What We Play

As you may have guessed from all the writing I do about the games I've run and the games I seek to create, I'm ever on the quest for a better game experience for myself and my players. Now my players are a lot that are largely happy to show up and game, but I'm the sort who sees the "just show up and play" as settling for mediocrity. I want to run the kind of game that has people thinking about it in the time between sessions, that has them showing up early and rearing to go, that truly captivates them. This isn't an ego thing. I'm convinced that when you've got a player base that invested in the game, you're going to get better play, and from that you get a better game experience for everyone.

Another Day: Pain is Fun!

When I first started this project, I had the idea that the most robust part of your character should be his capacity to absorb punishment. As I move through this design, I'm all the more convinced of it, because taking damage needs to be somehow interesting too, as that appears to be a big thrust of the game.

And then there's the request that the rules be involved, maybe even a little complicated. Yeah, for real, that was specifically requested.

I'm no fan of making something needlessly complicated, so I'm instead taking that request as permission to go a little more in depth than I might otherwise and not bother sanding it smooth afterward. What's that leave me with?

The damage matrix.

What I've done is create separate health meters for differnet kinds of abuse a survivor might suffer. (Side note: Survivor. I like that as a term for character. I think I'll use that.) So if you're sunburnt and starving, you can't take a beating as well as you normally could. You could represent this from a single damage meter, but that doesn't provide enough detail for a game like this. So instead, you have various metrics of heath: nutrition, health (disease), toughness (physical injury), weathering (exposure), and packing (how much gear you can carry).

As you encounter different hardships, different health meters get assaulted. Tracking damage is pretty easy, and largely similar to how it works in other games. You have a number of levels, and each level can take a number of points equal to your score. So let's say you have 4 health levels in all scores (because it's looking like that's what I'm going to use). If your Toughness is a 5, you can take 5 points in each of those 4 levels. So far, pretty standard stuff.

Here's where it becomes a matrix. As you drop to a new level, you take wound penalties. You wound penalties don't affect your skills or your actions, but your other health meters. You don't take damage in those other meters, but those scores drop. So say you've also got a 5 in Health, and you take a few gunshots that damage your Toughness to the point that you take wound penalties. This drops your Health to 4. Now, you can only take 4 points of damage per wound level. You don't actually take any Health damage, but you're not as resilient to disease until those gunshots heal.

Now let's say that you already had 5 points of Health damage when this happens. Normally that keeps you in the first level, but when your Health drops to 4, those 5 points can't be contained in a single level. Now 4 points fill the top level, and the last point goes into the next level down, which also inflicts penalties. Damage suddenly cascades.

It's a little tricky to track and to explain, but in the sample I showed someone, he got it as soon as he began to use it. I'm thinking this might make a good app for the iPhone to help in tracking, because I've yet to come up with a good way to visually present the damage matrix that makes it both easy to use and understand.

In a nutshell though, that's the core of the character. Survival and pain and suffering, oh my!

Another Day: Basic Play

I spent a lot of time thinking about "old school" gaming in thinking about how to Another Day should play, and what I came up with was a dungeon. Back in the early days of D&D, play largely consisted of trying to get in and back out of a dungeon without dying. In short, it was more a survival game than anything else. Oh, sure, there was a quest element to it, and you were in theory accomplishing something, but really, especially in the early levels, you were just trying to make it to the end.

So I took that idea for Another Day. This is a post-apocalyptic game, not a fantasy one, so dungeon crawling isn't necessarily appropriate, but if you abstract the dungeon into a series of encounters, you can translate that into just about any setting.

This means that in Another Day, you're going from one safe point to the next, and need to face down a certain number of encounters in between. The GM probably decides the number of encounters, which could be totally random, and you deal with each of them as they come up. Encounters probably wear you down, forcing you to deal with diminished capacities as you continue, making each subsequent encounter a little more difficult.

Sounds like a death spiral made into a whole game, doesn't it? I guess it kind of is, so the question is how to make that fun? Working on it.

