Monthly Archives: March 2011

A Grand And Glorious Deal

I take a minute every day to check a few daily deal sights like woot.com and tanga.com (they often have good boardgame deals). Recently, gamerati has started doing one of their own, Loot, which is gamer specific.

The schtick, if you’re unfamiliar with it, is that every day they put up one deal, usually a good one. Sometimes it’s only ok, sometimes it’s fantastic, but whatever it is, it’s only one thing, and it’s only for that one day. Predictably, on most days it’s not going to be anything you want or need, but occasionally it’s going to be just what you want at just the right price, and that’s kind of magical when it happens.

So far, Loot has been a mixed bag. There have been a few cool things I didn’t need (like Gamer Paper and Iron Tyrants) but mostly it’s been games I’ve never heard of and don’t care much about. But today, they knocked it out of the park, and are offering such a great deal that I decided it was worth dedicating today’s post to.

Today’s deal, if you haven’t already gone to check, is a bundle of the Dying Earth RPG and two of its core supplements (The Kaiin Player’s Guide and The Scaum Valley Gazeteer), in print, for $15. That is a jaw droppingly good deal, so much so that I regret that I already own all three books.

For the unfamiliar, the Dying Earth RPG is a Robin Laws game (which, for me, is enough to sell it all by itself) based on the novels of Jack Vance. It is baroque, colorful and magical play with an emphasis on wordplay and style that is very much in the style of the source material. A generic version of the system is floating around out there as Skullduggery, and it’s slick, but there’s something fantastic about the source material that streamlining loses.

Anyway, this is a great deal, and if you’re reading this today, I hope you take advantage of it. Totally worthwhile.

A Lesson from Dragon Age II

I’ve restarted Dragon Age, and right off the bat I have to give props: there’s one big difference between the Warrior/Rogue start from the Mage start, enough so that it caught be my surprise even though it made perfect sense in retrospect. So far that’s already introduced a few new wrinkles into things. For context, my initial playthrough was as a male rogue without the bonus content (for reasons of connectivity). I’ve started a female warrior and male mage and have been swapping between them, though the mage is looking to be the one I play more of simply because I’m super curious about how elements of the game play out if you’re playing a mage.

The reason I’m so curious to see the game as a mage is that one of the big recurring points of tension in the game is between the templars and the mages. For those unfamiliar with the setting, Dragon Age mages are pretty powerful, enough so to be dangerous, and their power also makes them vulnerable to demonic possession (something which can be made more likely through the use of blood magic, which is high power/high risk). To keep them in check (and because the church dictates that mages should not rule over men), mages are cloistered in “circles”, isolated places that are part school, part prison. These circles are overseen by templars, whose jobs include hunting down rogue mages (“apostates”) and killing blood mages, as well as being wardens of the circle.

This is a great conflict because it’s wonderfully mixed. The mages are unfairly oppressed, but at the same time, the danger they represent is very real, and more, it’s a danger that there are few (if any) protections against. At the same time, while some templars are sympathetic to the mage’s plight or are genuine defenders, some of them are exactly the kind of bully boy nutjobs you’d expect in this kind of gig. One of the things the game keeps coming back to is that the current solution stinks, but no one has a better idea (and, in fact, you get to see the tragic end of many attempts to find a better idea).

As a final note, there are factors in play in Kirkwall (the city the game takes place in) which have escalated the usual tensions in a circle to an extreme, and they’re all nicely human ones, usually the reasonable result of one thing leading to another.

The end result is an unsolvable problem with immediate consequences and personal elements. That’s a beautiful combination, and one that you GMs out there might seek to emulate. Historically, we try to steer away from unsolvable problems for fear of disempowering players, but that concern is (paradoxically) diminished by making the problem big enough and putting it smack dab in the middle of things. Life is full of these problems (usually as a result of a difference between what people deserve and what can be done) and it feels false if your game does not.

