Blades in the Dark G+ Archives

P153 (Downtime Activities): “You can only attempt actions that you’re in a position to accomplish. If an activity is contingent on another action, resolve that action first.”

My current set of players keep an eye on their heat tracker and wanted levels, frequently wanting to reduce heat and take dangerous actions to finish projects, train, etc. The characters are often in a position (often, a risky one) to reduce heat in one way or another (which I take to mean being “contingent on another action”). Hence, I read this to be saying Resolve the action to deal with the danger first to get them into position to safely take the DTA, and the reduce heat DTA instructions to then be adding to make a downtime activity roll using an action rating (not an action roll) to determine how much heat is reduced.

Problem is: these are going to be the same action roll, and it feels weird to do that (the first result, for the action roll to get into position, could be a Critical, then the second one to determine the DTA result could be a 1-3, reducing only 1 heat). The alternative seems to be to have them be one roll, but then this directly opposes the instructions in the quoted text. This leads me to wonder: am I reading too deeply into the directions in the quoted lines, thereby placing unnecessary layers of complexity between the PCs and their goals in downtime? Maybe I am missing something? Something else?