It makes great intuitive sense to me that when you have Trauma 0 you would have Vice 4, and as you add Trauma you reduce Vice.
The more you’ve seen and the harder your life has been, the more difficult it is to relax with your favorite simple pleasures. Your needs grow more rapacious and more complex.
Beginners recover from stress easily. Veterans incur less stress, but also recover more slowly, until finally they must retire.
Starting characters find it pretty easy to clear off stress between missions. It is harder for those who are more hard bitten to shrug off their stress; a group would prefer to put stress on the new guys and not the veterans, because the new guys can recover faster.
What is the counter-case? How does it make sense that Vice is more effective on the more Trauma laden characters?
I think the idea is that as vice dice / trauma go up, so does the intensity of your indulgences. It seems like an attempt to have the number inform the fiction. So it’s not that vice is more effective on the Traumatized characters, but rather that during each vice roll they indulge more.
Chris Boyd But… the cost is the same. What prevents a lower trauma character from getting more vice dice? Let’s say you have a guy rolling 3 Vice dice, hanging out with a new character who is rolling 1 die. The new guy wants to roll 3 dice too. Why can’t he?
To reverse the situation, a Trauma 3 guy goes with a Trauma 0 guy to a party. The Trauma 0 guy rolls 4 dice, he’s having an awesome time. The Trauma 3 guy has been to all these parties, and he’s going to have to have something more intense to stimulate him; he is only rolling 1 die. This party? This is NOTHING compared to what he’s seen and done.
I’m not saying you’re wrong. Just trying to give some justification to the way it’s currently laid, out. It seems like it’s mostly the current way for gameplay reasons.
Another interpretation is that the traumatized person has more incentive / a “better” mindset to lose themselves in their vice. They have more that they are running away from.
Or the reason the low trauma guy can’t roll 4 dice is because if he did he’d vomit 😛
One problem I have seen as the center of a bit of tussling is to figure out how trauma hurts the character; a desire to mechanically connect gaining trauma with a future disadvantage. Inverting the vice scale would do that nicely, and also show WHY a Trauma 4 character retires; they can no longer clear stress.
I am not sure how game play is helped by the current Trauma / Vice relationship–but I WANT to understand.
Chris Boyd I can see suggesting that if a lower trauma character tried the higher trauma person’s stress relief, they’d come out neutral, or incur more stress.
That is easy with drugs, but gets more complicated and unpleasant pointed at other vices.
What if you want to play a character that doesn’t get kinky or masochistic, but has sex or faith as a vice? Requiring the “it’s gotta be stronger” progression fundamentally alters some things about the character at that point, and everyone may not want to have that change forced on their character.
Just a thought.
If the scales are reversed, and more trauma means fewer vice dice, then you don’t have to escalate the indulgence in vice. However, if you don’t, the returns are less effective. That’s where you have to pay to get better more intense relief, and that represents the escalation of complexity and intensity in the need. Those options are also open to lower Trauma characters, but not as necessary. I like that fit better.
I think that together we’ve laid out pretty clearly how the mechanic connects to the fiction in either implementation. At this point I think it’s more for John to decide what the design intention is with this.
Interesting discussion.
I have thought about connecting trauma levels to the Vice action roll, and have done so fictionally.
I keep trying to remember that the level of Trauma is a timer and thus a ‘tension meter’ of sorts. Rolling less vice dice when heavily stressed and highly traumatised may be a little anticlimactic….
I think the opposite – it’s more realistic that beginners recover from stress slower than veterans. The latest Hardcore History podcast about WW1 touches on this a little, for example.
It also makes sense story-wise – you can get a veteran who knows how to cope with the job, but is still haunted by trauma from back when they were a rookie who couldn’t handle their shit. That’s a very in-fiction situation.
Mechanically, it prevents all characters from quick spiraling out – gaining trauma and then losing their ability to deal with further trauma.
Nathan Roberts Exactly: Trauma is a timer and a tension meter. So getting better and better at dealing with stress–then why would they stop? Why retire if trauma makes you ever-better at coping with stress?
Also, another factor to pay attention to here is, those with higher trauma are more experienced. They’ll have more dice to throw, and they’ll be less vulnerable to incurring stress in the first place. It makes sense to me that you are more resistant to stress, but when it gets through, it’s harder to clear off.
To the “why would they stop” question, in the analogy of a war veteran, yes the more experienced soldiers are more hardened and better able to cope with the situation, but eventually they just don’t WANT to anymore. It’s about accumulated trauma rather than in the moment stress.
Chris Boyd What the character wants is the purview of the player, though, right? What the character is capable is managed through mechanics. Using mechanics to regulate what the character WANTS seems totally off to me.
The character does have agency there though, they can avoid trauma.
I guess for me if we are saying “more trauma means better ability to reduce stress” then I don’t understand why “max trauma means no more risk-taking behavior.”
Where if you flip it around, it makes perfect sense to me. Trauma reduces your ability to process stress, and when you have too much trauma you need to avoid stress.
You are totally right–characters can avoid trauma. And, you would think more experienced characters would be BETTER at avoiding trauma. So it makes sense to me that they would do that INSTEAD of incurring stress. If they do, though, they need maybe more recovery time.
Characters at EVERY level have agency to avoid trauma. What I don’t understand is why those best suited to purging stress are the ones who go cold turkey and give up their careers.
They’ve seen too much man, it’s time to rethink your life. is it really worth it?
If that is the rationale, independent of vice, then choosing 4 seems arbitrary. Gaining a trauma is more or less what would be death in another game, I think. So maybe it’s less having many experiences, which you could do without gaining ANY trauma, and more reinforcing that sense of vitality and having some spark suffocated with repeated snuffings.
There are no warning signs in the mechanics to reflect in the fiction. Just one day, you can no longer play this character, and it’s up to you to explain why. Nobody can talk the character out of it, no incentive can sway them to take one more risky mission, it’s kaput and that’s final.
Maybe the player has built it into the fiction and it makes total sense. But, maybe not; and if not, it doesn’t make much sense, especially if a game group likes to have their characters kicked around and abused. More kicking around and abuse finally forcing retirement at 4 trauma feels random.
There’s no measure of “will to go on” that could be a tug of war clock with trauma. There is no accounting for a character with a death wish who continues until killed, unless you narrate the fourth trauma as death.
I see that it works for some people, having vice and trauma rise together. I guess I still don’t see it. Fortunately, it is not necessary to convince me. =)
I’ll just add that my character’s 4 Trauma is not your character’s 4 Trauma. The play can, and you could argue ‘should’, insert the rise and fall of Trauma & Vice into the Fiction.
One other thought came to me overnight. Lots of people will play characters with less than 2 trauma. Few will hang in there and continue playing characters with 2 or 3 trauma. (Just the nature of how many game sessions you’re likely to get in a year, for an average group. Before the next shiny thing comes along, or you go back to the old shiny thing.)
So, for the people who are just going to play a few sessions, it is a real advantage to let them clear off that stress fast and get on to the next heist. It’s okay to slow down with the veteran characters, their players have demonstrated staying power.
Also, the Veteran character’s will probably take less Devil’s Barganis on their Vice Rolls :evil-grin:
“You’ll promise you get back to her. She’ll be angry if you don’t but her father/matron/gang boss/etc will be if you do”
“You drink for free, but you promise to help the Leviathan-hunters with ‘settle a score’…”
“Sure, it’s possible to get a table at the new restaurant, but in that case the Matron’dee will consider you his boyfriend”
“your brother will discover that you bet against him in the pit fights”
.