But simply having these as big abstract problems is rarely very satisfying, either to a narrative or a game. What makes it work in DA2, and will hopefully work in your game, is that it’s a constant source of new (addressable) problems. Not only are these problems of immediate concern, each of them puts the (big, abstract) conflict in a personal, actionable, and usually choice-demanding way. When a mage runs away from the circle and you find him, you are making a real choice when you decide to return him or let him go. It matters to that mage and to other people involved, but it also says something about the bigger problem.

To round it out, the tensions that drive the problem come from people, specific people who you can talk and work with. In the case of Dragon Age 2, there are numerous templars and mages who all have strong views and actions to take that contribute to the bigger picture. No one person (even those in charge of the factions) can truly steer the iceberg on their own, but they all contribute [1] . These are the people you interact with for your specific, tactical elements of play (adventures), but because they all have a position relative to this one big thing, you can feel the context of your actions.

Now, obviously, I think this is a page worth stealing from DA2’s playbook for your own game, so let me add one last twist: this is not the only such problem in Dragon Age 2. In fact, early on in the game it’s greatly overshadowed by another, similarly unsolvable problem in the form of a small army of Qunari that have set up camp in the city. But when that problem comes to a head, it doesn’t magically solve all the other problems in the city. In fact, some things get worse, since one problem often keeps another problem in check.

For my two bits, this kind of tension, escalation and context have a lot to do with why Kirkwall feels more alive than many other fantasy cities I’ve played around in, and while you might not be able to bring the wonderful art or voice acting to your table, there’s nothing stopping you from taking the ideas and running with them. Find a problem that’s too big to solve, have it create specific, actionable consequences that reflect on the big problem, and have characters in the setting who reflect and shape the problem to give it a face. Then do it one to three more times, and see what you’ve made. If nothing else, you will probably find you’ve created and adventure generating engine, and that’s no small thing.

(back) 1 – One other very human thing – any given individuals ability to make things worse is usually far greater than their ability to make things better.

Gamma World Thought Experiment

Random thought experiment: What would happen if you removed stats from Gamma World?

First, the why: I’m thinking about this because I think they’re the biggest hurdle in the system – they complicate what is otherwise a fast, simple character creation system by demanding a range of modifiers and middling bonuses rather than fast resolution. So, bottom line, the goal of any such change would be to speed up and simplify things.

Ok, so given that, what would it do.

First, attack bonuses need to make up for the missing +3/+4. I don’t really feel too obliged to replicate the chance of an occasional +5/+5 but I’m ok simplifying things into +4/+4, which is to say, just call base attack bonus +4. Done.

Second: Skills. Similarly, let’s just cut to the chase – class skills and bonus skills get you a +8. Done. I actually have another thought about that too, but we’ll get to that in a second. Figure some sort of default for everything else (say, +2) and you’re good to go.

Third: Hit points. Treat everyone like they have a 15 con for hit point purposes. A little generosity because, frankly, it’s a brutal game.

Fourth: Defenses. Same logic as Attacks. +4 as the virtual “dex” mod for AC. Figure a 4/3/2 (dealer’s choice) for other defenses.

Fifth…Well, hell, I think that’s it.

There are a few odds and ends to think about. GW has an an interesting model for weapons that splits between light weapons (that use int/dex) and heavy weapons (which use str/con), but that mostly exists to solve the problem of strange stat distributions. The problem is that, really, weapons in Gamma World are a matter of style. We’re not looking to _accurately_ represent the damage of an old stop sign or a razor sharp x-box controller thrown like a batarang. As such, just use whatever weapon stats you want.

So, the thing is this could all work. It’s a little samey-same, but it’s functional, and the assumptions is that the novelty would be coming in from the templates. But what intrigues me is that with a little work, you could do up one more set of templates to speed the process of creation and provide for a little variety in these bonuses.

Tweaking some of the ideas above (going back to +4/+3 and setting up a skill default idea) and you can end up with a template like:

SCIENTIST
Powers attack: +4 (Or +4/+3 if you really want)
Powerful Attack: +3
Quick Attack: +4
Skill Bonus: +2 (the bonus for any untrained skill)
Bonus Skill: Science (+8 – +12 if trained from template)
EDIT: Weak Skill: Acrobatics, Athletics or Perception (see comments)

Hit Points: 15
AC: +4
Reflex: +3
Will: +4
Fortitude: +2
Quick Junk List: Magnifying glass, Half a dozen specimen Jars, Spiffy lab coat.

