Maxima_2023/src/volatile.md

# Volatile
Areas of the ruleset which are likely to change.

This page is written in the form of notes and ideas, open for comment, yet-to-be formalised.

These notes are in chronological order. Items near the start may have been eclipsed by items near the end.

## Strain
Modifying every single Challenge by Strain is arduous, but most notably, it seems unnecessary. There are other factors which can affect Challenges, or ways to apply Strain to Challenges which don't require direct subtraction on every single Challenge.

Tracking Strain without having a dedicated Strain stat (i.e. using only Willpower) seems to always cause desynchronisation with reality. A separate stat is almost certainly needed, but how to use it can vary.

expand feint challenges into general exhaustion challenges, which we run whenever the storyteller feels like it, the difficulty is equal to the current strain, and it's versatile. If you fail, you feint. For this, the current scale of Strain would probably need to be doubled.
This means there's little-to-no effect from very low amounts of strain - in fact the only difference between 1 and 0 is if they have a relevant skill at 1, since rolling a 1 is a failure anyway.
It might not be worth bothering calling such a challenge until they're at about 3 strain.
The rate at which such challenges are called will effect willpower supplies, and it's completely storyteller-elective, so it may be seen as overly- or underly- harsh. Perhaps a specific criteria for when to run the challenge, like when leaving a tense or hazardous situation, is required. This works well, unless the strain is from something non-dangerous, which is perfectly possible.
We'd need to consider whether to allow any skills to affect this, and if so, it's better not to let them affect BOTH resistance-challenges AND exhaustion-challenges, but this might be unavoidable.

the main problem with this is knowing when to apply these challenges, and the need to remember to do it. Forgetting it once causes significant unbalance. Then again, this is also true if you forget to apply it to challenges. Is there a way to apply it which doesn't get unbalanced?

consider granting 1 willpower at the start of exhaustion challenges when they follow the end of a tense or hazardous situation, to incentivise the player remembering them? This can become farmable.

consider rewarding several points of willpower for passing a feint challenge, and letting players choose when to use it. This would also remove the need for the storyteller to remember to arbitrarily reward willpower.

## Sync
Incentivising applying Strain for every Challenge is good, because Players aren't likely to work to remember something which doesn't benefit them, and otherwise the Storyteller has to remember it every time. However, in practice, this is too much to do during a Challenge, and distracts from the point of Challenges.

It may be that Sync is completely unnecessary. The original point was to reward Players for following their Character's personality accurately, at the expense of their objective benefit. If some other way is found to cover this purpose, and maybe a few other minor things, Sync could be removed completely.

sync also takes the place of 'experience' by being tradeable for Growth, but this isn't necessary if there's a slow income of Growth to the characters, unless the Storyteller wants to track progress differently on a scale smaller than individual Growth points.

sync could be spent to automatically succeed at certain challenges, which concern the player more than the character, such as Organisation.

sync could be spent to gain total insight into some story element the characters wouldn't otherwise discover, perhaps in batches of 10.

perhaps the solution is to focus on the detriment we're measuring the roleplaying against, and instead make sure to make it a detrimental trait, and therefore give that player some growth to spend on something else.
This still might be a problem if the trait incentivises them to screw over the rest of the party - it's too close to pvp.
this is essentially the same as already-existing Prude trait, though.
there should be guidance that any detrimental character aspects *ought* to be made into traits, otherwise there can be no reward for roleplaying them.

consider creating a system to resolve inter-party character disputes without requiring PVP.

consider instead of granting willpower on successful applications, increase strain by 1 on failures to apply. This reduces the likelihood of farming, but inverts the incentive, increasing the amount the storyteller has to remember, as well as punishing players who forget to roleplay.

## Chaos
Everything about the Chaos mechanic seems to work and make sense, and yet forcing a detrimental effect upon players, which everyone has to remember, is still unpleasant for everyone. Arguments over whether an action should grant Chaos also slow the game down and create friction.

