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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kenada" data-source="post: 8382602" data-attributes="member: 70468">I think we’re looking at the costs differently. The way I parse it, the stress cost is based on the opportunity in the flashback.If I were earlier able to skulk a weapon into the room that lets me take the guy out (to use an example from the book), why wouldn’t that cost 1 stress? I wasn’t in a desperate position when I set that up, but I am now, and if my shot misses, I expect I’ll take a bunch of harm.I was guessing at possible options based on your innuendo since I didn’t know the parameters of what kind of “charm” and “luck” they were in for. However, you’re also right. I had a bit on that in my post, but I took it out. The gist of it was I intentionally leave the fiction malleable to make sure I have tools I can use during the score. We had a session where we didn’t do that, and reflecting back on it, I think that’s why we didn’t use any flashbacks (so we had to solve the problem with detonators …).That session was our stairs scenario. When one of our guys opened his mind to the Way, he took a Devil’s Bargain, and I suggested that someone noticed. The GM put a clock down that the Nightspeakers were coming. The clock ticked over, and I threw a detonator at the Nightspeaker that showed up. We were badly outclassed, but we rolled really well. I don’t recall our position, but he said it would have been bad if we hadn’t gotten lucky.What we had done in the prior session is go talk to a bunch of people about the place we would be going. This locked down lore and knowledge about it as well as our limitations. Because most of our infiltration involved overcoming obstacles as we pushed further, it wouldn’t make sense for us to have put stuff there ahead of time for when we encountered a problem. This was problematic later when we encountered an old computer we didn’t know how to use, but since we established what we did during our research, we couldn’t flashback to get the requisite knowledge.I see. You’re using “went off plan” to mean that you’ve established in the fiction that no other planning was done. Does that exclude “I lied. I actually did do something and didn’t tell you.”?Not necessarily. My character was conceptualized as a cross between Captain Sternn and Zapp Brannigan (unethical and lascivious). It wouldn’t be out of character for him to get the code ahead of time and use the mission (which was during a party) to screw around (rather literally).Our GM really likes the Mr Johnson format. Most of our scores have had us stealing something or delivering something for someone. Some have gone down loudly while others have gone more quietly. Only one of them had a hard requirement that we couldn’t be discovered at all. That one was a lot of fun (don’t ever trust Totally Legit Inspectors Inc). We’re on hiatus currently, but I’ve been trying to push back against the format because I find that constraining.We had no where near enough clocks. The GM said he doesn’t like faction clocks because he thinks they’d be completing them all the time and make the game chaotic. However, that seems like “superstructure” stuff, which wasn’t being contended as constraint-free.[USER=16814]@Ovinomancer[/USER] I think you’ve convinced me that it is possible to create constraints if you do things that eliminate the option of using flashbacks. However, it doesn’t seem like that’s the only way to play. I’m not sure whether one way or the other is better, though I obviously lean towards the latter.</blockquote>

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