Do one of these for every skill – maybe even multiple ones to get other themes – and I think you may have something. No longer are you merely a radioactive cockroach, your a radioactive cockroach ACROBAT!.

Anyway, just a thought.

Choice, Cities and Dragon Age II

I finished Dragon Age II this weekend. I enjoyed it a lot, and will probably get around to reviewing it, but I’ll likely do another playthrough first. Partly this is because I like to re-playthrough Bioware games in general, but in this specific case it’s because the game REALLY left me feeling like the choices I’d made all along the way lead directly to the culmination of things. One of the reasons I really want to try playing it again is to see how true that is – will things unfold differently, or is it all just sleight of hand? I’ll say this: if the impact of the choices are half as real as they seem, Bioware has done something really magnificent here.

Playing the game also got me thinking about tabletop play, and I think there are a lot of lessons to take from the CRPG that could translate well into tabletop. First and foremost, the whole game is, effectively, a single urban campaign. The majority of play takes place within a single city and its surrounding locations. I love urban games, but I’ve always found them to be a real bear to run beyond a certain point, but this hangs together well enough that it really feels like it could just as easily have been one of the Plot Point adventures that Savage Worlds uses. Yes, there are a few random bits that might feel out of place (mugging seem to involve small armies) but the overall shape of it works very well. This is hard enough to explain succinctly that I’m going to have to chew on it for a while to create a useful set of lessons for people who haven’t played the game, but if you do play it, take some time to think about how well it would migrate to tabletop.

The big lesson, and the one that really stayed with me as I played, was how strong the story/roleplaying side of it was. The fights were fun and all, but Bioware (as usual) brought their writing chops to bear to create a situation full of well-motivated characters in conflict with one another and few clear solutions. Part of why I’m so curious to replay the choices I made is that the game goes to great lengths to make sure they have teeth. A lot of times games will offer you choices, but there’s one obvious good choice, and you only take the others if you’re curious. DAII had more than a few points where the choices were all bad – not in a punitive way, but in a way that made total sense to what has happened. Things like a friend passionately and honestly wanting to do something that’s a terrible, terrible idea: you can be loyal to your friend and back their play, or you can (in their eyes) betray them. How do you want to play it?

Oh, and for the weasels (like me) out there who try for the middle path of compromise all the time, thinking that’s what the game wants? Yeah, that might work. Or it might mean you get BOTH bad outcomes. You’re often better off making real choices.

But here’s the thing: they managed to do this with a game that is really about button-mashing ass kicking. The mechanical parts of your character sheet have only a minimum of interplay with these choices. And that drove home a point for me: it’s a cop out to blame a system for “not supporting role-playing” – hard choices don’t care what system you use. If you’re not making them in your play, the problem is not mechanical[1].

Now, to head off the obvious protest, yes, obviously, some systems have built in hooks to drive things towards hard, meaningful choices, but the reality is those are just tools to help get there.[2] The system can’t makes choices matter – at best it can force a pantomime of the act of making a hard decision. Choices matter because your game, at your table, either goes there or it does not. If the problem is that you don’t know how to go there, then fine. It can be learned, there are tricks that can help get you there. If you want to reach that point, you can do it.

But if you know how, and especially if you know how well enough to complain that X or Y game doesn’t allow it, then you need to take a hard look at your table and decide if the problem is that you can’t face the hard choices, or that you don’t want to.

And if you don’t want to, that’s fine. But cop to it, don’t blame the system.

(back) 1 – I am, I know, more or less equating good roleplay with hard, meaningful choices. That’s not all there is to it, and there are a lot of assumptions in there about what hard and meaningful mean, but by and large, I think I’ll stick by it.