It was originally intended to enforce the ethics of the Narrative Setting upon Players who weren't following them, specifically playing their Character in a way which wouldn't make sense for that Character in that Narrative Setting.
This, however, is better enforced naturally, through the story.
The only exceptions where this wouldn't work, are to reflect Characters' guilt. Some people don't have guilt for unethical actions, and some unethical actions are punished by observers, but in the space between these, are Characters who do feel guilt, but whose unethical actions weren't observed.
This is particularly important for Characters for whom their ideology grants power, and specifically forbids certain sins, and would impose severe guilt for such violations. This is important whether the ideology refers to something literally real in-universe or not.

It may be possible to replace Sync and Chaos together with something else. Perhaps a hidden stat which refers to how well the Player is co-operating with the story, which the Storyteller can use to influence whatever they like.
Hiding the stat reduces arguments, but also reduces accountability, and guilt is something Characters would know about.

Perhaps a better solution is to at least agree beforehand on an ethical requirement, which specifies a deduction of willpower during obvious violations. At least if it's agreed beforehand, this is not as arguable, but there are so many things which could be considered unethical, that the argument is just about whether broad categories of unethical actions apply to some action the player did.

It could be argued that chaos doesn't really concern morality, moreso the theme of a narrative setting. If Characters are expected to exhibit a pattern of behaviour in that narrative setting and don't, there's no good way to resolve that. This just depends on the players' attitude, and the players therefore define the shape of the campaign.

For guilt specifically, this could be added as Strain, which can be cleared using willpower, or by realistic narrative methods like counselling. For this though, it should be possible for some Characters to be psychopathic, receiving no guilt, but with some alternative detriment, perhaps less maximum Willpower, due to the difficulty of hiding their remorselessness from everyone all the time, and appearing normal.
This still doesn't properly control for examples where Characters would have undergone advanced psychological profiling or other means to detect such variations before their Character got to where they are. Perhaps this should just decrease their maximum willpower by more. 1 if their condition is more acceptable or less exposed, up to a maximum of 4 if it's less acceptable or more exposed. Perhaps a greater Growth cost instead?

Use Skills to track remorselessness, and allow players to opt in to a challenge to resist incoming strain from some causes.
Remorse is a valid form of strain.
If a strain challenge succeeds, the strain is reduced by 3, down to a minimum of 0.
the difficulty of remorse challenges is how likely the character is to be remorseful in general. In a star trek setting, the difficulty would be high, perhaps 8, or even more for some roles. In a less morally-upstanding setting, the difficulty would be much lower. The standard should be about 3.
While the exhaustion challenge is versatile, this one isn't, and the Storyteller can skip it quickly if they know nothing can affect it.
This can also be used to factor in armour, and other things which provent any amount of damage.

## Tracking Strain Causes
the way this is done now is confusing to players, since when adding strain, they essentially have to add it in two places.

merely a different conceptualisation of tracking strain might help, but the layout of strain as a resource, and the causes as statuses makes this difficult.

perhaps all resources should actually be statuses? Then at least we could tree them, which would help clarify strain factor vs strain total.

## Recording Growth: Current and Base
this isn't too hard to remember, but if it can be streamlined it should be.

perhaps players should only record current, and the storyteller should record a pan-party base, but if players ever have a different base amount, it will need to be recorded per player.

Perhaps instead of recording current and base growth together, base growth should be recorded in a metadata area of the character sheet, and current should be in the status section just like it was a physical currency?

alternatively, a model where we record how much has been spent, instead of how much has not yet been spent, allows us to only increase one value when more growth is added, rather than two.
The downside of this is that it's slightly more maths to know how much you have left. This might be a worthy trade-off.

## Breakthrough
is it actually necessary to limit this? With the new evaluation of Skill levels, due to luck-optional challenges, it will be very rarely even possible to go above 10, assuming Skill levels are initially limited to 7.

Perhaps all we need to resolve this is to strongly recommend limiting Skill levels to 7 initially. This should be strictly justified, and perhaps that's the main thing we're missing.

Perhaps a counter to track the maximum Skill level as a campaign progresses is a good idea.

