Mothership 1E. Stress Rework - Stress as a Critical Chance
If you find Motherships's 1 E stress system to be "not interesting enough", let me show you version of stress I'm planning to use in my future campaign.
The Reworked Stress works as follows:
No maximum stress cap of 20. You keep gaining stress past 20;
Changed Critical rolls conditions: a) All doubles (11, 33, 55,....99) are Critical Successes; b) Rolling equal or bellow your current stress is Critical Failure. It overrides Critical Success (00 is always Critical Failure);
Players can increase their current stress by 1 and re-roll a result of Stat of Save check. It can be repeated multiple times. If at any point a Player rolls Critical Failure, it cannot be re-rolled;
The goal of New Stress System is to make stress more impactful during games as a semi-permanent debilitation and a useful resource risk-reward at the same time. Brand new character has 3% chance of Critical Failure (00, 01, 02) and 9% Chance of Critical Success (11, 22, 33, 44, 55, 66, 77, 88, 99). It is when characters are the strongest: they have high crit. success chance and a lot of potential re-rolls to bruteforce their way into desirable outcome.
However, as stress goes up, it slowly devours your regular success chance (very noticeable for Saves - they are rather low without class bonuses). Ever increasing critical failure chance means you will panic a lot more often, and be worse at doing your job when you are at breaking point Making rerolls is no longer a safe, but risky option: would you risk it all for a chance to turn a situation back in your favor?
The Rework is inspired by Alien RPG with it's own version Stress. I wanted to make Stress to take more important role during games and show clear difference between those who keep their calm and those who no longer can handle a situation.