"Do your time like everyone else"

In the Angel's rules, you are sometimes offered a choice:

"Spend [some time] blissed out on chillstabs, or do your time like everyone else."

What does it mean to "do your time"? Does that just mean: wait for it to heal naturally?

I think it means: suffer.

And what does that mean?

It means not having painkillers after surgery.

It doesn't do anything fancy mechanically, but it can be a kind of important thing to establish where the Angel falls on the "Let me adjust your IV, Mr. Balls" to "Bite on this here leather strap" continuum.

Mechanics-wise? It means a lot more rolls to act under fire. Or other bad stuff.

Hmmmm. When you MC, do you make people act under fire and similar bad stuff after they've taken 1-harm (or 2-harm)? Under what circumstances?

It means you're in serious pain as your body deals with whatever the Angel just did to keep you from dying/fix you up, presumably. (Sorry, I knew that response was going to be sort of unclear, but it was just too fun to leave it short.)

What that looks like in the fiction is going to depend on the sort of wound, type of treatment, etc. -- and what that looks like should help determine if moves start kicking in.

But also, in some situations it's kind of a specialized example of 'tell them the consequences and ask'. Like if you tell them it's gonna be a week of blissed-out bedrest, and the PC is like 'hell no I got shit to deal with I can't just lie here high as a kite for seven whole days' -- then as the MC you probably want to make sure there are consequences for that decision.

Like if you tell them it's gonna be a week of blissed-out bedrest

This is what i thought Chillstabs would do to you.

Yes, the outcome of "spend a week blissed out on chillstabs" is pretty clear.

I'm curious what you do when players choose the other option. ("Do your time...")

It sounds like you start introducing medical complications if they choose the other option.

So my follow-up question was:

Do you also introduce medical complications (or whatever) if they just take 1-harm in a fight somewhere but do NOT visit the Angel?

I have trouble seeing that in play, so I'm curious to hear how you handle it.

What was the injury?

Most of the time in AW you pretty much suspend disbelief where the health of the PCs is concerned.

You could not do that and have various medical complications play a bigger choice, which is probably a good idea if you have an Angel in play (same as how it's a good idea to scale up threats when there's a Hardholder in play and involve more complicated social arrangements with a Skinner).

That doesn't involve anything anyone already knows about AW, though.

What do you want to get out of this question, Paul?

Most of the time in AW you pretty much suspend disbelief where the health of the PCs is concerned.

Quite right. AW PCs are presumed to have a sort of limited "plot immunity", where they can take (for example) a bullet and just keep on going. It's only if things get really serious that their health and survival is really an issue.

Similarly, the book suggests that you might often (but not always) have a PC "clear a segment of harm" at the start of each session.

Unless each of your sessions spans more than a week of time, why would you ever choose to "spend a week blissed out on chillstabs" (the price for healing one or two segments of harm)?

I'm still waiting to hear how this plays out in your games. No one's really answered that question yet.

Most of the time in AW you pretty much suspend disbelief where the health of the PCs is concerned.

Yeah, this is my practical experience as well, though a lot depends on whether you have an Angel PC and how interested their player is in actual medicine.

But the idea of a wound getting infected, or something like that, seems beyond the usual scope of the game. This is why I said 'suffer', rather than, I dunno, 'waste away' -- I think the consequences are usually framed in terms of pain and suffering (and having to Act Under Fire, yes), rather than more serious medical consequences.

I have never seen medical complications resulting from untreated 1-harm -- though I have certainly seen PCs having to Act Under Fire after taking larger amounts of harm. (Again, it depends a lot on the character.)

I also wonder if the week recuperation is intended for NPCs. Since the MC can opt to let PCs recover 1-harm at the beginning of a session, I wonder if that implies the PCs are not really going to benefit much from that 1-week recovery.

That said, yes, I imagine it is a good opportunity for acting under fire.

In answer to the question "what about when they are at 1-harm or 2-harm and don't have an Angel? Do they act under fire then?" I would observe the following:

If a PC *got* to 9 o'clock (doomed to die without help) and then were surgically treated until they got back to 6 o' clock  (going to get better), that feels different to me than if they just got miscellaneous wounds adding up to 6 o'clock (going to get better).

In that case, acting under fire may mean trying to do things without UNdoing the surgical interventions (stitches, meat mesh, whatever), depending on the narrative.

But I, too, would feel more confident with clarification on hot to adjudicate.

I think the chillstabs are mostly a character beat for the Angel. Do they have their pacients take painkillers after pain, or are the "bite on this" kind?

As for the player suffering the harm being healed, well, it depends on how much you make the pain matter in the game - in default AW, that's not much, but then AW is very customizable.


In a game I ran once, I trust the players would not have minded getting some chillstabs. The city was full of jerks, the characters kept getting in trouble and hurt, and the only local medic-type-guy charged an arm and a leg to basically brutalize them with weird machinery. One of the guys got shotgun shrapnel ripped out of him with an electromagnet, another one failed to make full payment and covered the rest by granting the guy rights to experiment on him, a third one had a kidney cut out during trauma surgery, again as part of payment.

When the default healing process is basically a kind of mutilation, I would think spending a week blissed out on chillstabs becomes far more attractive.