## Rest Willpower Recovery
With the willpower limit of 6, it's probably not necessary to restore as little as 1 willpower per 2 hours rested, it might be ok to restore 1 per hour. This also makes the "round up to 1 willpower for 1 hour rest" exception unnecessary, and thus simpler.

though this does make any length of sleep greater than 6 hours completely useless.

## Special Verbiage
possibly change 'Special' to something else.

possibly change 'active' and 'passive' to something else, something to imply that the effect is either 'elective' or 'mandatory'. 'Manual' vs 'Automatic'?

## Special Definition
relate the definition of a special to the obvious physical capabilities a character has - i.e. a humanoid can walk, not teleport, but even a member of a race who can teleport might still show no obvious signs that they can physically do that, indeed it may not be 'physical', depending on the magic system being used.

being able to swing an arm-blade is obvious and physical, being able to chop unnaturally fast, unnaturally precisely, or unnaturally strongly, may all be Specials.
## Strain (2023/12/18)
- Strain is gained as normal
- 1 Willpower can be spent at any time to reduce Strain by 1
- Strain sources are not reduced, only the actual Strain value itself
- When regaining Willpower from significant events, it always goes towards reducing Strain before gaining any usable Willpower
- Whenever Strain increases, if it's 5 or above, do a Feint Challenge (Similar to Exhaustion as described above)
- Some Strain sources get worse over time if not tended - for example, an open wound. For these, there will be occasional Malady Checks, for which any applicable Strain source gets worse, and the amount it gets worse by is added onto the Character's Strain.
- If a Strain source is too bad, beyond what one could mentally ignore, a Feint Challenge can be run for that specific source.
### Problems
- Why would anyone spend Willpower to resist Strain early, when it's the same as waiting for the next Willpower gain. The only reason would be bleeding, and that won't apply to every Strain source.
	- Could change it to "no matter how much Willpower you would have gained, you gain 1 Willpower and lose 1 Strain." - this doesn't scale with the significance of the regain at all.
## Unbounded Scaling
For Skills, or similar ratings, it may sometimes be preferable to allow the values to scale to any extent - for example, if a magic system allows for a huge variation of power levels, the campaign may eventually reach the point where 10 just isn't enough.

In these cases, it is probably wise to introduce a new counter for something like "magic power", and leave Skills as they are.

Skills are intended to measure things which *are* essentially bounded, but there are likely to be problem cases.

One possible problem case is if a playable species has superhuman ability in some metric, like strength or senses. If we lower everyone else's values, they may spend the entire campaign unable to reach 10, or even 7, but if we raise the superhuman's values, it changes assumptions about 10 being the maximum, including the breakthrough mechanic.

The reason this is coming up is that ultimately Skills are conflating different kinds of metric. They are mainly intended to serve for areas of knowledge, and may not always work as well for other kinds of metric.

Allowing freely going over 10 would be ok for some Skills, but not for others.

Consider a system whereby 'Skills' or some replacement are in fact just a limit on how well a Character can do at a task, and if no knowledge or other things are required, there is no limit, and then Players choose how much energy to expend up to that limit.

This would also imply the need for a lower bounds on some Skills, if a Character is to expert that it's just as easy, or easier, for them to operate at a high-Skill level, than a low-Skill level. A medical expert might find it just as easier, or even easier, to be correct about a complex medical topic, than to be no more correct than an amateur would be.

I can envisage this system working, and solving the skill-scaling problem, and perhaps some others, but it's noticeably more complicated than the current system.

## New Strain System 2024/01/15
(Many names are WIP)

Strain effects are in three categories:
1. Minor: Doesn't need to be tracked, but can be
2. Debilitating: Doubles boost cost
3. Fatal: Incurs feint challenges on every time-skip, and at earliest convenience after acquiring

Minor strain-effects are those which are expected to heal on their own, and do not cause most tasks to be more difficult. They are only tracked in case they can stack and thus become debilitating, they have no effect on their own.

