Heroes of Destiny: Fourth Playtest

The last playtest blew a huge hole in the mechanical basis of the game, so I had a lot of work ahead of me to get the game in shape to play again, as prior posts attest. Walking into this game, I wasn't sure how the revisions would go over, so I had the train roll into town and got the players into trouble right away.

Non-combat rules changed very little, so people were fine with just rolling along. Destiny worked a little different, what with 10s counting double, but it didn't come up much. No one defended or endangered dreams this session, so despite the fact that those rules underwent a massive rewrite, there wasn't much testing going on there.

We did see several combats though. That's right, several. The new rules allowed us to engage in multiple altercations and have time left over for not ony more game, but more combat. Needless to say, it went much more smoothly. I found information much easier to track on my end with NPCs reduced to series of target numbers, and not once did a player stop to ask what the hell he was doing.

New recovery rules proved intuitive, and while I still wonder if they make a person a little too tough, hard opposition can still put plenty of hurt on a PC. Players found the entire system far easier to track than the bloodied/bruised system in place previously, so there's a win. I think it bears more watching/testing, but it's a step in the right direction.

Damage, special damage that is, needs some work though. The whole damage = margin thing is cool and it works, but having all weapons provide bonuses to the attack pool isn't translating into harder hits the way I hoped it would, and it puts our spellcasters at something of a disadvantage when compared to gunslingers. I haven't worked out how to make it work instead (players are pushing for a straight damage bonus, but that feels wrong to me for no reason I can articulate), so that's grist for the design mill. The short of it is, there needs to be ways of making special attacks more potent, ideally without adding a while separate damage score to the whole thing.

Which brings us to the other major complaint of the game: potencies suck. Okay, no, they don't suck, but they're not, well, potent enough. The general feeling was that for abilities that cost extra successes to activate, they should have a lot more oomph than they do now. Some of the design suggestions made them into quasi-feat chains ala D&D, which was a real turn off for me. I don't hate D&D, but I want to avoid the design methodology that created that system as much as I can, given the playstyle it engenders and that I've experienced. I want to avoid a power grab system that turns characters into compilations of special abilities. That said, if people aren't feeling their potencies matter much mechanically, that absolutely does need work. Throw that on the pile I guess.

Next up, some possible solutions... I hope.

Ideals, take 3

In thinking over the 10s are double successes idea, I've decided that a 10% chance per die of getting a bonus isn't good enough. There needs to be a more compelling reason for hewing to your ideals. Destiny dice need to be that much better when you're following the true calling of your heart instead of just being a big damn hero in general.

The double success idea is a good one. I like it. It's still simple and prevents dice overload. It just doesn't get triggered often enough.

So why not just take out the trigger and make it automatic? Act in accordance to your ideals, and any successes you roll on Destiny dice count as double, up to the rating of your ideals in play. Roll those dice over to 10 if it helps you keep track of them.

I think that's the version of the rules that's going to hit the next playtest session.

New Use for Ideals

With Dreams squared away, we now turn to the action side of the pool: Ideals. Again, no additional dice, so what whole double dice spent thing doesn't cut it anymore. However, my solution for this is much simpler than the whole rigamarole required to fix Dreams (probably because Dreams required that recovery be fixed first, where this is based on action resolution, which required no adjustments).

In short, every 10 you roll on a Destiny die counts as 2 successes, up to the rating of the Ideal, assuming you're acting in accordance to your ideals, of course.

It's simple. It works a lot like talents and trainings. It doesn't add dice. It doesn't require any additional rerolling. In fact the only concern I have with it at the moment is whether it's a significant enough benefit. After all, you only have a 10% chance of getting a 10 on any d10, and that means that there will be plenty of times when you roll in accordance to your ideals and get no benefit. And even if you do get a benefit, will it be powerful enough to make a real difference?

I could say that we need to play it to find out, and that's true, but this is one I think I want to spend a little more time on. It might need another revision before the next testing session.

New Use for Dreams

With damage and recovery worked out, I feel there's enough new ground laid to take a look at Dreams. Dreams are, in the definition of the game, a way to keep the character going. He can persevere because he still has something to live for.

Well, the old rules lost sight of that, sort of. They could certainly boost your damage capacity by adding Hope dice to your pool, but they were semi-action oriented in the same breath. With the new 10 die maximum mandate, adding dice is no longer an option, so we need some other way of representing hopes.

John, for whom this game is written, gave a fantastic idea: Dreams, when either being defended or endangered, act as trainings for recovery checks, meaning that dice up to the invoked Dream can recover on a 4 instead of a 5. That's some awesome stuff right there. It's simple. It's thematic. It uses the existing rules. We're going with that.

