Resilient: Pulp Talent Question

[ragr]

I may be missing something obvious here but;

On Page 25 of Pulp Cthulhu it lists Resilient as; may spend Luck points to shrug off points of Sanity loss on a 1 for 1 basis.

Under Luck spends on page 61 the example for Halving Sanity Loss states:

Dirk sees an awful monster and fails his Sanity roll. The Keeper rolls and gets the maximum Sanity loss of 20 points. Dirk’s player decides that now is not a good time for Dirk to lose it, and so states he is spending 40 Luck to halve the Sanity loss to 10 points. Dirk also has the Resilient Talent; his player decides to spend 5 further Luck to reduce the Sanity loss by 5. Dirk is now losing only 5 Sanity points but has spent 45 Luck points in doing so. (Note that this is the wording form the errata update.)

My question is: Why doesn't Dirk just spend 20 points of Luck from having Resilient rather than spending 40 on halving the loss and then another 5?

[tendentious]

Exactly!

I think they just used the one example to demonstrate how the two different ways of ameliorating SAN loss work: double LUCK to halve SAN, and Resilient's one-for-one LUCK for SAN.

It doesn't make any sense to do it that way, but you certainly could.

It might have raised fewer questions if they had mentioned Dirk's friend, Kirk, who also happened to lose 20 SAN, but lacked the Resilient trait and had to spend the 40 LUCK to halve the SAN loss. Unlike Dirk, who spent (let's say) 15 LUCK to cut the SAN loss to 5.

Why doesn't Dirk spend 16 LUCK to avoid the Bout of Madness? Maybe he only has 15 LUCK left. Or maybe he wants he boost to his Cthulhu Mythos skill.

Edited November 1, 2020 by tendentious

[ragr]

A part of me wonders whether there was an intention to slap a pre-condition or a restriction on Resilient and that assumption made it through to the example but was missed from the talent description. Resilient seems a little strong when compared to a lot of the other Talents, which is what piqued my interest; not to mention the fact that one of my player's investigators has selected it for MoN. 

[redfive]

Going through something similar now. It seems to me like they atleast had different versions of Resilient when testing (maybe closer to the NPC version?).

Have you run it in your games? Does it seem OP? As written it looks too overpowered to me (or at least eliminates sanity in a way that I don't think I necessarily like). So I'm considering limiting it to only being able to do 5 points in the duration of time that you track for temp insanity

[ragr]

It's only come up in a minor way so far in the Masks campaign I'm running. As we go forward I think it will become more prominent and may, as you allude to, make that particular investigator all but immunised against the effects of Sanity loss; the player wants to take some time out in the journey to Egypt to learn one of the spells picked up in London so the Talent will have obvious benefits when wielding magic. There may be some balancing factors that are more outside of the purview of mechanics so it'll be interesting to see if and how those develop; I'm not going to restrict the Talent now as it was chosen in good faith by the player and there is still the threat of death rather than insanity and it's possible that a perceived immunity to the latter may precipitate exposure to the former.

If you asked me outright though I would say that I do think it's OP.