8 thoughts on “Has anybody had a PC take their 4th trauma and retire?”

  2. Interested to hear this as well. My PCs in both Blades games I’m running tend to avoid stress at all costs for the most part when they’re close to trauma, so barely any of them even have 1 trauma yet(despite my telling them that trauma can earn them bonus xp :P).

    The one shining exception to this, however, was a PC who voluntarily pushed himself for an extra die to roll skirmish against an NPC who was trying to disrupt an arcane ritual the party was performing(and who, through various devil’s bargains, had escalated from ‘isn’t into the ritual’ all the way to ‘is actively sabotaging the ritual and is highly skilled’), even though the stress from pushing would take him into trauma. He literally said to me, “I am voluntarily pushing myself into trauma”. It was pretty awesome. Given that his traumatic act was shanking another person, we agreed that his trauma should be ‘vicious’.

  4. The cutter got his trauma from giving a hug to “a pillar of almost crying eyes, radiating everlasting sorrow, ghostly vengeance, and hundred screaming children” that the leech accidentally summoned. fun fact – the leech resisted not resist the horror escaping the ghost field,  he resisted the type of horror, asking for a spirit of sorrow instead a spirit of blood and murder.

    suffice to say, the cutter is now haunted

  5. I had one character in my game get to 2 trauma, that’s the highest though.

    I’m not convinced it’s fair or accurate to say that avoiding trauma is cowardice.

    Trauma changes a character (ideally in personality, but certainly in some mechanical ways.) Every time a character gains a point the player is a step closer to losing access to the character.

    There are lots of ways to play characters, and not racing to rehab and disaster like a pop star on VH1’s Behind the Music is a viable way to play. Of course, racing a character through a personal arc from healthy scoundrel to shattered wreck incapable of taking risks is also a viable way to play for people who are really into that.

    Trauma happens, but it seems as incongruous to shame players for avoiding it as it is to shame players in basic D&D for using guile to avoid combat. Trauma is in some ways a fail condition. There are lots of ways to develop your character that don’t require it.

  7. Let me tell you the tale of of a Cutter PC that I played with named Sidewinder. He was a brash, foolish bravo who was known for doing anything to win a fight. He had already taken trauma in the forms of a lost hand, one eye gone, and the inability to feel any form of physical sensation(due to immersion in a chemical vat that nearly killed him). Each time he would resurface later, more battered than ever, but no less willing to kill for his crew’s leader/Spider, Kingmaker. In a battle with a cult that worshiped the God of Razors, the crew found themselves faced with a spirit of rage possessing a cloud of glass shards. With the rest of the crew occupied with the knife wielding cultists, Sidewinder’s player asked me where the cult’s leader was, and I told him that he was in the middle of the swarm of glass shards, manipulating and controlling it. These guys were literally seconds from death, as the swarm was easily the size of an elephant at this point. I told him it would be a desperate roll to even get to him. Sidewinder had taken many devil’s bargains, and was on his last legs, both health and stress wise. He pushed, knowing the consequences, and leaped into the storm of razor death, pushing through until he could hook (lost his hand, remember) the cult leader under a rib, and blind and bleeding from a hundred wounds, pulled him into the cloud. As the crew dispatched the remaining cultists, the razor cloud dissipated, revealing the still standing form of their comrade, barely recognizable as anything human. As he fell, his leader, the Kingmaker, the man he wanted to see on the throne of the empire (plot), caught him, and seeing as there was nothing that he could do for him, did him one last mercy.

    My players haven’t recovered yet.

  8. I imagine having 3 Trauma is around the time the player has communion with the fiction: when they have to choose between most likely overindulging because they have just a few stress, or taking 3 stress.

    I wish one of my players had gone to 4; the highest I had a player go was to 2 though. That being said: I always told my players they would “be retired” to become villains, not go quietly into the night.

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