Another Day: The Big 3

As ever these days, I started with the three questions to give myself a little better orientation as to how to tackly this project.

1) What's this game about?

This one was handed to me in the specs, in a fashion. It's about survival, and specifically not about questing. This means that character viability must be a big deal in this game. Generalized hit points, where you go from 100% efficacy to dead is no good here. A survival game needs to have a health system that has all different shades of suffering built into it, so you can, um, enjoy(?) the degree to which your character has progressed towards death.

2) How it is about that?

Many games focus on how it is you accomplish something. I'm thinking that if this game is about survival, it's instead got to focus on how you take various kinds of damage. In fact, right now I'm thinking that your only attributes all deal with how you weather different kinds of hardship and damage. The focus of the character is how he survives, not how he accomplishes actions.

3) What actions does it reward?

That's a good question. Since this game is about living to see the next day and nothing more, you could say survival is its own reward, but that's pretty tepid. So I think what I'm going to do is tap into some of the other specs and, in the spirit of old school mentality, say that teamwork will be rewarded somehow. You'll need to work together to survive. Old D&D was like this, in the beginning anyway, and I think it was always intended to stay that way, even if it really didn't the higher the levels climbed. So Another Day will have something in it that rewards working together.

Another Day: The Specs

Another Day is another game I started working on by request. It was put out as something of a lark, but given that I've been able to get zero in the way of playtesting for Heroes of Destiny in a while, I figured I'd take the time to put together the rough draft of this. I did promise it, after all, even if the description didn't sound like something I wanted to play.

What I wound up doing was taking that description as a challenge. Take something that sounded tedious and make it fun, as I'd define it, while still meeting all the requested design specifications. What were they? So glad you asked.

• Old school feel
• Post apocalyptic
• Involved, perhaps even complicated character mechanics
• Simple resolution mechanics
• Make hit location important so you can have piecemeal armor matter
• Gear must degrade
• Make the game about survival, not heroics; you play to see how long you survive, not to see who you can save or what you can accomplish
• Gear must be detail oriented, with ammunition specific to certain firearms
• Fly fishing must be a part of the game

Not my kind of thing at all. But one weekend I decided to sit down with a notebook and see what I could do with it. I'll show you what I came up with in future posts.

Relationship Health for NPC Tracking

One additional suggestion that came out of the whole stages of relationship health meter idea tied back to formally ending a scene. In addition to ending a scene by consensus, John said he thought it would be neat to include a sort of postlude if anyone's Dreams suffered damage, be it from heeding the Call of Destiny, or temporary damage from endangering your Dreams. He said it should show the repricussions of the change, even if they happen off camera for the PC and he has no way of knowing about it.

In my mind's eye, I picture this as an opportunity for the player to take over in a limited GM capacity for a moment, and narrate what's happening to the NPC that's important to him. He controls that person's fate in a way, and gets him more involved in telling the story of his character through telling a side tale of someone important to his character. It's a marvelous idea, and one I intend to introduce straight away.

The Inner Demon

Let's move on to the second aspect of the mission statement: the inner demon. This is the means by which the characters maintain their individuality. Characters in Neuromancer did it through drug addiction, death wishes, isolation, extreme body modification, and sheer insanity. There wasn't anyone in that book who was just a little quirky. They were either faceless and forgettable, or they had something really wrong with them. So we need something similar for this game, something to give players the power stay themselves, but to do so in a way that breaks them.

 

Okay, so there's clearly got to be some kind of disadvantage tied to a character's inner demon, but again, it needs to be mechanical. The 90s were strewn with RPGs that introduced disadvantages that you were just supposed to role play, and while they were a big step in the direction of thinking about your character's personality and not just his combat stats, too often these disadvantages were banks of points that you got for free and proceeded to ignore in actual play. A character's inner demon needs to inflict a mechanical penalty to the character, while at the same time it needs to provide some mechanism by which a character can increase his punk rating.

