Chrome Viper – Blades in the Dark G+ Archives

S&V Question;

On p297-289 there is a description of magnitude. It describes artifacts working essentially a bit like the “old” tempest move; you go for an effect and the group decides what a reasonable stress cost for it would be. Seems fine to me, i get how it works, and i’ve used it before to great effect.

Now, the problem is in the Mystic move “the Way”, which allows one to spend a gambit in place of any stress cost. It even specifically calls out that for abilities with variable stress costs, it counts the entire thing.

My question is, given a powerful enough artifact, can a mystic with this move essentially spend a gambit to use the artifact to insane levels of effect? regardless of the other consequences of such an action, do we think it makes sense, or is intended this way? and if not, how would you solve a situation where a player wants to use a combination like that?

So, rules (or rulings?) question for you folks. By suggestion of the “lost” overindulgence, one of the players in my Scum & villainy game has decided to create a second character. With this, we’ve hit some resistance from the rules. We agree that we don’t want to encourage the best strategy being ‘create 20 characters’ – we agree it makes sense that he would choose which of his PCs to bring to any given mission. We also think it makes sense that he would get 2 downtime actions as a player, and he could use any character during downtime, as long as they are fictionally present.

Where we’ve hit some snags are some very specific moves. His current character is a Muscle, with the new one being a Scoundrel with Speaker moves.

First, The Muscle’s “Flesh wound” gives the character 3 ticks (half the clock) on their healing clock if they are wounded at the start of a downtime. In S&V, this means that they could essentially skip one mission, and get 6 ticks for free, which clears any and all harm. RAW it feels like it should apply, but it seems maybe unfair?

Second, the speaker’s “Air of Respectability”, which gives an extra downtime action to spend on acquiring assets or reducing heat. We feel like it makes sense that he could use this every downtime, so long as he can justify it, but this maybe sets a dangerous precedent about creating additional characters with special abilities that give more free downtime actions.

Any and all advice on the situation would be greatly appreciated!