Players with threshold successes can spend them on Stunts to improve their character’s position or further their goal. Stunts are narrative permission slips — they give you the chance to alter the scene in your favor or do something that you otherwise couldn’t have done. When a player rolls several extra successes scampering over a barbed-wire fence, a good Stunt would be to carefully snip the wire on the way over, so the other characters using raw muscle to climb won’t be injured.
A Stunt must:
- Link back to the success of the character’s action;
- Affect a different Skill or Attribute combination than the player used; and
- Be narrated out by the player as to how they change the scene.
Stunts are also deeply involved in the three areas of action, particularly in action-adventure, and these Stunts have a particular success cost associated with them. There are three basic types of Stunt:
- A complicated Stunt allows you to make a Complication for another character, making their life more exciting. How many successes you spend on the Stunt determines the level of the Complication.
- An enhanced Stunt creates an Enhancement that you can use for another action, whether that’s your character’s next action (using a different Skill) or to aid another character. Again, the number of successes you spend on the Stunt indicates how many successes the Enhancement gives you. It’s like giving yourself or someone else some successes for later.
- Finally, a difficult Stunt makes it harder for others to accomplish actions directed at you. The successes you devote to this Stunt add to the Difficulty for characters to take actions against you.