Looking at the new “Stress Response” chart I admit I am missing a lot of the great panic effects from the original version.
The main problem with the old Panic Chart was that it caused characters to lock up and be completely useless. It also lead, with the rules as written, to situations like a really bad roll causing someone to start cursing and having a meltdown or going berserk when they are doing something thats justifiably stressful, which is most highly technical problems. Since the panic is mostly time limited, it just ended up stretching out the interaction time for normal things, and resulted in rules such as yours, where you removed a mechanic from the game to avoid it making the game awkward, or where people rule against panic spirals.
I've always run a game much closer to those Stress Reaction rules. I use the Panic table only in very highly stressful situations - I usually default to what would be a 9+ roll on the new Stress Response table. I also have a much higher bound (6s vs 1s) on whether a panic will occur. I've yet to have a single panic spiral, and after doing a bit of maths, the way this Stress Reaction system works out is pretty similar. I've had everything from people boofing grenades into themselves, to screaming at the top of their voices in the presence of a Xenomorph, to crashing a space craft because they got distracted.
Essentially, the maths on it works out like this:
- your Resolve is the average of your Empathy + your Wit / 2 rounded up. That's going to average out in the range 3-5. In the context of the game, that's the amount of stress you can have, and not have it negatively effect you
- your stress is then a flat modifier on top of that. Your stress plus your resolve gives you the base reaction you can expect even if you didn't roll at all
On a 2d6 roll, over half of your outcomes are bounded between 5 and 8. A 2d6's lower bound is 2 as a minimum roll (1+1).
Therefore, you can say the following things about a guy with low Resolve, here set at 3. We'll call this guy Hudson:
- the minimum stress reaction Hudson can have is 0 (2 + 1 stress - 3 resolve). His chance of not having a stress reaction at all is about 15%
- assuming your 2d6s roll out correctly, Hudson will screw up an average of 7% of his rolls at 1 stress (9 - 1 + 3 means you need to roll 11+ to panic)
- Hudson will screw up every single time once the combination of his Stress + Resolve reaches 7, which for him, happens at 10 stress
- the point at which more, rather than less dice rolls cause Hudson to screw up is reached at 5 stress since 5 - 3 = 2 which means any rolled 7 (the median roll for a 2d6) will cause him to flip out and fail
It's designed to smooth out the curve for panicking in the rules as written. You can add in the Panic table as a second roll for 9+ if you like the flavour, unless they have added additional panic rules. However, I will be replacing my own system with this one immediately as of next weeks session because it's a much cleaner approach to the problem than what I had written myself. It does involve more rolling, admittedly, but I like how it looks.