[Halfjack]

You know, coming off the high of our first two sessions I was hard put to come up with anything I didn't like. Now that I've had some time to simmer, there is one flaw that is worth mentioning.

That one big flaw in the game is the stress system. In combat you get a stress track of five or so boxes and when injured you knock off a box appropriate to the degree of injury. There's more detail than that, involving consequences, knocking off higher boxes, and so on but there's a reason I'm not keen to describe it -- it's really contrary to the spirit of the game. And honestly we never used it. When Dirk Blade scored a LEGENDARY hit on Doctor Nein, that was clearly (to our group), the end of Doctor Nein. We don't need no stinkin' hit points. Anyway the beef is that the hit point track bogs the game down when you get to combat because where you used to be rolling once to resolve, now you are rolling over and over again.

Since that game we've read about other systems and thought about the impact of formalising our play. There are plenty of good ideas. We'd prefer to just throw the stress track out, but several stunts manipulate those rules so it's not that simple. On the other hand, no one in our group took any of those stunts.

Currently we're playing stress like so: if an attack roll minus a defense roll exceeds your stress you are taken out. You can take a consequence (an aspect with purely negative effects) to stay in the game. That's it. We ain't got all night.