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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 8423793" data-attributes="member: 16814">Because in one the character has a breakdown while in the other the character is awesome beyond normality, but nothing in the scene or fiction provides for either event until after the roll is made -- there's no lead in fiction to either.  These outcomes cannot be framed into the fiction prior to the roll.  This means you have to either frame every single roll in a way that invokes high risk/high stress and then deal with the awesome outcomes that breeze through it (which is maybe a better feeling outcome, if just as odd and disconnected) or you go with neutral framing and deal with the extremes at both ends being jarring.  I don't think the former approach works, in that constant high-tension framing loses something rapidly. Again, I reference the stress mechanic in Blades to show the difference between games that frame the situations and risks in the fiction prior to the roll.  Contrast this with Aliens were you cannot except to keep things at a high ratchet.  However, this will still create problems with exceptional rolls.  The spread on the resolution in Aliens goes from failure with consequence (serious depending on the panic check), to fail forward failure (no successes, no panic), to success (1 success, no panic) to holy sheet batman success (multiple sixes).  None of this can be framed into the situation -- it's all post resolution justification in the fiction.I did not.  I used the instant example of fixing an airlock with high stress, I never extended this to a larger pattern.  Regardless, even if I had, disproving that one example would not blanket disprove the idea that you can have stress feedback loops that happen quite suddenly.I am aware, however it's another roll that doesn't allow for downtime to alleviate stress, and that builds on whatever else is going on.  Pacing wise, there are a lot of rolls pretty quickly in that scenario.  That will average out to okay, but you get some very nasty events possible that aren't too far into the tails of the distribution.Dying on a hill is just an expression.  I'm very comfortable with the game doing what it says on the tin.  It will generate weird cases from time to time even then, but that's okay and tolerable because most of the game generates the intended play well.  It's only if you try campaign play and/or to flex the game into a bit more of a drama that the issues become glaring.As you want.  It might be interesting for you if you consider that I know how the game works and I might have a point, though.  I get where you're coming from, and how it's perfectly fine from that point of view.  I'm not trying to challenge your play.  I'm saying that if you do look at how the game functions purely from the fiction generated, that the Panic system requires that you cannot adequately frame a scene in a way that encompasses all of the fictional outcomes the system can generate, and that requires you to retcon the scene after resolution if you get one of the outliers -- and that said outliers are not all that uncommon.</blockquote>

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