 

So, each character has a demon, defined along theme appropriate lines. This gets a variable rating (um... 1-5 maybe?) defined by the player at the start of each adventure (I'm still assuming this being a Shadowrun game, that it will be built around specific missions/jobs). The rating determines how hard the demon is kicking at that particular time. Sometimes it's nice and placid and behind the scenes, and sometimes it's a raging beast. Take for example the demon "drug addict." At a rating 1, the character might feel the occasional pang, but he can pretty much white knuckle his way through the job. At rating 5, he's jonsing for a fix constantly. Time that should be spent gathering intel on the team's target is spent instead scoring a fix and blissing out. He's walking into firefights high, and he's going through withdrawal when they need him driving the getaway car.

 

A character's Edge is equal to his Punk + Demon. Yes, this does mean that the more messed up a character is on any given run, the better he'll be performing, but we're going to chalk that up to him being less distracted by all the trivialities of the world. Demons are an aspect with only a downside. The GM can compel the aspect, just as any other, and you are free to resist if you like. However, it costs you a number of points equal to your demon rating to avoid succumbing. When it's really kicking, you're going to be spent just keeping it at bay, and if things get too rough, you are going to give in. 

That should make the "brokenness" of cyberpunk characters a more front a center thing in this game. With rare exception, players want their characters to be good at what they do. That means high edge. But that high edge comes with a price, and I'm willing to bet people will pay it, which hands the GM the tools necessary to help players explore the dark parts of their character's unique snowflake of a personality. 

The Core Mechanic

So, with a core "about" statement, let's move on to question 2. How is this game about that? First and foremost, if it's going to be about avoiding being a mindless drone, there needs to be some kind of identity score, an "individuality" stat, maybe we can call it "punk" in homage to the literary source. That stands for how far apart from being a mindless consumer you are, and how outside society you are. That, by extension means that being a part of society has to be bad, as in mechanically bad. Remember, it doesn't matter what the flavor text of your game is, if there's no rule for it, your players won't care. Thus if being acclimated into pop culture is a bad thing, there needs to be something in the rules themselves that make it bad. 

One of the terms you hear time and again in cyberpunk RPGs is "edge." It's something that you're always after, and even if you're on it one minute, you might slip and fall behind the next. It takes constant work to stay on the edge. I'm thinking the more you're into chasing down the latest Brittany or Justin Beiber video or voting for the newest round of American Idol or whatever, the less you're keeping your edge, so maybe your punk score has something to do with either setting your max skill rating or the threshold over which the cost for increasing a skill jumps dramatically. Or maybe, like tech, you need to work just to stay relevant (think computing speed, and what's considered average now vs, five years ago), so there's a maintenance cost for your skills just to keep them the same (as in relatively effective given a growing world), and your punk helps offset that maintenance cost by preventing you from sinking too much time into consumerism that doesn't promote personal growth.

Hmm... I'm going to flash forward briefly and look at question 3, which asks how that's fun. While the idea of maintaining your skills relative to a growing world is realistic, and there's a thematic resonance between that mechanic and the tech industry to which cyberpunk owes its existence, I don't think working to keep what you have makes for a fun game, so let's jettison that.

Okay, so we're back to punk vs pop culture. I'm a big believer in rewarding player choice rather than penalizing it, so I'd like to make this conflict one that gives the player a bonus of some kind, rather than takes something away. The loss can be the forfeiture of the potential bonus. It's easier to swallow. Since I'm on a dual die design kick these days, I'm going to make some assumptions for the moment just to put some ideas down and move on. Let's say this is a die pool system, and that 5s and better are successes. You roll a number of dice equal to your skill. Dice up to your punk rating are d10s, because that's your edge. Anything over that are d6s. This means that you won't lose your character if you fully acclimate into pop society, but you'll be soft by comparison to those living on the edge. There's a mechanical incentive to staying individualized.

Hmm... maybe we should split the edge and punk ratings. That is, make punk = edge in the beginning, but allow some method of growing edge beyond punk. Punk then creates some sort of insulation, but doesn't create a ceiling. Eh, it's a nebulous idea to let circulate in the idea cloud for now.

