Pressures
Pressure is not a penalty the game hands you. It is the price of the advantages you asked for, charged to the faculty that granted them.
Exerting spends the limit behind the skill you are rolling with. It buys a better roll now, and it pushes that limit toward the point where its whole faculty turns harder and can no longer be exerted at all.
[You have exceeded your social limit. While Anxious: Psychological (Social) checks are now harder and you cannot Exert yourself while performing them.]
What exerting buys
An ordinary roll uses two dice. Exerting adds a third die and keeps the best two. Critical success and failure still apply.
A white check can receive a bonus for not exerting, provided its other conditions are met. Exerting removes that bonus. Compare the final chances rather than counting only the extra die.
What it costs
The whole of it runs on 3 dials. 15 skills sit behind them, 5 to a dial, and each dial answers to one faculty.
The spend lands on the limit, not on the skill. Technoflex draws on the same limit as Grey Matter and Records, so a roll you exert on one of them leaves less room for the next.
Each exertion spends the limit associated with that skill. Watch that faculty's pressure when making repeated attempts; the other faculties do not pay for this roll.
What a full dial does
Anxious says it plainly. Past your social limit, checks in that faculty get harder and you cannot exert on them at all. Fatigued and Delirious carry the same lock for their own faculties.
The pressure is working on you before that point. As a limit degrades, the rolls of the skills that draw on it are penalized, and the size of that penalty is not stated either. A limit is a range rather than a line, and the case moves its middle as it goes, so the same build does not have the same room on every night.
Getting the room back
Sleep is the valve. It brings both ends of the range down, and how well you slept decides how much comes back.
The other lever is what you swallow, and it is not a way out. Of the 21 things you can consume that touch a dial, 14 lower one by raising another. The three families run that trade in three different directions.
- Coffee (RUMBA! Canned Coffee, Jefa Red & Black Blend, Camisado Ultra Sweet) buys physical room and spends social.
- Nicotine (Suprema 100s, Sturdy Pony, Ouroboros Black) buys intellectual room and spends physical.
- Alcohol (Perro Pale, Wiśnia Brand Schnapps, Shard Mezcal) buys social room and spends intellectual.
So it closes into a loop. You exert to pass something now, the dial rises, the faculty carrying it turns harder and eventually locks, and every way back down costs either a night or a different dial. Nothing here is a free gain, which is why this guide names the trade rather than a build.