Debilitating strain-effects are those which would make most tasks more difficult, due to pain, stress, or anything similar. Debilitating injuries are not expected to worsen without limit (i.e. bleeding to death).

While any debilitating strain-effect is active, all boost roles during challenges cost twice as much (2 by default, instead of 1).

Fatal strain-effects are those which are expected to worsen without limit, such they can kill or cause unconsciousness.

When a fatal injury is acquired, a feint challenge must be performed at the next non-tense opportunity. One must also be performed during every time-skip (possibly only if longer than 1 hour), and should be intensified for particularly long time-skips. (Possibly double the difficult for every full 8 hours skipped).

Feint challenges (name WIP) require adding up the top two injuries, and every fatal injury. This is the difficulty of the challenge. These challenges are versatile.

It's possible for a condition to be fatal without being debilitating, but unlikely in practice.
### Problems
- Is doubling the cost a bit too harsh? Anything else is likely to be much more complicated.
	- We could certainly add a trait which un-doubles the cost for the entire challenge, at the cost of 1 willpower. This isn't the best way to lay it out since they'd always want to use it.
	- If doubling it seems too harsh, then only apply debilitated when the status effect is bad enough. Use the result as the requisite.
- Potentially, multiple injuries could combine together to be debilitating, whilst their source is recorded individually.
	- The individual conditions should be marked as debilitating or fatal because otherwise we don't know how to get rid of those states when the injuries are healed.
	- One solution could be for the latter injury to make the former injury worse directly when it's inflicted.
	- If this is required, a new status called "general injuries" or similar could be added with no severity, but which applies debilitating. It would have to be healed by a general healing method, or removed when no other injuries remain.
	- Accounting for this will sometimes require the storyteller to review all the strain-effects a player has, otherwise there's literally no point in recording non-debilitating and non-fatal injuries. Perhaps the lesson is that it *actually* isn't worth recording them?
		- We could simply add another flag for "strained", which, for example, reduces the willpower recovery limit during rest, say from 6 to 4, which is applied by smaller injuries.
- Recording whether each status is debilitating or fatal is an extra thing to do on every injury received, though it's still much less to do overall than under the previous system.
### Further Notes
- Some sort of counter of how many hours of fatal strain have been accounted for, so that time-skips don't punish the player more if they are simply more frequent, even if short.
	- This could lead to a tendency to remove some of it if there has been more than an hour of non-skipped play. It may not come up often, but it's worth avoiding this in principle.
	- Alternatively, the number of hours skipped could just be added on as difficulty. This might be too much, but if we divide it first, we lose the 1 hour minimum and have to use a 2, 3, or 4 hour minimum which seems wrong.
- On reflection, only fatal strain-effects should actually cause unconsciousness (and thus, only they should factor into feint challenges). Debilitating effects could maybe contribute to it, but it's much simpler if they don't.
- "Fatal" definitely needs to be changed since it's not necessarily accurate, or at least not the point, and "debilitating" is too long and may be slightly too uncommon a word.
	- "impaired" or "impairing" might be a sufficient replacement for "debilitating".

## New Versatility (2024-01-17)
Removing the current versatility system, which allows characters to use their boost roll result as their skill level for challenges with significantly-intrinsic (instinctive, like perception) requirements. Adding instead a new Skill which every Character always has called Versatility, which is at level 3, but has conditions around its use which match the conditions for the current versatility system.

This removes the need to declare that a challenge is versatile proactively, instead allowing the players to seek benefit by asking themselves. It will also teach them what versatility is, and honest players will eventually not need to ask.

It removes the random chance element, but I would consider requiring characters to use boost if they are using versatility. This means that instinctive actions cost willpower (which is ok), and adds back in the random element. Perhaps we don't need to, since 3 is pretty low, and that could just be treated as the challenge floor - not ideal, but since it's for instinctive things this isn't so bad.

In group challenges, if one character has a format which lacks some intrinsic sense the others have, it will be less cumbersome to specify that, and after some time, players will know whether something is versatile for their character instinctively, so it will almost never need to be asked.

