In an ongoing refinement of Heroes of Destiny, I took a hard look at the conversion from Destiny points to dice. The 1.5x conversion rate didn't seem hard to me, but every playtester I showed it to was left utterly baffled, and even those who got it didn't like it. I thought maybe it was a learning curve issue, but it remained a distinctly unpopular mechanic.
I still wanted some kind of way to get more Destiny dice though. So I started thinking about that idea I'd looked at way back at the beginning of this project, some way to give a player different flavors of destiny for his character. What I came up with are ideals.
Ideals are to Destiny what dreams.are to Hope. Each Destiny point you have gets assigned to an ideal. It's something you believe in strongly, and when you spend Destiny toward accomplishing or upholding one of your ideas, you get 2 dice instead of 1, up to the ideal's rating. This cuts out the weird math while maintaining an ability to coax more dice from your pool.
More than that, though, it transforms the game in a fundamental way. Instead of playing heroes who are continually compelled by some nebulous force of fate, the characters in this game now continually face the question of choosing between what they love and what they believe in.
What do you believe in strongly enough to choose over that which you love?
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