Raising Stress-based skills

[Grunthex]

Anyone have any tips on the best way to go about this? It seems so counter productive. The only way to raise stress is to fail obstacles usually, which costs me permanent stat bonuses. And while I could let stress build up from certain automatic events, it seems I usually want to stab it back down as fast as possible to keep adventuring. So my stress-skill-training is always 1 point at a time which is uh... bad?

[sjunaid]

Erm...which skills are stress based?

[swang]

I tend to keep my stress around 10-20 most of the time. as opposed to 0. Another thing I tend to do is adventure only at the beginning or end of a period. For example, after I get back from India, I would immediately knock off an adventure (Bigglesworth) which pushed me to 30 stress, trained any stress skills I wanted (and others as well, of course), drop it down, and then finished adventuring (both Anna adventure and the football adventure) before going off on the next trip.

 

I typically only train skills when the combined gain is 7+ (4 and 3, or 5 and 2) Although, given how high my attributes are, I'm going to move it to 9+ pretty soon.

[Mikka]

I do adventures at the very beginning of a phrase. So I'd do the Bigglesworth adventure, the Anna adventure, and the Football adventure in a row, and take the automatic stress gain from them combined and use that to train up my stress skills. Occasionally an event will pop up at random, but I like to always be carrying one of those +60 cards you get for finishing an adventure around with me, so I usually don't have a problem.

 

I then rest the day before we leave for a trip- you usually get a one week warning, and sometimes a one day warning.

[sjunaid]

Oh...sorry. Thought you were talking about academagia...yup. Sorry just checked the specific thread path. Haven't got scheherazade yet. I'll butt out now.

[Grunthex]

Junaid: You can click the purple Stress cup in the skills menu to see, but the stress skills are: Awareness, Fisticuffs, Dodge, Moxie and Escape Artistry. Many of which come in real handy for Sadie. Escape Artistry especially in my experience. She just has this habit of getting into those places...

 

Everyone else: Thanks for the ideas. I'll probably try floating some stress later on, but in the early game, adding 10+ to an obstacle with a base difficulty of 8-12... well it makes it tough. Assuming the difficulty scales quite a bit later, adding 10 to a 20 or 30 might seem a lot more reasonable.