In the current system, versatility is a bit too abstract for people to remember what it means. There have been many instances where players have confused versatility with other things, or just ignored it completely. This new way is not only more grounded in an actual thing (a skill), but also encourages the players to ask about versatility since it confers a benefit.

This also frees up increasing the cost of boosts, since boosts are no longer conflated with versatility. One problem with this is if versatility still requires to use boost, then it still costs more, but that's still better than the current system.

### Problems
0 is meant to be considered 'average', but under this system, 3 becomes the new average (for most character types) and 0 is used for character types for which versatility does not apply to the current challenge - which should be covered by a trait. This implies a violation of a fundamental principle of the skills system, which is going to lead to some contradictions - for example, there is no way to represent having 1 or 2 in anything to which versatile applies.

Consider a system which, for versatile rolls, allows combining two boosts together - perhaps also granting one free boost roll. This does also produce double the risk of rolling a 1.

## Removed Versatility (2024-01-17)
Remove versatility entirely.

All this requires is to redefine 0 as not "the average among a population", but as a "low, but not anomalously low, degree of intrinsic, with no specific knowledge".

This allows us to treat intrinsics the same as other skills. There's no need for any other part of the previous system.

Players could even make this really easy by giving themselves a skill called "senses" (which fills out a large part of intrinsics), and even at a low level it would be very useful. Sometimes this will be too broad, and will require specialisation, but that's just like every other skill.

The only argument against this is if we believe that having higher levels in intrinsics is inherently significantly more valuable than non-intrinsic skills. I don't think this is true - it might be for some campaigns, and not for others, but that's expected and not a problem.

Other character formats (eg. other species) who have a level of intrinsics below the level defined as 0 can simply use a trait, which is how it's meant to be done.

For narrative settings with no humanoids, where the above definition for 0 doesn't really make sense, it should be pretty easy to map it onto something which does work. Writing a short guide for this won't be hard.

Just like with 10, the storyteller must, to some extent, adjust the range to the needs of the campaign. Using this new conception of 0, it should require less effort than 10 does.

Removing versatility also makes challenges significantly simpler.

This change is not just a good adjustment, it seems to resolve what was actually a principle violation, or perhaps even a flawed principle.

For challenges which are mostly luck-based, versatility could still be useful, but if it's so luck based that you need a random range of +6 rather than just +3 (as it is under this new system), then it might be so luck-based that it should be a fate roll instead.  
(Fate rolls need to be added to the rules document).

It might be a misconception to think that what versatility was for was "luck-based" challenges, since often, something like perception may seem like luck, but might actually be based on *genetic* luck, or on other measurable circumstances. There should still be a way to include luck, but this fix removes the mistake of relying on it here, whilst still including luck in the normal way.

Maybe give players a few more growth points, and include some advice that they also need to consider spending their points on intrinsic things. Senses, but also strength, stamina, etc.

The range of luck-based variation for intrinsic-based skills is *sometimes* more than for any knowledge-based skill. Not so much for strength, but often for perception. Even if this is true, it's not worth adding back the current system for this reason alone.

Perhaps allow Challenges with a significant luck component to include more boosting. Perhaps this could apply to *every* involuntary challenge. Fate rolls may often be the solution here, but skill *could* factor in enough to be worth using a full challenge.

This system does beckon for a set of 'recommended' skill names, though of course this depends on the narrative setting / character format. Expansions should always try to provide some recommended names.

Since versatility does not allow for using a Skill, it is in fact just a fate roll to which modifiers can apply. If a challenge is entirely luck-based, modifiers probably shouldn't apply to it.
## Fluke
consider a system which would allow the character to spend 2 willpower, roll 2 boost di, and take the combined result, blundering if EITHER is a 1. This doubles the chance of failure, but also doubles the maximum boost, though the latter is much less likely.

In these cases, it would be perhaps fatally unbalanced to allow the character to use a skill as well. Adding 6 is just too much, but it could work well if they aren't allowed to use a skill with it. Perhaps for this downside, the cost of rolling a fluke dice can be reduced back down to 1.

## Skill Naming Issues
- Up-Coverage and Down-Coverage have an ambiguity in how often either can 'bounce' back up or down. For example, with the Skill 'Rocket Science', through Down-Coverage, it covers 'Physics', 'Science', etc., but can you then use the Up-Coverage from 'Physics' to cover 'Quantum Mechanics'? This may require an extra Level 3 Skill for the specific knowledge, but this still might not be desired.
	- This would make specificity overpowered compared to vagueness, since a specific skill covers the general area, and its own specific area. This may not be a problem.
	- It's quite unclear - a player could be using 'Rocket Science' for all kinds of scientific rolls, as long as they have a token level in the specific area.
- There could be multiple different paths to gaining a Skill, each with different areas of expertise. Neither one is 'required', even though at least one of them may be. How does Down-Coverage work in these cases?

## Fat
Take for example a situation where an element of a Character's design would not normally be thought of as beneficial, or may only be beneficial rarely, so it wasn't made into a Skill. The Character being Fat is a good example.

Then a situation arises where that attribute is actually beneficial, like, for 'Fat', trying to snap something using your weight, or for insulation.

Are we going to tell the Player they have to make this a Skill? Do we just ignore the fat if they don't have enough Growth? Do we consider a high-skill in 'Fat' to mean they are highly fat?  
If not, are we going to allow them to use Character design elements as if they are Skills? This could be horribly unbalanced and easily exploitable.  
Or do we just give up trying to run a Challenge for this, and just decide arbitrarily whether they succeed or not?  
Or do we require that any element of Character design which the Player wants to use mechanically must be instantiated as either a Skill (not in this case) or a Trait/Special? The latter would make more sense in this case, though each unique case will need a new Trait/Special which is itself balanced.

Probably the best solution is to use a Trait, with a customisable level denoting the level of fatness, which applies bonuses or reductions on relevant challenges. For insulation or weight, it gives a bonus, for speed etc., it reduces the success.

Clarify hard that Skills are just for purely beneficial things. Don't add as a Skill anything which has direct downsides.

Instead: Skills MUST be things for which a lower level is less useful than a higher level. 'Fat' isn't.

## New Strain System Adjustments
Consider removing Stage 3 from the new strain system, and letting it behave more naturally, as follows:
- Storyteller can initiate an exhaustion challenge at any time
- They should avoid doing so during hazardous situations unless the strain is really bad
- Successes in exhaustion challenges reward a small amount of willpower
- It could be viewed as the Storyteller constantly looking out for opportunities for reliable gambles that they can overcome the Player's resistance to exhaustion. If the Strain is bad enough, and the player's willpower is low enough, the Storyteller should take the risk. If they're wrong, the player gains willpower and may be safer afterwards.

Obviously this doesn't imply the Storyteller should actually be adversarial, just that the dynamics reflect a rising baseline hazard, which the players must stay above, and which the storyteller enforces.

Problem: there's no strong reason for the storyteller not to just spam exhaustion challenges. Obviously they wouldn't have to, and it would be stupid to do so, but it would be much better if there was a reliable prevention. One way to do this would be to guarantee that the player will have more willpower after a successful exhaustion challenge than they had before. This may not be very realistic, but it might be worth it.

This reorganisation simplifies the new strain system's structure, to the point that it can be represented not as stages but just as two simple policies for the players to remember: that of any strain causing the sleep willpower effect, and any impairing strain causing the double boost cost effect. Players won't need to know or remember anything about stage 3, nor do they need to think of strain in terms of stages.

## Exhaustion and Resistance Challenges Frequency
### Exhaustion Challenges
The storyteller may be inclined to include any relevant skills the player has for resisting the challenge when assessing if it is time to run one or not.

Especially if we decide to include a willpower reward for successful exhaustion challenges, this will lead to disbalances (in the exact wrong direction) in which players recieve the challenges, and thus also the willpower.

one possible solution is to just set a strict number of strain at which the challenge is initiated.

simply removing the willpower reward, and trusting the storyteller not to overuse exhaustion challenges would probably be a better solution.

