A Crusader Kings 3 player raised such a greedy character that a request to lend five coins could give him a heart attack

In Crusader Kings 3 you can die from poisoned wine, a dagger in the back, or a lost war, but sometimes the deadliest weapon turns out to be a request to borrow a couple of coins. Stack the right – or rather murderously wrong – combination of character traits, and a mundane everyday situation turns into a death sentence.

This happened to a fourteen-year-old ruler from House Renard, a nod to the medieval Reynard the Fox from Old French satirical poems. The character was asked to lend a woman named Ida five gold coins, and the game duly warned about the consequences of such generosity: a relationship reset and 416 points of stress at once. For comparison, the critical third stress level, after which mental disorders and sudden death follow, kicks in at three hundred.

The disaster came down to a combination of modifiers. The character had greedy, shy, ambitious, and vengeful traits all at once, plus temporary effects like basking in reflected glory and training with a personal champion, both of which also pile on stress. Each of these traits multiplies incoming stress, and the game adds them up linearly with no cap whatsoever.

As a result, five measly coins triggered a cascade of multipliers, and the teenager was practically ready to clutch his chest rather than part with the pocket change.

Commenters nailed the problem exactly. One player put it bluntly:

Yeeeeah, just making all sources of stress add up linearly instead of a logarithmic scale or some sanity limits (e.g. can't get more than ~50 stress in an insignificant fluff event) was not a great idea. Also what event writers often do is go like "ok, ambitious / paranoid etc gain more stress in this event because these traits are more stressful, amirite" but then these traits multiply all incoming stress already, so in effect this triples or quadruples the amount of stress.

The character fate turned out exactly as grim as predicted. The poster later reported that Robert Renard died at 34 as a full-blown alcoholic, somehow managing to keep his sorry little county independent the whole time. Some suggested saving characters like this with diplomacy tree perks that reduce stress per friend, but with such a multiplier, all the friendship in the world wouldn't have been enough.

Five coins meant nothing to the Renard treasury, but for their owner nervous system, they turned out to be a lethal dose.