Hey everyone,

We just played through the Final Act scenario, and let me tell you, it was a blast. However, we have one question that has niggled since I read the book.

When a relationship gains Stress during a mission, how does it affect the real-word characters in that relationship? For example, if my relationship gains two stress during a mission, is the mission itself the cause of the stress on that relationship? Or is there an external reason for the stress, and is the stress gained merely a mechanic for showing the relationship's slow decline? If a relationship is broken during a mission, WHY has that real-life relationship been destroyed?

I'm not putting this very well, so I hope it makes at least some sense to you folks / Ben.

It does make sense to me. I'm kinda interested to here others' ideas (including yours!) before responding, though.

yrs--
--Ben

The way I see it, youre actually using the relationship to defend yourself with (for example). The damage you recieve when you are in the dream world (the Stress) manifests as your Relationship declining. The two arent separate, theyre linked, but its not like you take Stress and then your Anchor (or whomever) immediately starts trusting you less. The relationshihas been damaged, and pretty soon thats going to color the interaction.You or the other person are going to do something, say something or feel something that changes the way you feel for one another.

My two coins.

Well, I guess I have a slight problem understanding it because in some sense the mission must be the cause of the stress, else damaged but intact relationships couldn't break until after a mission, and as my group now knows after playing Final Act, it's very easy to have decent relationships turn broken very quickly.

Somehow there's a bit of cognitive dissonance here for me - really the only part of the system/setting that I had/have much trouble with.

To mangle terminology for a bit, I think this is a bit of a fruitful void in the game. At least it worked that way in our play: when these changes in relationships were caused by missions, we as players got to decide the why of it and even whether the characters realized or acted upon any such changes to any immediate extent. The rules (nor Ben) didn't say what was the in-fiction causal connection between fighting and relationship damage, so we worked it out on a case-by-case basis. The common baseline was to treat the situation very literally: nowhere in the rules does it say that the technology used to fight the aliens is clean, understandable and safe. It doesn't use the willpower or pure intentions of the pilot or anything like that, it quite literally runs on his relationships. So if we accept such a ludicrous idea as a giant mecha made of relationships, then there shouldn't be any difficulty in accepting that, somehow, there is a correspondence between the fight coreography and the social implications of damaging a relationship. How that correspondence surfaces was determined by us as the need arose.

Well, in one of the demos I played in, we had an instance of the damage to the mech attachment manifesting as actual physical damage to the character's body. I don't think that is the "default", but it is certainly one way to go.

One way to consider it is that the mecha parts are made up of some paramystical material (something like Orson Scott Card's philotes, perhaps) that actually IS the relationship-bond. Therefore damage to it in the Dream World (which is linked to every human being through the collective unconscious) could easily manifest in the real world as psychic turbulence between the characters, or even physical damage.

Another way to consider it is that the mecha parts are made up solely of the pilot's emotions- meaning they are symbolic of, but have no actual connection, physical or mystical, to the character itself. In that case you could easily imagine than when the part gets damaged, it causes an emotional backlash in the pilot's psyche toward the character. Possibly the pilot might subconsciously resent them for failing under pressure. Or feel grief for not having protected them better. The character is symbolically associated with the role of that part, so it's easy to reverse that association. Maybe it could even cause brain damage in the pilot, if you wanted to go that far.

And thirdly, you could just not explain it. Or let it come out in play. The setting features extradimensional dream aliens and mecha made from emotions, so really, it's not like anybody is whipping out a slide rule here.

I hope you guys get around to a campaign, I'm still eagerly awaiting extended AP reports from anybody.

You could also do it by removing any causal link (in the narrative) between the missions and the relationship damage.  After all, relationships between teenagers are fraught at the best of times and they often blow up into various confrontations.  Who's to say that Sally wouldn't have got upset with you after that mission anyway, regardless of what damage the relationship underwent during it.  With this view, the mechanical effects of the missions are simply a pacing mechanism that brings the relationships into jeopardy.

But I think the best way is to allow all the different narrative justifications for stress in the relationships.  Some perhaps will resonate better with your players, but it's useful to have several tools in the box.

Neil.

I like all of these responses! Except for Eero's wierd bit about a "fruitful void." Clearly that's not it. : P

The truth is that I usually just wing it. I guess, if pressed, I'd say that I like the think that the missions exacerbate existing stresses in the relationship. But I'm also cool with physical damage sometimes, because it's awesome and dramatic. Or with strange nightmares, or just an emptiness where there was none before.

yrs--
--Ben