I just can't find an answer to this one…
Before I get starting, please excuse my terrible english.

Is there a limit of stance pieces that a character may have, or a limit of how deep he may move into a stance?
I'm asking because there are some actions that are effected by the depth of a characters stance, like the holy / magical shields of shallya priests and bright wizards. These actions give a charakter a soak value equal to his depth in the conservative or reckless stance.
The character sheet indicates a full stance meter with 6 conservative and 6 reckless pieces, so I assumed that this would be the limit.

However, today we had an argument about this, since our wizard was 6 steps in reckless stance even though he only had a maximum of 5 characteristic dice he could convert to reckless dice. One of our players remembered that one could only have so many stance pieces as his highest characteristic (i. E., if your highest characteristic is Fellowship 4, you could only have a maximum of 4 reckless stance pieces and 4 conservative pieces), but we could not find a rule like that.

Can anyone help us here?

Argh, sorry, wrong thread. This should have gone to the "Rules Questions" thread.
I already asked a moderator to delete this one.

Your limit of stance is measured by how many pieces you have bought with your advancements. You cannot go beyond your stance pieces.

For example:

New apprentice wizard has: 2 green and 2 red MAXIMUM. He can go a maximum of 2 green dice or 2 red dice.

If he spends 2 advancements for 1 more green and one more red, he can use a maximum of 3 green dice or a maximum of 3 red dice.

You have been playing it beyond the rules limit.

Jay H

USA ~ Where English is optional, even for the English-speaking

Emirikol said:

i would suggest that the 6 spaces on the character sheet be a hard limit.

i don't believe there is anything in the rules to prevent you having a stance depth in excess of your highest characteristic, the player has decided to expand that at the expense of not advancing in some other way. also it takes a lot of rounds to get to 6 deep in a stance or a lot of stress. i think there is nothing mechanically broken with the choices he made to get there

That is correct. There is no limit to stance pieces, but you have to buy them with advances.

Purchasing beyond your characterstic is not optimal however, as you are wasting them.

If you only have an intelligence of 4 and you buy 5 deep in green dice, you "wasted" at least one advance, because you cannot use the extra stance piece.

jh

Unless you have a bunch of cards that have effects based on how deep you are in your stance. If that's the build you're going for there could be value in it.

RARodger said what I was going to say! So I'm in favor of no hard limit, but a sane limit.

New Zombie said:

Yes, that is exactly the case. He's not 1st career anymore and other careers in the path still 'allow' you to buy more reckless pieces.

I think a 6-point-limit makes sense. 6 points of extra soak is a lot already and I can't imagine it to be right to have above 10 points of extra soak or damage.

Given that the cards rely on how deep you are in the stance, not how many pieces you have in con/reck I can't see a reason to limit it, it would take many rounds of combat to get to the point where they would be gaining +10 from their stance pieces, how many combats actually last that long?

Matchstickman said:

Well, I think that depends on the storyteller. In our group, for instance, most fights exceed 10 rounds. And even if fights are shorter, you could always force your character deeper into a stance by gaining stress tokens.

Matchstickman said:

What, your players don't fatigue themselve to move deeper in their stances? Yeah, mine don't either.

i don't think i've seen a combat last more than half a dozen rounds. between criticals, stress, fatigue and wounds there is usually a strong incentive to hit hard an fast, if the enemy aren't overwhelmed then the players are keen to disengage and survive.