The changes to Time Stands Still's mechanics had already given people the ability to break out of the Stopped Time, either by passing an opposed check, or having their own cool super-duper techniques. Anyone sufficiently badass could potentially resist or counter TSS, as our cousin did during our spar in Skane, or Jogrim just now for that matter, so I'm not sure functionally what has changed. With Iron Embrace we lose some of the utility applications, like using TSS as a way to move at effectively infinite speed across short distances, but that was not really the complaint here? Fundamentally Iron Embrace will still let us immobilise people and kill them, but not if they pass some threshold of strength/narrative weight - just like Time Stands Still did. Nothing has changed.
Indeed Iron Embrace reframes the whole technique being explicitly focussed around imprisoning people so we can shank them, rather than Halla being so cool and powerful she can temporarily escape the bonds of time. It's a less thematically and visually cool way of doing an identical thing, which retains identical problems (if you can consider them to be problems) in terms of gameplay. Personally I didn't think Time Stands Still was that problematic because it was pretty clear Halla was in the big leagues now anyway, and it's not dissimilar to the bullshit other heavy hitters can throw around.
But if you did consider it a problem that TSS was very convenient trivialising certain fights against mostly weaker opponents... Iron Embrace still has that problem, and thematically centres it to a far greater degree than TSS did. Which is part of why I find this kind of odd; I don't understand the problem it was attempting to solve.
Last edited:
