Stress Points

With yesterday’s post on Fraction Column use modification for a theoretical third edition, I brought up that persistent modifiers wouldn’t work as well because negative modifiers would be handled by the fraction columns.

There is a system in the game called Character Difficulty Factors (CDF) thats used to track these persistent modifiers (like tired, sick, etc.). It’s used in a lot of tracking systems in the game. It offers a lot of granularity to different things that can effect the characters. The problem is, it’s a lot to track. When testing out the survival games rules, the CDFs worked as intended, but it was a lot of book keeping. There are ten attributes all with their own CDF value each one was being erased and updated each turn. Book keeping bad.

Now Stress Points almost could stand in for most of this functionality for mental CDFs. Each Stress Point would (in order to remove subtraction from the mix because it is a slightly harder mental calculation) add to each of the player’s rolls for mental attributes (Cha, Int, IQ, Psy). So if I have 5 stress points, and I roll a 27 my final result is a roll of 32.

But that doesn’t help with being tired or physical effects. The solution then is to have two sets of Stress Points, Mental and Physical. When a character does something that’s tiring they get physical stress and would effect physical attribute rolls (Con, Str, Agi, Ref, Dex*, Bty). That all works fine.

The thing that’s hard is this breaks how drugs work in the game. They normally trade Stress Points for CDFs temporarily and then it converts to a risk of addiction later on. In this situation I’d either have to have the drug swap stress points from one form to another or come up with entirely different ways of having them work. Still, it could be done, it just wouldn’t be exactly the same. It would be more interesting if there were a third kind of stress points. Maybe physical (Con, Str, Bty) mental (Cha, Int, IQ, PSY) and other (Agi, Ref, Dex).  I can’t come up with a reasonable designation for this third category (Coordination Stress? Functional Stress?). If I could this is starting to shape up into a real option.

* Dex is a weird one that I don’t know if it’s mental or physical