Shadowitz: Mission Statement

So... what should Shadowitz really be about? Yeah, there's magic in a modern cyberpunk world gone wireless, and it needs good combat rules along with easy speed tracking and all that jazz, but none of that is what it's about. I remember reading Neuromancer only a few months ago and thinking how much Shadowrun wanted to be like this book, but shot well wide. Why? The why, the thing Shadowrun's missing is what I think Shadowitz should be about. 

The game should be about characters living in a world populated in large part by mindless consumer drones drifting through a shallow pop culture that robs people of any individuality. The thing that keeps these characters separate and individual, however, is an inner demon that compels self-destructive behavior. Characters struggle between losing themselves to the wider world and the end their inner punk pushes them toward.

In a nutshell, I think that means the game is about struggling to maintain your identity through the use of an inner demon that might kill you. Everything else, the plethora of guns, the magic, the wireless matrix, the cyberware, the sorcery, the metahuman races, all of it, are irrelevant to the core of the game. All of that stuff is in there, and there will ultimately be rules for it, but first and foremost there must be a mechanical system that represents that core mission statement, and it must be at the forefront of the game. Shadowitz doesn't have that, and that's why it's a failure.

Shadowitz: Second Edition

A friend of mine introduced me to someone recently who shares an interest in game design, and we've been corresponding, talking shop, for a while now. He's scary smart, and perhaps because of this hasn't read as widely as I have in the area of game design, content to work on his own material without outside help. Thus, when I mentioned the three questions to him, it touched off a long discussion as to what they were really asking and what they meant. It was great.

In the course of this discussion, Shadowitz came up, and through the back and forth, I wound up hitting on the thing that I felt the original design was lacking. Namely, an answer to those questions. Looking back to the beginning of this blog, I see I asked and then chucked those questions almost immediately in the design process. The goal became modelling everything in Shadowrun with an alternate set of rules, but it wasn't about anything. My game ultimately didn't see characters any more true to the cyberpunk genre than I'd gotten before. It worked as a resolution engine, but as for creating a particular feel, it was a failure.

It was the conversations with this new friend that smacked me in the face with that, and then just as suddenly, the answer came to me. What followed was a flurry of ideas that lead to a new core of the old game. I never really finished Shadowitz; the initial draft retains plenty of rough patches, but I decided to go about revising it according to these new answers anyway in the hopes that what came out the other side was closer to what I'd been searching for all along. Stay tuned.

Heroes from All Sorts of Places

It occurred to me during the development process that Heroes of Destiny could serve as an engine for a number of genres, not just fantasy. That's not to say it's a universal system, because it's not, and my forays into RPG design have lead me to believe that universal systems are by necessity bland.

This game is about something specific: the rise of a character from rich but somewhat humble origins to greatness at the cost of those things most dear to him. Its focus has nothing to do with genre, so as long as the genre supports characters with deep, personal connections to things they stand to lose and a rise in greatness, it works.

In messing around with the rule set, I've seen the following potential alternate takes:

• Swashbuckling - I'm running 7th Sea right now, so of course I'd drift here first, but it does follow. Swashbuckling is a genre of high action and romance. There can be plenty of epic struggle here, and heroes rising up against a corrupt political power is very much in line with this genre. The romantic aspect of the genre sits well with the hope mechanics in this game, though stories told with this system may have a greater tragic element than in other games. 
• Westerns - As a genre, at least in the movies, Westerns often involve rough characters who have some pretty ambiguous morals. Certainly that's the realm of the spaghetti western and The Man with No Name Eastwood portrayed so many times. However, more modern takes on the genre sprinkle in a hefty dose of heroism too. Look at Tombstone or 7:10 to Yuma. If everyone at the table establishes that this is the sort of western they're going to play, Heroes of Destiny is a good fit.
• Supers - The base mechanics would need some adjustment in order to deal with the increased level of power present in a supers game, but it's certainly possible to handle such stories in this game, with one big caveat. Superhero stories, at least as shown to us in the comics, tend to be static. Yeah, things do change over time, but how long did it take Lois to finally discover Superman's identity? When's the last time a major hero died and stayed dead? Things have a way of returning to the status quo pretty regularly in the comic book world, and that's not the kind of story that this game is designed to tell. However, within comic history there are a number of isolated arcs that, if taken out of the larger flow before later issues reversed them, serve as great examples of the kind of superhero tale perfect for this game. Look at Spider-man and the Green Goblin when he accidentally killed Gwen Stacey. Look at the Doomsday rampage, or No Man's Land. Stories which really push the hero to the limits and put at risk everything he holds dear are perfect for this, as long as the campaign doesn't later undo any big changes. The big difference here is that Heroes of Destiny is designed to ultimately come to an end. comic book stories aren't. 
• Space Opera - Given that space opera is really just fantasy in different clothes, there's absolutely no reason to think that this game would have difficulty in dealing with the genre. You'd need some rules for ranged weapons, assuming you're not comfortable reskinning bows as blasters, and there should probably be some vehicle rules too, but outside of that, it's almost good to go out of the box.

Easy Encounters, Now with Dice

With all this talk of the game on the player end, I forgot the GM. I should know better, seeing as how that's usually where I'm parked in any given game.

I said at the very outset of this project that I wanted to keep things simple for the GM. Making everything diceless was largely an outgrowth of that endeavor. However, that goal still remains very much in place now that I've put dice back into this game. But, how to do it when the GM has to roll dice for every NPC action?

I don't know. So let's not make him roll dice for every NPC action. That seems like a pretty good start.

Just because the game uses dice doesn't mean the GM has to use dice. The existing gift rules grant automatic successes toward certain ends, using them more heavily for NPCs than PCs seems like a great way toward simplifying things for the GM. In fact, we can probably get rid of that whole Threat thing. I had to put that in to introduce a level of variance exchange to exchange, but now with dice on the player side, player results will vary on their own, meaning if the NPC numbers remain constant results will still differ.

Boom, done. NPCs are now just fixed numbers, placing all the die rolling on the player side. Players roll defense against a fixed NPC attack score, and they roll to attack vs a fixed NPC defense score. We can keep Fight for a health meter, since that works just as well here as it did before. Instead of taking down a Threat level, it can reduce the NPC's stats instead. Yeah, this creates a death spiral effect, but as long as the NPC puts up a good fight in the beginning I'm okay with that. Something I've learned from D&D4 is that fights that go on too long lose their pizazz. Let the players waste an NPC after he gets in a few good hits and I think everyone will be happy.

Advancement

There's a surprising number of games out there without an advancement mechanic. Your character changes, but he doesn't add to his abilities. Some of them look downright nifty, but in the end I decided that this game needs a more traditional growth mechanism, because characters are supposed to rise to epic heights, and since they're starting there, they need the opportunity to advance.

I hate experience points though. Really, I've come to loath them. They're not evil, but in my games they have a way of taking the emphasis away from the character's, well, character and placing it on a menu of advancement options. The character becomes a collection of powers and abilities, and I cannot stomach another 4 hour discussion about point distribution. I ran a Shadowrun game once that ended with one of those. Literally 4 hours at the end of every single session dedicated to discussing the various ways points could be spent, either now or later at some date calculated by expected reward patterns.

This game is supposed to be about the person transformation of a character from happy, or at least dream-besotted, to a hollow hero of thousands who give everything he cared about for people he doesn't know, or at leas the tightrope fixed between these two poles. What traditional xp systems have done to my games in the past is about as antithetical to those goals as I can imagine.

As a solution, I'm stripping out xp from the game. There's advancement. You can increase your talents and trainings, gain new ones, up your attributes (now called gifts), and pick up more potencies. You can do all of that.