This would also reduce the overall frequency of exhaustion challenges for players with a high toughness, rather than simply allowing them to pass more of them. This streamlines the gameplay.

### Resistance Challenges
There is no strong reason for players to forego calling resistance challenges, even though they will almost always fail.

perhaps they should simply cost 1 willpower to initiate?

in that case they should refund the willpower when successful, and maybe reduce the strain by more than 3.

a simpler way to conceptualise this is simply taking one willpower if they fail.

perhaps the strain can be reduced by the level of the skill used in the resistance challenge?

## Partial Resistance
Currently resistance challenges are all or nothing. Perhaps there should be a way for them to have a partial effect?

It should be possible for psychopaths to be completely immune to guilt, but without extremely-tough barbarians being completely immune to injury. Perhaps the only or best way to achieve this is the original plan of a trait with a special condition for psychopaths.

given this, perhaps the correct balance is to simply increase the reduction of strain from 3 to 5, and allow it to happen more often?

perhaps 3 should always be the base resistance but traits can increase it for specific things? this may be overly-complicated, including with naming. Perhaps use 'immunity', such as "3 immunity to cold" or "total immunity to guilt"? This still implies they should also have the resistance, but in fact immunity on its own would do literally nothing, even though skills are well-suited to handle this function.

perhaps 3 is the base resistance, but they can spend willpower after a successful resistance challenge to increase that by 2 or 3 per willpower?

perhaps we could do 3 plus surfeit challenge success rating? So if they needed a 7 and got a 9, the reduction is 5? ( 3 + (9 - 7 = 2) = 5 ).

the problem ultimately is that that different types of strain can, in reality, be resisted different amounts. Some injuries could barely be resisted at all in reality no matter how 'tough' someone is.

perhaps the answer is to simplify this, removing resistance challenges, allowing characters to have skills labeled as immunity which reduce or remove strain of their given type below their given level?

one problem with this is there's no structure to include it as a page in the ruleset right now. I could make it a sub page below specials? there does seem to be a need for this for other things too.

problem: the immunity approach makes skills like "toughness", "stamina" etc., almost useless, for a pretty arbitrary reason. We could allow resistance challenges but make them much softer.

problem: tick-strain like supplies could be completely ignored using resistance challenges.

back to resistance challenges, but simpler. No base difficulty (though the storyteller can add difficulty where appropriate), and successful resistances reduce by 3, to a minimum of 1. Traits can enhance this reduction, and/or change the minimum.

this doesn't solve the tick-strain problem, but it solves the rest.

perhaps each resistance costs willpower? If so, make it a bit more powerful? Or align it so the cost follows the severity more fairly?

how about characters can pay 1 willpower to do a resistance challenge against an impairment effect, and if they succeed, it's no longer impairing, just straining. Might still need the base difficulty of 3. I like this idea.

keep immunity, it's a flat reduction of a type of damage, with access to it controlled by traits.

also consider changing the strain scale to 0-10, with 1 being the lowest severity which we care to grant gameplay effects, and 10 being a severity which will cause unconsciousness in almost every character.

## Leisure
As a way to limit passion trait willpower regain without just saying "no farming!", we could allow a pool of potential willpower, called leisure or similar, which passions can pull from.

The pool would be stocked during Accomplishments, raised to the Willpower reward of that Accomplishment, perhaps allowing just adding 1 if that isn't a raise.

or, much simpler and only a little less accurate, just cap passion gains like we cap rest gains. Perhaps allow passions to increase the rewards of relevant accomplishments, too.

## Passive/Auto/Active/Manual Specials/Traits
traits which grant a contingent skill would be thought of as passive but don't meet the definition as a memory intensive event trigger based trait.

this inconsistency suggests we cannot blanket define passive or active; instead each trait could define itself as something like "heavy".

additionally, it may be better to use the term "memory" as the limit on such traits. the word is literally accurate for its purpose but this use is a bit oblique.

