(quote from Ryucoo)
Just when I wrap my head around the Stress & Panic of Alien RPG they release a new edition with new rules! Ha.
I like the idea of other attributes beyond Agility getting a knock. But yeah, like Teean says above it’s interesting that they can be arranged in an order of importance. I’m surprised the roll doesn’t just ‘know’ what attribute you were rolling a response to and hit you with a -2 on that. Then again, I don’t really know how this new system works - I guess Stress Response doesn’t ‘upgrade’ like the previous Panic system?
We're waiting for the new version of the Beta to see all the details but they've said for the Stress Response table that duplicate results are just ignored. So it's kind of a "Gotta Catch 'Em All" situation. With typical Resolve values of 3 to 4, you'd be getting Mess Up only once you were a few Stress points in, minimum.
This makes balancing stress as a player less of a knife-edge. In current rules there's a sweet spot of around 3 stress (2 if you're more a cautious person like me) in which you actually want to be there for the extra dice, even though there's a risk in doing so. With the initial release of the beta you kind of didn't dare sit there anymore because any stress response was likely to start the snowball effect. Now I think we're back to it being more of a ledge than an edge, where a player is comfortable having a few stress dice about. If anything I'd actually have Mess Up still have the ability to add stress - it's a difficult task to balance this stuff. You don't want it impossible to control but you don't want it to be totally under control. You want stress to be... well, stressful. Personally I would probably ditch "Jumpy" as it's a short term thing quite likely to have minimal effect, bump everything else down a little, put Deflated ahead of the attribute penalties and maybe introduce a new effect that just did a +1 Stress to your PC; as well as making Mess Up be +1 Stress in place of the extra roll.
(quote from Jeff Wilder)
I will point out that the bell curve, per se, wasn't really the problem. In fact, done properly, the bell curve can do both things that seem to be the worthwhile objectives: mitigating the prevalence of Stress/Panic spirals and providing more common, less common, and even rare varied responses.
For example, assuming an average PC Resolve of 4, and Stress of 3, a 3d6 table could put "Keep it together" from <=8 (penis unintentional, but funny), which would produce a response only a little more than 50% of the time*, and would allow 10 other entries of increasing severity. (These numbers would represent my preferences for ALIEN PC competence, but are easily tweaked as long as the math is kept in mind.)
Bell curves really aren't the enemy, I promise.
The issue with the bell curve is that what you want in a table of increasingly bad effects is something linear in one direction. The bell curve leads to rarer events in
both directions. It's okay to have your worst result be rarer than the less bad results. But you don't want your best results to be equally rare because you end up having to calibrate everything around the middle and if you want your starting point to be the mild effects you have nowhere to go below that. The designers are actually correct to introduce the Resolve mechanic or some other form of static deduction if they want a bell curve determination because that means you
can weight the lower outcomes to be more probable than the high outcomes which can be a positive thing in game design. It would work except that in addition to the static deduction, there's an increasing static addition (+ your current stress value) which outweighs the deduction of Resolve over time. Meaning the more stress you get the more the problem of having to calibrate towards the middle comes back into play.
Ultimately the biggest issue with the Stress Response was that it was very rare to not increase stress on it. Even if you were only on one stress the odds were still 11 to 1 against it increasing further. It was the combination of this with the bell curve that caused it to be so explosive. If only the upper effects of the Stress Response table increased stress then whilst 2d6 would still have some issues, they'd be much less.
And Resolve can be increased with the Seen it All talent, like Hardened can increase Health - also we're changing these to +1 (instead of +2) but they can be gained multiple times up to +3.