You do it when the GM says you can. Simple as that. As the game progresses and things happen to your character, you pick up abilities, and the GM will tell you when that is. So quit worrying about pointmongering and play the game. I'm not sure how that'll be received, but again, playtesting will tell.

Destiny Creep Revisited

I've been giving the idea of Destiny Creep a lot of thought lately. Translating it from the diceless version of the game means that accumulating points toward your creep is automatic, but I recently wrote a section of rules that changes this to a die roll.

Now, after a scene in which you spent destiny, you roll a number of d10s equal to the largest single chunk you spent. Successes turn into hash marks on your creep meter. Simple enough, right?

Turning it into a die roll makes the endeavor a safer bet, doesn't it? It means you're not guaranteed to accumulate creep, and in fact will certainly do so at a slower rate than you would if it were a sure thing. But somehow, and I could be totally wrong about this, it feels like spending destiny under this system feels riskier. It's a gamble now, every time. So instead of making the decision ahead of time to accept a sure fate and face the consequences, there's an uncertainty principle behind rolling to see if you lose any hope now. That's the theory anyway. We'll see how it plays. Once, you know, there's enough of this thing to play.

Stepping Away from Fantasy RPGs

Stripping skills out of the game was like a slap in the face. It cleared my mind in a surprising way. Despite all the work that's gone into this game bent toward accomplishing its main objective of making the choice between hope and destiny a primary and continual one, there was still a tremendous amount of influence from historical design, for no reason other than that's the way it's always been done.

Take spellcasting. When I got to talking to my friend about the various aspects of the game, I discovered why he had been insisting on including mages, even though he didn't particularly like them: he didn't think you could have a fantasy game without them, not because he particularly wanted them. Now they're coming out. Just because D&D has mages and clerics doesn't mean that this one needs them.

It reminds me of Conan. The first Conan film focused on a trio of characters, none of whom were spellcasters. Yes, they did know a wizard, but from an RPG perspective, he was more an NPC than PC. When you get to Conan the Destroyer, there's a much broader diversity of character types, and the movie sucks in part because of that. It loses focus, and needs to play shifting spotlight just to give everyone a chance to do their thing, even when it makes no sense.

The first film is more of the fantasy that I think this game should emulate. The second is what a lot of games wind up feeling like.

Simple NPCs

Game Masters can have it rough in combats. While everyone else is running a single character, they're often left keeping the details straight on a number of NPCs, any of whom may have special options. To further complicate matters, the GM hasn't had the time to get to know these characters and their special rules the way a player has his character. Keeping track of all that can be difficult, and the more complicated dice mechanics are on top of this, the slower everything goes.

Since one of the primary goals of this game is to keep things easy on the GM I decided to make the game work different on the GM's side of the screen. Nothing says he's got to follow the same rules as everyone else, especially given how different his play experience and role is.

NPCs, be they characters or monsters, use stats similar to the PCs, but make much heavier use of them and have a simpler, more restricted kind of effort pool. Their stats include Attack and Defense, but they get no Recovery. Instead of a hope/destiny pool, they have something called Threat. Threat is a pair of numbers, such as 3(2).

The first number is a chunk of points that gets allocated on an exchange by exchange basis to the NPC's stats. The parenthetical value is the number of chunks the NPC has. So, in the example above, the NPC has two bundles of 3 points he can see added to his scores each exchange. Grouping up effort in this way makes for fewer options, and thus, hopefully, speeds allocation.

Because NPCs don't have a pool like PCs, they need to track damage differently. They do this with a rating called Fight. Every time the NPC accumulates damage equal to his Fight rating, he loses a point of Threat. When his Threat hits 0, he's taken out. While I'm not a huge fan of hit points, they are pretty simple, and for NPCs the lack of flavor is forgivable, since their specific mechanics aren't part of the player experience.

Spellcasting

Despite all the work I'd put into this system to make it simple, to make it about a hard personal choice that players needed to make with every action, and to make the mechanics about the character, in the end the person requesting the game kept referencing D&D. I'm not sure if that's because we haven't played many other fantasy games (come to think of it, I can't think of any others I've played with him, and my own experience is limited to some very short sessions of Warhammer, despite owning several others), but that left me with one major gap in the current system: spellcasting.

