Okay. So have a slide who is confused about Adaption, and I really couldn’t answer their questions well.
It lets you take stress to substitute actions, which is straightforward enough mechanically. I guess my point of confusion is how does it work narratively? If they use Sway in place of Mayhem, how does that come through in the fiction? My first thought is to turn it on them and have them justify it-but frankly, if you can justify any skill then you could just use it normally, so why bother with taking a stress?
The other option is not ask them to justify it, but that just leaves a feeling of disatisfaction as we’re not able to picture exactly whats going on here.
No official opinion, but you’re right, if it requires justification then there’s no point.
I’ve been running it on a purely mechanical level. If you use Adaptation, you say what you’re doing in whatever terms and just roll extra dice for it, clean and simple. It would probably feel a little better if it were just clear that it were “roll the maximum number of dots you could have based on expertise/mastery for one stress” instead of trying to drag other actions into the mix.
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It seems like the nature of stat substitution moves to cause little wrinkles in the fiction when asked for justification. In the case of Adaptation (or Unorthodox) spending stress is a great justification. In this example Mayhem might not be an area the Slide typically excels at, but given the stress of this particular situation they potentially perform better than expected.
Yep, there’s no “justification” needed. They’re actually doing Mayhem but rolling their Sway dice.
Maybe rephrasing it as “roll your best action dice pool” or something is clearer.