I'm going to throw in one additional bonus for defeding your Dreams: you can recover for free as long as your Dreams are directly in peril. So if your wife is being attacked by crazy cultists, and you're fighting them off her, you can recover for free every single exchange with no need to set aside a success from your pool to activate the ability.

Recovery without Die Status

Chucking the whole healthy to bloody and then back to bruised thing for dice means the entire way that health is measured in Heroes of Destiny is up for grabs. Not just health, but damage, damage recovery, and no small number of potencies. There's a whole web of interconnected concepts that need to change together.

Today, I'm dealing with the matter of getting your dice back. Wounding seems pretty simple. You take damage, dice drop out of your pool. That part can stay the same. 2 points knocks loose a Hope die, while a single point bloodies a Destiny die.

The question is, what happens then? How do you get them back, in the middle of things I mean? And make no mistake, you need some manner of recovery, otherwise this is just another death spiral game, and I know of few people who enjoy death spirals.

So, first things first: all dice of a type are the same. This means that all d6s in play act the same, just as all d10s in play are the same. What this means is that a die is in play or it isn't. If you recover a die, it's a full fledged member of your pool. You can roll it, but you can also use it to take more damage. Recovery means you're getting some of your damage capacity back too.

Now that we've got that, how do you get those dice back into your pool? An idea that one of my players had was to roll your injury dice (the ones knocked out of your play, bloodied to use the old nomenclature). For every die that comes up a success, you return it to your pool. Anything that doesn't come up 5 or better stays where it is.

I like that. It's pretty simple, and it uses the existing rules. Yeah, okay, there's an additional die roll in that, but it's not too bad, is it? Bears testing to find out; I'd like to keep additional rolling to a minimum, but this particular roll might work out. However, I'd like to add one wrinkle to this: recovery isn't automatic. You need to expend a little effort. So, on any given round you can allocate a single success from your pool to recovery. That lets you recover at the end of the exchange, and those dice return to your pool for use at the beginning of the next exchange.

That's complete enough to begin play again. I'll let you know how it works out.

A Few Rules For The Other NPCs

One of the characters in our playtest is a former lawman who's given up the badge and moved out west in order to start a new, more pedestrian life with his wife and child. His ideal is Champion, which he defines as standing up for other people when they're in trouble, while his Dreams include his wife, child, and a new, quiter life.


In the train ride out to Redemption, AZ, our family of east coast transplants ran into no small amount of trouble when something possessed a passenger and turned him into a near unkillable creature that was doing awful things to the rest of the people. You can read all about it in the prior playtest reports to Heroes of Destiny.

As you might imagine, our lawman found himself called into action again, and the player found he really hit a groove with the character taking control of situations on the verge of panic and enforcing order while wrangling posses to hunt down the supernatural terror. He found a joy and a sense of purpose in it that he imagined his character had as well, and said that's clearly why he became a lawman.

This put him in conflict with his wife, who he described as nervous and clingy. She was always asking him not to get involved, to stay with her and protect her, just her. In the process of saving the train, he endangered his relationship with her quite a bit and heeded destiny's call just as much. Every time he lost Hope, he dropped his Dream rating for his wife. By the time they rolled into Redemption, she'd gone from a 3 to a 1, and that 1 was damaged down to a temproary 0.

So when he arrived home at one point, she greeted him by throwing crockery at his head. He was confused at first, until I explained to him that their relationship had been damaged both in the long term and short term, at which point he perked up and made the following suggestion:
In addition to providing some personality notes about each NPC that's a Dream, all Dreams should have a health status of sorts. This has nothing to do with combat and everything to do with their relationship to the character. At each rating in Dream, make a note of some change in the relationship. So if your wife is one of your Dreams at rating 3, define a telling point of the relationship at ratings 3, 2, 1, and 0. If your dream is a business, define what your relationship to the business is at each point rating.

Another fantastic idea. I think I'll have a hard time getting the guys to make those charts up mid-play, but for future tests, it's totally on.

Scene Structure in Heroes of Destiny

One suggestion that came out of the last playtest was to add a formal finish to any scene. Most time, play just flows from one person to another, one locaiton to the next, and from scene to scene. That's all well and good, but given that certain mechanics apply for one scene, he asked that we formally declare the end of a scene to clear up any ambiguity.

It's a small thing, but I like it. I think the appealing part of it is that by asking for scene close by consensus, it gets the players thinking about story structure and pulls them into more of a director stance, even if subtly. Anything that helps bridge that divide between players and GM is a good thing in my opinion. Many games have suffered when players show up with no sense of responsibility beyond attendence and playing their own character in a vacuum, and the GM runs games and plots with no eye toward engaging the players, instead looking at their characters as his own playthings. It's gone bad from both ends. Meeting in the middle, even in small ways like this, brings everyone closer together, and I really look forward to seeing how this easily implimented practice changes play.