Heart-Exploding Spell and the Stress Track

[Tedronai]

Is it just me, or is 'Victor Sells' Heart-Exploding Spell' (YS301) estimate of the shifts necessary to fill a stress track significantly more than would be indicated by the stress rules on YS202?
'Heart-Exploding Spell': "...plus 10 shifts to fill up a
strong physical stress track (4+3+2+1)..."
YS202: "When your character takes stress, mark off
that box (and only that box) on the appropriate
stress track."  (bolding added, italics original)

Which, at that point, would be the TENTH stress box, not the fourth, third, second, and first, combined.  And since the target, assumedly, does not have ten stress boxes, they're going to be good and taken out.  By a rather significant margin.

[Chris_Fougere]

My books description of the Heart Exploding Spell doesn't list 10 Shifts to fill up a Stress bar, but 5 Shifts to fill the box beyond a 4 Stress bar (YS 301).

20 for the Consequences
9 to overcome a Superb Endurance + 4 roll
2 for extra mild Consequence
5 to land beyond the 4th box on the Stress bar

Total of 36

[Mij]

When marking off stress boxes, you mark off the maximum.  IF the maximum is greater than your current stress track (i.e. you take a 5 stress hit and you only have 4 stress boxes) then you're taken out unless you can reduce the stress total to something you can take.

So the philosophy of the spell is to cause so much stress in a single blow that the target can't -- through any combination of regular stress track, consequences, and possibly items -- reduce the stress so that it fits into his/her normal stress track.  If I remember correctly, the example assumes the target has a 4-box stress track.  So the spell has to do enough damage that the player can't reduce it to 4 or lower.

Does that help?

[Tsunami]

Is it just me, or is 'Victor Sells' Heart-Exploding Spell' (YS301) estimate of the shifts necessary to fill a stress track significantly more than would be indicated by the stress rules on YS202?
'Heart-Exploding Spell': "...plus 10 shifts to fill up a
strong physical stress track (4+3+2+1)..."
YS202: "When your character takes stress, mark off
that box (and only that box) on the appropriate
stress track."  (bolding added, italics original)

Which, at that point, would be the TENTH stress box, not the fourth, third, second, and first, combined.  And since the target, assumedly, does not have ten stress boxes, they're going to be good and taken out.  By a rather significant margin.

It seems you are still using the Early Bird PDF. In the Final PDF and in the Print Version, the Spell is reworked to fit the current rules.

[Tedronai]

*sigh*
That'd be why, then...
Why do I keep opening the wrong file?

[Leatherneck]

*sigh*
That'd be why, then...
Why do I keep opening the wrong file?

Yea, me too.  That is why I not only moved them to their own directory, I zipped them named the zip file, 'Pre-Release DFRPG Books'.  Now all that is messing me up is my sometime poor reading comprehension of the released books.