This feels like such an obvious question that I feel it must have been addressed in the rules or on here, but I couldn’t track down a clear answer.
My character in our BitD game has chosen to go to prison and take the rap for our crew’s Arrest Entanglement, as he has the Jailbird ability and is the best placed to do so as the others continue to run the crew. He ended his last score on huge amounts of harm and stress, and I will be playing a different character for the uptime of the next score for the few months while he is imprisoned.
When my character goes to prison, does the Incarceration roll take the place of his usual downtime actions? If so, is it expected that the GM and I negotiate between themselves whether the stress and harm disappear by the time he gets out, or are they assumed to stick around? Or is the intention that he can still take downtime actions that work within what he would be able to achieve in prison (such as healing), and then also has to make the Incarceration roll?
In our game we played that it was between the GM and player to decide how it works. As GM I actually let them work on a long term project as long as it made sense for what they could accomplish in prison.
So decide for yourselves if you want to just wave off all that harm and stress because you spent more than enough time ‘relaxing’ in your cell. Or, maybe your are participating in downtime activities. What makes sense in the fiction? can you accomplish those things in prison?
EDIT:
Yes (beyond the mechanical results), let the Incarceration roll result influence the fiction. You can still do things but it could be traumatic to do so if that was the Roll result.
Thanks for your reply! My GM and I talked about it and decided that we’d still have a downtime for the character but it was limited by what he could do while in prison, and thankfully he didn’t get more trauma from the Incarceration roll (phew!)