One thing that we agreed on, though, was that neither of us liked the Swiss army knife way magic worked in D&D. There was a spell for everything, and with enough levels or scrolls, you could have a massive battery of utility spells to render you immune to every hardship you could imagine. Add to that the massive killhammer high level magic became, and fighter characters become good for show only. Neither of us wanted that.

So I set about creating a system of magic that offered some decent choices without completely invalidating every other character option in the game. There are plenty of ways to limit magic in an RPG. There's drain, limited casting capacity (also known as Vancian casting), components, even insanity risks. In the end, I went with making magic slow. Yes, you can throw a fireball into the midst of an enemy horde and roast all of them, but you won't be doing it every exchange. It takes time to build up that much power.

Instead of writing a separate tome chocked full of spells (I'm too lazy for that kind of work), I broke a spell into several categories. This includes aspects such as range, area of effect and duration. Each of these has a few ratings, and the more you want to do, the higher the cost.

What cost? Effort cost. To cast a spell, you decide what you want it to do, assign it a rating in each of the categories, and then tally up the cost of all the aspects. That gives you a number, and that's the effort you need to generate before you can cast the spell. Now, that's just to gather the energy to cast it. Effort spent gathering the power doesn't actually go toward casting the spell.

Once you meet a spell's effort cost, you're free to cast it just like you would perform any other action. You generate an effort pool and look to beat the challenge rating of the task. If you succeed, your spell is a success. If not, you still cast the spell, but it doesn't have the desired effect. An attack spell misses. A telekinetic effect lacks the strength to perform the action. Etc.

However, win or lose, there's no further side effects. No drain, no loss of energy. If you want to cast more magic, you can do so, but you begin by gathering up the power again. On average, if a mage wants to throw an effect that's on par with a warrior's sword swing, he can do so every exchange. If he wants to roast an entire battalion, he can do that too, but he'll be gathering energy for a good number of exchanges. He can do other things during this time if he likes, but that requires splitting his pool, and thus gathering energy at an even slower rate.

And that's my attempt at introducing magic, keeping it powerful, keeping it fun, and keeping it in line with everything else. It looks good on paper, but only testing will tell how it actually works.

Destiny Creep

We've now established how to bid points from your Pool to accomplish things, and gone over the options available to you for managing both your Hope and your Destiny. But there's one other aspect to the interplay between these two scores that's essential to playing Heroes of Destiny.

Your Pool begins with a Hope of 9 and a Destiny of 1 (remember, your Pool always equals 10). Right now you're probably thinking that Destiny sounds so much cooler than Hope. It's not limited by skills, it gets a better effort exchange rate, basically it's just the point kind to pick whenever you want to do anything worth talking about. So, the natural question is: how do I get my Destiny rating up?

As it turns out, it's pretty easy. Just spend your Destiny points. Really, that's it. The more you use Destiny the higher it gets. It's called Destiny Creep. During each session you track the most Destiny points you used in a single exchange. At the end of the session you add that number to your Destiny Creep. When that equals 5x your current Destiny score, your Destiny goes up by 1. It's that easy.

But remember, your Pool always equals 10, so every increase in Destiny means a decrease in Hope. And every point in Hope is tied to a hope near and dear to your character. That means that as your character climbs the ladder to becoming a legend, he loses ties to his hopes for a simple life. This doesn't doom everything he cares about to fire and pain, but it does mean his chances of having these things in the end fade away. They might be destroyed, or his relationship with them might simply fade.

In the end, every time you spend Destiny, you are actively making the decision to turn your character's back on those things he loves most in life. He's placing something heroic and noble above his wife, children, siblings, friends, and whatever else you put on that sheet. There's a price associated with being a hero, and by spending Destiny, your character has decided to pay it.

