Recover from as one of his Downtime Activities, and he thought his wounds might prevent him from going on the next Score.
In the end, I ruled that the Hound had to sacrifice one of his two Downtime Activities (although he still had the option to pay Coin for more), with a promise to ask this Group their opinion.
Any thoughts, John Harper, Stras Acimovic, or Sean Nittner?
He would not have lost any downtime actions at all, that’s just how the entanglement ends with their trauma-ing out. In addition if someone is too beat up to go on a score they can become voluntarily “lost” to their vice and miss the next score. The player makes a new character to play and the original character is healed of all wounds and stress ( but keeps their trauma ).
But don’t you think Trauma-ing out at the end of the Entanglement is getting off a little easy? Or is the permanent Trauma supposed to be consequence enough?
4 trauma and you have to retire your character.
Also 1 or 2 trauma can be a good thing as it opens up a door to getting XP. But yes I think 1 trauma is punishment enough for trauma-ing out on an entanglement as this game is very good a wearing down the characters.
Karl Meyer Yeah, good point. Ok, looks like I owe my player a Downtime activity retcon! Thanks for the advice!
My pleasure, I GM a couple groups of blades and play in one and I’m finally feeling like I’ve got a fairly decent grasp.
Since Trauma is literally one of the worst consequences you can suffer in this game, it seems like plenty for an entanglement.