stress

One of the core components of Diaspora Anabasis is stress. When you want to improve a rolled result, including helping someone else improve theirs, you take stress. But stress is not an inert hit points track you run out of. Stress is intended to minimally model, well, stress. This turns out to have pitfalls I hadn’t anticipated.

Your first point of stress leaves you agitated. It’s easy to get rid of. You work out, talk out your problems, take a vacation, and so on. All the things your friends tell you to do when you’re freaking out actually work because you’re not all that stressed. Being agitated doesn’t even warrant a FACT on your character sheet. No problems here.

Gnoll is agitated but has a process.

Your second point of stress gives you a compulsion. You write this in as a FACT on your character sheet: this is a true thing about your character that you are expected to incorporate into play. Your character keeps coming back to the topic related to their stress, even when it’s not appropriate to the scene. You are worrying something over and your compulsion is a signal that you are in distress. Getting rid of it requires getting away from the thing causing you stress. That can be hard in a space ship a million miles from actual air.

Your third gives you bad judgement. Again embodied by a FACT, your character is now bad at making choices about or related to something. Maybe you are becoming too careful. Maybe too daring. But your choices relating to your FACT are not the best choices. They instead are focused on whatever you’re stressed about. Clearing this one requires that you make a substantive change to your situation. In our game the captain of the vessel gave up their captaincy. So it has to be a big change.

Your last step of stress is withdrawal and at this point all of the other characters should be worrying. You need professional help and the support of your allies to clear this.

What I didn’t anticipate is how much this impacts the players. It can actually be quite upsetting.

One reason, of course, is because someone is telling you how to change how to play your character. Players rightfully buck at this. It’s one thing to be asked to narrate a limp because your leg is broken, but for some reason (and I say that not to diminish it but to express that I don’t fully understand it) it is way harder to take on a real-seeming psychological change. I suspect this is because of the way the human brain handles pretending things: when you pretend an emotion, your brain probably simulates the emotion just by running the mechanisms that actually evoke the emotion with with a little simulation flag set so you don’t forget you’re pretending. Bottom line is that pretend pain doesn’t hurt but pretend emotions do, to an extent depending on the person, cause you to genuinely feel.

That up there is two reasons of course: we don’t like being told to play our pretend personalities differently, and feeling real bad feelings can really feel bad.

The other thing that gets in the way is that you are basically asked to play your character sub-optimally. You’re expected to deliberately make bad decisions. Since we’re playing a game, there is a desire to solve problems correctly and bask in the glory of victory. Deliberately failing is genuinely hard for a lot of people. I put myself in that camp.

When this last came up we talked it out and found a way forward that addressed as much of these as possible by making sure the player still felt like they had authority (but were handed some creative parameters) and agency and also that they wouldn’t be made to feel badly in a way that they didn’t want to feel bad. Talking it through was a big deal for me both to identify just how much of a minefield this thing is and also to resolve it or at least set us up for success in the next session.

Anyway here’s a draft of my rules text relating to this issue:

Stress can be very onerous on players. It asks you to play suboptimally and at the same time engage the game material in a way that is designed to emulate the real effects of stress on humans. At the extreme end of the track it asks you to act in ways that may upset yourself and others: your character will be withdrawn, upset, and making bad choices. Here are some ways to handle it. Please use these in addition to your preferred safety tools (X-Card, Script Change, and so on).

• • Don’t do it. Skip the facts. The stress system is not as powerful this way, which would be the point of not using it. If it upsets you, just don’t use it. It’s not more important than your fun.
  • Discuss it. When a character gets into the deep end of stress, take some time offline to discuss how to engage the new facts in ways that are not too upsetting. Part of what’s upsetting is that the rules are telling you how to play your character which most people are resistant to, but if you discuss how you want to play it, you can make it your own.
  • Help the stressed. If everyone pulls together to help the stressed character it can relieve the difficulties that this brings. It also makes great scenes and clears the stress! Everyone wins.