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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Justice and Rule" data-source="post: 8423586" data-attributes="member: 6778210">Oh no no no, I see where the disconnect between us lies now.You see the panic attack as being related to the door, that the running away has to have some direct relation to the what's being done. I get it now: you see the framing as the task. Thanks, this clears a lot of things up! Sometimes I'm dumb and just miss what people are saying. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />I see the framing as the stress. The stress itself is what dictates the action, since you rolled a 1. It's not like with a Xenomorph, where you might have to roll a panic test automatically because the situation is naturally frightening. What is happening is specifically because of the stressed-out state you are in.That person is not panicking because the door is frightening. That person is panicking because their entire mind is starting to fall apart under the unreleased tension and anxiety they are carrying. They are cracking from the fear and emotion they've been holding back since this whole affair started minutes or hours ago. Now they are trying to do something simple, and do you think their mind is truly on that task? No, it's putting together how close they were to death, how close they currently are to death, how hopeless this all is, how none of these damn wires are twisting the way they want to and how everything is going wrong... and suddenly, they just can't be there anymore. They need to be somewhere else. Somewhere small, closed in, safe, like a closet, a locked bathroom, underneath a desk. Stress is not something that kindly waits for a big monster to suddenly appear and trigger it; stress is a reason unto itself to break down.Trust me, I know from experience. I've been close to having a panic attack for much less than whatever goes on in the average ALIEN RPG game. I've seen a friend break down while trying to make dinner because of everything going on around them. And let me say, at 7-8 Stress dice, no task is routine anymore. The person from your example has a just-under 13% chance of going berserk on a random nearby person. That person is one stress die away from having a just-over 13% of falling comatose trying to do something. That person is not just having a bad day, that person is having the worst, worster, and worstest days of their life simultaneously.So to me, that's completely coherent. I totally get someone having a breakdown doing a mundane thing if they haven't been able to properly destress. If you're holding onto an insane 8 Stress dice, that person should be a danger to everyone around them until they are able to find a way to release some of that (and preferably not on someone else's face). Now if you don't find that heroic, I can totally get that. To me, it feels very gritty and real, which syncs with what I want from ALIEN.</blockquote>

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