The time really flew by, but the winner of the third deep dive poll is Stress & Panic! Remember to vote in the poll for the final deep dive at the bottom of this post, and if you’re getting this in your emails and haven’t pledged yet, come on over!

And now, Panic! In the TTRPG. For the Mothership players out there, a lot of this will be familiar, so bear with me while I explain it to the new folks, and stick around to spot the differences.

Much like sanity in Call of Cthulhu or humanity in Cyberpunk RED, the Panic Engine uses something called Stress. Rather than counting down from some sort of “normal” mental state, Stress counts up. Stress builds. Personally, I love this because it feels more accurate to real life. During my most stressful times, it definitely felt more like something building up and getting ready to burst, rather than some part of me reducing away from some hypothetical “normal”. But I digress.

Panic Engine PCs gain a point of Stress whenever something really bad happens to them, usually as a result of a failed die roll or encountering something traumatic out in the world. In Bite the Hand specifically, PCs gain 1 Stress each time they critically fail any roll, any time they fail a Mind save (which if you’ve played Mothership is basically Fear and Sanity rolled into one), and as the result of a few specific effects. If folks feel like that’s not stressful enough, then the rulebook does offer a house rule to give it out more often.

So that’s how you gain Stress, but what does it actually do? It’s just sitting there, piling up, looming but not doing anything. What could possibly go wrong if I walk around with 17 Stress? Am I still talking about games?

Stress results in actual harm to your PC in two main ways:

What’s Panic? Panic happens any time your character rolls a critical failure on a check, and occasionally in other extremely upsetting situations at a GM’s discretion. When this happens, you roll a d20, and then consult the Panic table to find out what your character’s fracturing mental state has resulted in. If the number on your d20 is higher than your current Stress, then the effect doesn’t happen. Thus, keeping your character’s stress low is a good way to avoid the worst possible effects of Panic, which can get you killed. 

This part works pretty much the same as in Mothership, but Bite the Hand comes with a new table of effects with more cyberpunk flavor! I’ll let you preview the first 10 here, and we’ll save the worst ones for release. (The beta has somewhat similar effects, if you want to get a rough idea.)

Of course, you can totally just get rid of most of your Stress by resting a few times, so it’s not really a big deal right? There’s no way I’m gonna build up 10 or 20 Stress just from rare crit fails between two rests right? Well, not exactly.

As was mentioned in the first deep dive, each new cybernetic you install adds to your character’s minimum Stress. Since cybernetics are mandatory, there’s an absolute floor of 2 minimum Stress, and that number is only going to go up as your characters face tougher challenges and purchase upgrades to face them. A few new robot body parts later, and you’re walking around with like 8 minimum Stress, now four times as likely to Panic.

If you’re a Mothership player and just want the TL;DR of how it’s different, here’s that:

And I think that about sums it all up! As always, hit me with questions in the comments, and vote in the attached poll for the final topic! We’re just under two weeks out from the end of the campaign, so bother your friends to come help us if you haven’t already, and have a good day.