The Second Attribute: Destiny

We've gone over what Hope is and what you can do with it. Now let's talk about the other half of your Pool: Destiny. Destiny is that spark of greatness that every budding hero has. It's that thing about him that makes the camera settle on him. It's what makes him a leading player in this story as opposed to a supporting cast member.

Okay, so what can you do with it. First, every Destiny point you spend it worth 2 effort. That means that by using Destiny you can accomplish much more than by spending Hope. Destiny is the stuff of greatness. Dig deep here, and you'll blow the doors off any normal person.

As an added bonus, Destiny isn't concerned with skill limitations. You can spend Destiny in any amount for any action. Got a sword skill of 3? You can spend 3 Hope on any sword action, maximum. You can spend any amount of Destiny though, and get double the effort for it to boot. Hell, you can spend 8 Destiny on a sword action even if you don't have a sword skill. Let's face it, when's the last time you saw an awesome hero in an epic be faced with something he couldn't do because he lacked the training? Characters with a big Destiny rating aren't limited by things like a poor education, be it academic or physical. They're limited by clever and powerful opposition actively putting roadblocks in their way. When you start tossing Destiny around, trivial matters like "did you take the skill" get thrown out the window.

Destiny isn't tied to any of your hopes. It exists as a free pool that transcends such mortal concerns like a quiet life. I'm very tempted to give destinies some kind of flavor, like Revolution, Revenge, Justice, Sacrifice, Salvation, etc., but for the moment I don't have anything like that. It sounds like a neat idea, and likely one I'll return to sometime. For right now though I'm not sure how it would work. So, for the moment, Destiny isn't tied to anything.

The First Attribute: Hope

Last post talked about The Pool and how you use it to generate effort toward various ends in an exchange.

Sidebar: Exchange is my word for a round in this game; I use a different term here not for the sake of being different but because I envision most actions being opposed, and thus order, and initiative, aren't as important. Heroes of Destiny doesn't have a mechanic where each person finds his place in a list and acts on his turn. Instead, all action is simultaneous, with the higher effort winning. If you really want to go before someone else (and it might matter mechanically), you can spend effort to do so.

Alright, with that out of the way, let's talk about the first of the two attributes that make up a player character's Pool: Hope. Hope is what he starts with more of, and it's what he stands to lose by being a big damn hero. His love of his wife and child, his simple desire to harvest his crops, his drive for all the things a person who is not caught up in quests and movements is all wrapped up in his Hope score.

To that end, a player must assign every Hope point in his Pool to a specific hope. This doesn't have to be a 1:1 thing either. If his character really, and I mean really loves his wife he could assign every Hope point in his Pool to her. This means he's got nothing else to live for outside of her. It also means he's probably clingy and annoying and it's only a matter of time before she gets fed up with his needy ass and moves back in with her folks, but hey, that's your character, not mine. Play what you like.

These hopes you define are important for a few reasons. First and foremost, these are the things that your character stands to lose by going off and being exceptional and heroic and all that cool stuff that most players hope for their PCs in fantasy games. You still can. In fact, you probably still should, because if your GM is doing his job there's some nasty stuff coming and only mighty men such as you can stand against it. But when you do, look at that list of hopes. Each and every item on that list gets put at risk when you make that choice. They may not die, burn to the ground, or otherwise be completely ruined, but your future with them could very well disappear. You beloved wife could get false word that you're dead, and by the time you come home  she's already got a new family started with Farmer Joe from across the way. Farmer Joe might not be worthy to have you piss on his boots compared to what you've done and what you've become, but he was there for her during the last harsh winter when you were out destroying the goblinoid horde that was raging through the Irontooth Pass. You were there holding the line for the good of everyone, but he was the one taking care of her. Now you've got the fame, but he's got her.

So now that you know what Hope is, how do you use it? When generating effort pools, Hope points get you 1 effort for every 1 point spent. However, you can only spend Hope up to a given skill rating. I'll talk about skill ratings later. Right now let's leave it with they create a cap that you can't exceed with your Hope.