I'm having just a smidgeon of trouble in dealing with this. I feel a little restrained in how I can actually punish the players in story mode. I feel that stress is probably the best mechanic for this, but I have a certain amount of difficulty stopping them from just saying "ok, I stop and have a scone or something" which would realistically give them the breather they need to regain lost stress. So, really, I'm worried about stress, fatigue and changeovers between story and encounter mode that might interject or cause difficulty in maintaining set numbers of same.

P.S. The writer of this helpful note has plenty of tokens, dice and fiddly bits, but does not need an extra sheet to try and hide behind his GM screen, I am more than likely inclined to use the peice of information that is short, simple and easiest to remember/apply. Just think of me as a slightly claustrophobic goldfish.

I have made them 'critical' stress/fatigue. 1-2 points is plenty. It just means they carry over that day to their next encounter. Just house rule it this simply and be done with it. If a player wants to spend a fortune point to 'cure himself' in story mode, I don't think I'd be too upset.

I'm actually taking delay's from the green dice and having the character convert them to fatigue or stress (player's choice).

For example (regarding Delays in story mode): We played "Worse than Disease." The Commoner-Charlatan was imitating a guard out front and was distracting the house guards with a long-winded story. I let him use up to two green dice. Well, he rolled a couple delays. At the time, I just said that he took extra long. Meanwhile the Ranald priest was recklessly sneaking in the upstairs window and rolled emo tears. Well, I figured it was unfair to 'punish' one and not the other so in the future, I'm converting unless I can find a better effect.

Crazy Aido said:

I would treat stress and fatigue in the same 'zoomed out' way that the rest of the story mode runs. So, if one 'gossip' test represents an afternoon's mingling and chatting, then a stress token represents many difficult conversations during the same amount of time. A 'rally phase' at which the player can recover stress is going to have to be correspondingly more significant too. A rally phase in the middle of a fight might be a few seconds hiding around the corner to catch your breath. A rally phase in story mode is a day spent chilling out by the river - and not making further progress in your investigation.

When the game reverts to encounter mode, the stress and fatigue tokens convert to 'normal' tokens too.