My mistake then, I was recalling the previous version.
The current one does leave room for interpretation, but remember this is not a game of GM vs. players where you need to worry about rules loopholes or ability spamming. When the text says “(...) an opportunity to unwind,” that should be undeniably true for both the GM and the player. I personally wouldn’t let a Runner unwind while under heavy fire, but to each table their own :)
Ok, I understand. Surely, "unwind" communicates unroll, relax, loosen up etc. In the Italian version, we had a flatter translation, which I could re-translate in "Describe how the fiction provides you with an opportunity to recover".
That generic "recover", coupled with the apparently very short-timed actions (take a pill, turn up the volume, punch the wall...) suggests the idea that you simply need a cool cutaway/flash-cut of just a couple of seconds, in which your hero, cornered, takes a painkiller and shouts a one-liner before running back into the enemies; or the chased driver puts his favorite song on the car-audio system, turns up the volume, before attempting a dangerous stunt etc.
I think that it's very easy to misunderstand the idea behind those rules (also, they are so compressed... 😁). The game can heavily change its whole tone based on the interpretation of that single phrase.
Clearly, the previous "Once per run" gives a very precise instruction on how much Stress you can hope to recover in the whole mission.
On the contrary, removing the limit and implying that you only need a quick flash-cut action make it seems as though the heroes have an almost infinite quantity of Stress at their disposal.
Apparently, though, the "standard" behaviour seems to be related less to a hard limit and more to the availability of a downtime scene (either because there's time for it, or because the party actively works to create an opportunity for it).
