Momentum and Threat

MOMENTUM
Whenever you make a task roll, you have the opportunity to gain a currency known as momentum. This is gained whenever you roll exceptionally well. It represents your mission or unit's drive, morale and cohesion. By your success you either inspire others to greatness, encourage them to think positively about the mission's odds or simply bring everyone closer as a team who just gets along and works well.

Any successes above the difficulty of a task roll generates a point of momentum which you either spend right away to achieve more out of what you were attempting or store in a communal pool for later use by yourself or any member of the team. You cannot have more than 6 points of momentum in the pool at one time.

Immediate: An immediate momentum spend means it can be done before a roll. Immediate momentum costs can alternatively be paid by increasing threat at the same rate.
Repeatable: Means you can only do it once per task attempted.

How to use Momentum:
1. Create or remove an extra Trait, Advantage or Complication after a roll (Not Immediate, Not repeatable).
After a successful roll, you may spend TWO momentum from the pool or ones generated by your own roll to create or remove an extra advantage or complication in addition to whatever effect was already gained from your roll. This isn't magic, however, you can't magically repair the teleporters because you managed to make a rising speech. But you can manage to remove the complication "damaged EPS conduit" at the same time as you successfully removed the "Teleporters are offline" complication by rerouting power to a different relay.

2. Create Opportunity (Immediate, Repeatable)
Before a roll, you may purchase extra D20s to help you at the cumulative cost of 1 momentum. Meaning the first dice costs one, while the second cost two for a combined total of 3. Purchasing a 3rd die would cost three momentum for a total of 6 points. Since the maximum amount of point in the pool is six, no more than 3 dice can be purchased this way. Remember you can always chose to raise threat instead of spending momentum on a one for one basis, however, the limit of purchasing 3 dice maximum still applies.

3. Create Problem (Immediate, Repeatable)
You can also spend immediate momentum before an opponent rolls to increase the difficulty of their roll. The ratio is two momentum for one extra difficulty. Once more, this isn't magic, it must make narrative sense. You can easily explain raising the targeting difficulty of an enemy ship if your helm is currently doing evasive maneuvers, but not if you've ejected the warp core and barely have functioning Life Support. As an immediate spend, you can also offset the cost by rising threat.

4. Obtain Information (NOT immediate, Repeatable)
After a successful roll attempting to obtain information, you may momentum to gain more information at the rate of one question per point of momentum. Both the question and the answers must make sense in the context of the roll. The storyteller will not tell you who is secretly from the Mirror Universe just because you are running a level one diagnostic scan on a replicator.

5. Avoid Injury:
Pay 2 momentum, increase threat by 2 or suffer a complication to avoid gaining an injury. This can only be done once per scene unless you refresh this ability by successfully using the action "recover" (see your combat action chart).

THREAT
The NPC and adversary equivalent of MOMENTUM is threat. The storyteller gains threat in several ways:

- Immediate Momentum spend Offset: Players chose to offset the momentum cost of immediate spends by increasing threat (1 threat per momentum offset).
- Avoid Complications: Players request a complication resulting from a task dice roll does not take effect (2 Threat).
- Threatening Circumstances: Whenever the situation takes a turn for the worse (who activated self-destruct?) or particularly dangerous foes make their enthrance (Who invited the BORG!) (1 or 2 Threat)
- Rising the stakes: Whenever players decide to use deadly force (1 or 2 Threat)
- NPC Momentum gains: Adversarial NPCs gain momentum too, whatever they don't use as part of their rolls gets converted to the threat pool.

Uses of Threat:
- NPC Momentum spends: Used in the same ways as momentum but for enemy NPCs.
- Threat spends: Anytime an NPC makes an action that would add to threat if it had been done by a player, reduce threat instead. For example, if NPCs decide to avoid a complication from taking place.
- Reinforcements: Surprise reinforcement! A minor NPC cost 1, major NPC cost 2 and starships cost threat equal to their scale.
- Environmental Effects: The storyteller may spend threat to trigger or cause problems by the environment.

NOTE: There are more uses to momentum which are combat specific. Refer to your charts.