## Combine Resistance and Exhaustion Challenges
it would just be less cumbersome. People are going to get them confused.

## Rest while strained reduction implementation
possibly require a fixed duration of rest (4 hours?) before willpower begins being granted.

## Maladies
Change the wording of "strain status effects", and "strain" heading to "maladies", and clarify that there is only a need to specify a malady IF it is 'straining'. A new word for strain may be needed, since we're using it in its "-ing" form, and 'straining' doesn't sound right.

### Malady Challenges

Also combine resistance and exhaustion challenges into one, possibly called 'malady challenges', which are for removing the impairment of a malady. They cost 1 willpower to attempt at the character's will, but are free if the character must perform them. Each malady has a base difficulty, usually 3, but more if the character is particularly vulnerable to that type (like ethical guilt for starfleet officers).

unconsciousness happens if enough impairing effects have built up to cause it. Non-impairing effects can't cause unconsciousness. Before unconsciousness is caused, the character has a chance to resist each malady using a malady challenge, which in this case does not cost willpower to attempt.

### Malady Terminology and Bounds
Whilst "Strain" and "Impair" are great choices for their purposes, they don't fit as well in this new minor overhaul, since they are used as modifying terms and thus require "-ing" on the end. Perhaps 'grim' or 'acute'?

## Rest: Disengage Willpower reward from time
Grant willpower at the start of any downtime proportionate to the length of that downtime.

This is to try to reduce the wasted effort with ad-hoc time management, particularly in deciding how long a given live-acted section has taken so as to subtract it from available rest, and continue with the practice of abstracting time management into willpower management instead.

The only time Rest is actually needed, is to force a player to sit out because they've been using a lot of willpower, which is perhaps the opposite of the incentive we want to provide.

## Rest: Disengage from Willpower
Using Maladies/Strain to track exhaustion when players voluntarily exchange for it, and then Rest removes that strain, for example:
- respite: -1 strain
- campfire: -2 strain
- standard rest: -3 strain
- luxuriation: -4 strain
- abrupt awakening: +1 strain

### Opportunistic exhaustion exchange problem
Players may try to exchange all their willpower for exhaustion before rest just to get the best benefit.

solution: willpower can go negative, and the exhaustion exchange can ONLY be done while Willpower is 0 or lower. Willpower can't be spent when negative.

addendum: to prevent imbalanced situations like 1 wp being worse in practice than 0 since at 0 you can jump up to 2, we define the exhaustion threshold as less than the wp value of 1 strain (which is probably 2).

### Oversleeping
if someone wakes up from going from 4 strain to 1, how do we prevent them immediately doing a respite to remove the last one?

type of rest is not a choice, it's defined by the best rest you can currently get.

further, to prevent double-sleeps, we can simply say that arbitrary willpower gains unlock 1 sleep. This wouldn't be necessary unless we wanted to disengage rest willpower gain from time, which we do.

### Exhaustion or Stress?
either works, but the latter makes more sense as a separation from energy, which willpower is supposed to represent. Stress also works better with the components system described below.

Neither are quite as general (to all possible character types) as ideal.

## Components - Replacing Strain and Maladies
Each character type (eg. humanoid) has a series of components.

these components are delineated by at which point a different specialised skill is needed to heal/repair them.

humanoids may have:
- body structure
- organ function
- mental competence
- psyche

this is more complicated than we'd like for what the players need to do, but this would actually be done by the storyteller, ideally all in advance.

starships would have as components all their major subsystems.

components could also be 'impaired' (causing the double-cost boost debuff), and each single component could also be the cause of collapsing on failing a challenge.

### Collapse Challenge Verbiage
in fact, we could call it a collapse challenge, since that's general and clear.

### Armour
armour and similar things could be added as additional components.

### Over-attention in character sheet
it wouldn't be necessary to list a component until it was damaged, though with armour it would be a good idea to. All the pieces combined could still be just "armour" though.

### Reflecting Stress/Exhaustion in non-humanoids using components
For humanoids, stress/exhaustion falls under the psyche component, but where does it fall for a starship?