Stress, trauma, transition scenes, and recovery

[konate]

As I understand it, if you are stressed out and receive trauma, your stress goes away automatically during a transition scene without having to roll recovery. If you were not stressed out, a recovery roll must be made vs. the doom pool (+ the hero's stress rating) to recover stress.

What if the hero was stressed out by someone that chose not to cause trauma? Does the stress go away as per the "received trauma" case, or does a roll vs. the DP need to be made, as per the "not stressed out" case?

[Majestic]

I would rule that the character didn't ever take trauma (even if it was voluntary on the part of their adversary). So a roll against the DP could be made (it doesn't have to be made, but it could be made), if the player wanted to try to reduce their stress.

[MidnightBlue]

Yeah, I agree with Majestic.

It's not a question of could the attacker have inflicted trauma, but did the attacker inflict trauma.

If the players/watcher had to keep track of everytime that they pulled a punch on someone, that's just one more record keeping nightmare.

I say keep it as simple as you can for the Watcher's sake.

[Supplanter]

There's an explicit rule for this in the OM. If you get stressed out by someone who pulls their punch, you start transition with D6 stress of that type rather than D6 trauma. Came up in our group just last night so it's fresh in my mind.


Jim

[konate]

Yeah, now that you mention it, I think I read that somewhere a while back too.