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?

I don't know where that rule is but I do know that Stance converts characteristic dice that you have, it doesn't create new dice…

So if you have an Int of 2 and a Stance of 4 reckless, you still only get two red dice for your efforts.

It is thus useless to buy more stance pieces than your strongest characteristic.

And since characteristics max out at 6…

Jericho said:

It might be useless if you're just going for the dice, yes. But if you use action cards that get stronger the more reckless you are, then it is not.

For instance, one of the Bright Order spells gives the character a bonus soakvalue that equals the steps you went into reckless.

Therefore, with 20 reckless-pieces, you could theoretically gain 20 points of extra soak value.

Good point !

The limitation will then come from careers, that usually permit to buy one or two slots only. So you would need to go through many careers to reach 20 reckless…

Seems that a house rule is in order in my game then

jh

In my opinion, If the action card mentions "stance meter" then it is the meter, not the stance the PC is in. In the action card mentions "stance" or "current stance" then it is the stance the PC is currently in.

In the first case, the limit is therefore the meter, while in the second case, the limit is whatever is the acting characteristic.

I would also be comfortable with a PC buying more stances than he/she has characteristic dices, just for use with his spells/blessings. After all, if a PC decides to study and purchase the advances necessary to have a very powerful magic shield, then great, he/she has a very powerful magic shield. He/she had to pay for it and had to trade off not buying other actions, talents, characteristics etc… I am sure that PC has a weak spot somewhere, same as the Ironbreaker.

Cheers

Ceodryn

I would expect a wizard rolling 4+ reckless dice for every channel and spell action to accumulate fatigue very quickly unless they are very lucky with their rolls. You'll average 1 fatigue every time you roll with 5. That'll rapidly push them into distress and then unconciousness even if the enemies cannot get past their elevated soak levels. If you're giving them stress for rolling banes then they put themselves at increased risk of insanity too.