I have been thinking about the problem with arbitary obstacles in Stitch and believe I have the beginnings of a solution.

First of all let us assume a piece of background:

'The timeline ejects the team after 30 mins as that is how long it will tolerate them being there. They are basically like a virus to the timeline and the suits you wear protect you from being detected up until about 25 mins in. The timeline then takes 5 mins to rid itself of you. The suits have a sort of radiation monitor on them to tell the team when they will be ejected.'

Ok so now rather than it being dependent on energy of the ship, the ejection is caused by the innate resistance of the timeline.

So within a knot, the collection of 3 events that a team manipulates, their are two things that make life difficult for the team:

Time: as time progresses stress increases. This is reinforced by the mechanics of testing.

Resistance: as they manipulate the timeline, it gets more resistant and more problems are created for the team to overcome.

So here is what I think should happen mechanically.

In Knot 1 there are x complications going to arise, say 10 or so for now. The team does some research into the events they want to maipulate, which mechanically allows them to say in which events there are going to be problems. There must be at least 1 complication per event.

Now obivoulsy without further rules every team will place most of the complications in the first event and storm through them. So, here comes the, hopefully, clever part. Complications early on in a given knot do not represent the team suppressing the resistance of the timeline that much. Later complications do as this is when the timeline tries to eject them from the knot. That needs better explanation but hopefully you get the idea, I have a graph!

So if you defeat complications later in a knot you get more inconsistency as you are directly oppsing the resistance of the knot. It would be something like

Complication in first 15 mins = 1 inconsistency
Complication 15 - 20 mins = 2 inconsistency
Complication 20 - 25 mins = 3 inconsistency
Complication 25 - 30 mins = 4 inconsistency

This addresses the arbitary problem: the team get to choose approximately where the danger will come and I will skew inconsistency requirements such that they need several complications in the later stages of a knot.

It also makes the GM seem less powerful even though he will get to define the nature of the complications.

A problem I can see is if the GM can't think of as many complications as the players assign. Maybe he can combine 2 'complication points' and make a really difficult one?

Thoughts appreciated as always.

Cheers

Iain