There's one little bit you may be overlooking: The time frame required. You can only spend 1 hour on curing stress a day. That heals 1d6 (or 3) stress. Any trauma will take 8 hours. Any disorders take 40. Especially for trauma or disorders these require a LOT of downtime since that may be only 8 or 40 hours of actually working on getting better, but that's spread over 8 or 40 DAYS. In this way, mental trauma is actually significantly harder to fix than physical wounds. Add on to that if they receive ANY stress while healing a trauma or disorder, they start over from the beginning with all that work WASTED. Which essentially means they need that much time without any Firewall work because... If you run the rules as written and the character isn't a totally hardened badass that's wholly detached from reality, stress can add up pretty fast. Just entering combat adds a fair amount of stress to someone not hardened to violence (1d6-1 for fighting, 1d6+1 for killing, increased to 1d6 and 1d10 if it wasn't in self-defense. Think less RPG protagonists murdering their way across the countryside and more veterans at risk of PTSD after their experiences). Even for someone hardened to everything humanly possible the unknown still adds a fair amount. Exurgent infected humans add a fair amount (1d6), full exsurgents even more(1d10, 1 on success), every witness of async sleights (1d6-2) and even more for psi-epsilon (1d10, 1d10/2 even on success)... and at the base 15 WIL it takes a mere 6 stress at once to get a trauma, and 30 cumulative to get a disorder. ((Edit: You said leaked, so I went forward assuming you meant using the 2nd edition ruleset))

GenehackedGynoid wrote:

Yeah, as Urthdigger says, the amount of time involved in reducing stress - and the likelihood that an already stressed character is going to experience more stress before getting help - is the real reason why stress damage is so dangerous in EP. Heck, I even missed the part in RAW where only one hour could be spent per day on psychotherapy, and the party in the game I'm running have had at least a few near misses each with going insane anyway. If things don't stop happening that require the party's attention, there just isn't that much time to squeeze in therapy - and if the stress just keeps rolling in, then there's basically no way to heal some of the more serious stuff.

To be fair, a lot of the stuff I mentioned are for 2nd edition, hence why you likely didn't notice them in the core rules before. Fairly certain the 1 hour per day is a new change, as is the stress damage for just going into combat without being hardened to violence.

Urthdigger wrote:

To be fair, a lot of the stuff I mentioned are for 2nd edition, hence why you likely didn't notice them in the core rules before. Fairly certain the 1 hour per day is a new change, as is the stress damage for just going into combat without being hardened to violence.

That'd be it, yeah. I hadn't noticed since I'm running a 1E campaign and haven't paid nearly enough attention to 2E yet. (I should rectify that.)

Trappedinwikipedia wrote:

[...] being in a firefight is almost inarguably "extreme violence" so most combats should be forcing stress checks for non-hardened/predator uplift individuals anyway.

Yeah, that's a recurring problem for my party too.