Stress trauma and forking.
There are clear rules for the stress caused by forking and merging but the rules are less clear about what hapos to stress form another cause taken while merging.
For example an ego creates an alpha fork which goes of an witnesses a gory sight, roles badly and takes 5sv and a trauma, it returns, the merging test creates no stress.
What if the fork and primary ego both witness the same gory sight and both take stress.
What if they separate one sees an exurgent and the other witnesses the gory scene.
What if the ego had some stress before creating the fork.
My initial idea was that after merging you would have the stress from before split + stress acquired by each ego (especially if it was acquired in different incidents) but this is likely to cause problems when 2 only slightly unhinged forks are merged perfectly the combined ego is catatonic. How have others delt with this
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Stress trauma and forking.
Tue, 2013-09-10 00:05
#1
thezombiekat
Stress trauma and forking.
Tue, 2013-09-10 16:21
#2
Justin Alexander
The rules do seem curiously
The rules do seem curiously vague on this point, but I think your instinct is right in simply adding the stress together: The fact that two sets of fractured memories adds up to a broken person doesn't actually sound like a problem to me. (The rulebook also says the only quick cure for stress damage is to revert to a backup that doesn't possess those memories; not merging with a fork that doesn't possess those memories in order to mitigate them.)
Looking at more complex house rules:
Halving or eliminating stress from a single source experienced by both forks sounds like it might be appropriate in some situations. But they are separate experiences and they may have dealt their damage to your psyche in different ways. Plus, seeing the exsurgent maul your friend twice from different angles (something that you were already having nightmares about) isn't necessarily going to help your mental health.
Another option would be to apply stress accumulated independently by the forks as a penalty to the Merging test: Resulting memory loss from a failed test would obviously focus heavily on the incidents which produced the stress. (During the merging process, the ego has simply rejected traumatic experiences.)
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The Alexandrian