Complications, Stress, and Trauma

I'll discourse a little more about stress/trauma vs. complications.

The simplest way to do it is "complications only". If you get in a conflict, you roll your dice, I roll mine, and the higher total gets what they want. Or the other party can say "no, I want to stay in," pay a Plot Point, and take a Complication. Then you go again, with the difficulty only ratcheting up. This guarantees probably the shortest time to resolve a conflict.

The Complication you take is contextual, and generally the GM is expected to signal the stakes, so you will know what happens if you give in.

Getting rid of the Complication is also contextual; but generally speaking, either it just goes away because things are different now (you rest up and your D6 Twisted Ankle is gone; you leave town and are no longer D8 Embarrassed; you get water and aren't D12 Dying of Thirst), or you run fixing the Complication as another sort of contest.

Stress is a way to theme what your problems are going to be, as the name and fictional positioning doesn't vary. Afraid D6 could have various causes but it is what it is. If you only use Stress, at one past D12, you are taken out. You might be dead. I personally am inclined to leave that up to you.

Trauma, when you use it, gets added any time you get taken out from stress--so you get that hit that takes you past D12, and you pick up a D6 Trauma. Until you take care of the stress, and further hits go straight to the Trauma (how are you still active after being Stressed Out? You can spend a PP to stay in; but you only keep one die for figuring your total). Trauma past D12 is pretty definitively a PC that is gone for good.

So stress and trauma sound grittier, but in fact, they put a lot of plot armour between "in trouble" and "dead." So if we use Stress & Trauma, the main Gritty Dial is just what you decide those stresses in fact are.

Also the "width" matters here. As one wag on the Cortex Discord put it:

you've been trapped in the wilderness for 2 days
d6 Starving
d8 Thirsty
d10 Desperate
d12 Freezing
sucks to be you

Presumably this is some kind of game about outdoorsy risks, if it's using Stress. You can end up with the same thing with regular Complications without Stress or Trauma, so there's two distinct ways to be a walking baggage claim. Brad's Soft Horizon games are a bit like this. Players decide if a PC is dead, but if you have enough Wounds and Debt (which are really nasty, as they reduce whole categories of skills), you may decide you want to retire that PC so you can get back in the action with a fresh one (and thankfully they're quite quick to create).