(back) 2 – One other easy protest is that, as a computer game, it has an easier time pushing things to choices than tabletop, by virtue of things being on rails and choices being from a menu. The latter point is reasonable – tabletop offers you more choices if you’re creative – but the former carries less weight than you might expect. It would be true if the choices were arbitrary (and a few are), but when the choice is a natural outcome of the conflicts in the setting, then the only advantage the computer has is one of pacing, and even that is a tenuous advantage. If two people, ideas, forces or whatever are in conflict, then the computer only has one path for things to come to a head. At the tabletop, you have many more options for how that conflict may manifest, but so long as the opposing factors are robust, the problems _will_ come to a head.

Choice, Cities and Dragon Age II

I finished Dragon Age II this weekend. I enjoyed it a lot, and will probably get around to reviewing it, but I’ll likely do another playthrough first. Partly this is because I like to re-playthrough Bioware games in general, but in this specific case it’s because the game REALLY left me feeling like the choices I’d made all along the way lead directly to the culmination of things. One of the reasons I really want to try playing it again is to see how true that is – will things unfold differently, or is it all just sleight of hand? I’ll say this: if the impact of the choices are half as real as they seem, Bioware has done something really magnificent here.

Playing the game also got me thinking about tabletop play, and I think there are a lot of lessons to take from the CRPG that could translate well into tabletop. First and foremost, the whole game is, effectively, a single urban campaign. The majority of play takes place within a single city and its surrounding locations. I love urban games, but I’ve always found them to be a real bear to run beyond a certain point, but this hangs together well enough that it really feels like it could just as easily have been one of the Plot Point adventures that Savage Worlds uses. Yes, there are a few random bits that might feel out of place (mugging seem to involve small armies) but the overall shape of it works very well. This is hard enough to explain succinctly that I’m going to have to chew on it for a while to create a useful set of lessons for people who haven’t played the game, but if you do play it, take some time to think about how well it would migrate to tabletop.

The big lesson, and the one that really stayed with me as I played, was how strong the story/roleplaying side of it was. The fights were fun and all, but Bioware (as usual) brought really strong writing chops to bear, creating a situation full of well-motivated characters in conflict with one another and no clear solution. Part of why I’m so curious to replay the choices I made is that the game goes to great lengths to make sure they have teeth. A lot of times games will offer you choices, but there’s one obvious good choice, and you only take the others if you’re curious. DAII had more than a few points where the choices were all bad – not in a punitive way, but in a way that made total sense to what has happened. Things like a friend passionately and honestly wanting to do something that’s a terrible, terrible idea: you can be loyal to your friend and back their play, or you can (in their eyes) betray them. How do you want to play it?

Oh, and for the weasels (like me) out there who try for the middle path of compromise all the time, thinking that’s what the game wants? Yeah, that might work. Or it might mean you get BOTH bad outcomes. You’re often better off making real choices.

But here’s the thing: They managed to do this with a game that is really about button-mashing ass kicking. The mechanical parts of your character sheet have only a minimum of interplay with these choices. And that drove home a point for me: it’s a cop out to blame a system for “not supporting role-playing” – hard choices don’t care what system you use. If you’re not making them in your play, the problem is not mechanical.

Now, to head off the obvious protest, yes, obviously, some systems have built in hooks to drive things towards hard, meaningful choices, but the reality is those are just tools to help get there. The system can’t makes choices matter – at best it can force a pantomime of the act of making a hard decision. Choices matter because your game, at your table, either goes there or it does not. If the problem is that you don’t know _how_ to go there, then fine. It can be learned, there are tricks that can help get you there. If you want to reach that point, you can do it.

But if you know how, and especially if you know how well enough to complain that X or Y game doesn’t allow it, then you need to take a hard look at your table and decide if the problem is that you can’t face the hard choices, or that you don’t want to.

And if you don’t want to, that’s fine. But cop to it, don’t blame the system.

(I am, I know, more or less equating good roleplay with hard, meaningful choices. That’s not all there is to it, and there are a lot of assumptions in there about what hard and meaningful mean, but by and large, I think I’ll stick by it.)

Not Really Universal

Cam Banks, the brain in a jar over at Margaret Weis Productions, was pondering the future of games and cited a conversation where it seemed the desire was for “a unified set of RPG rules.”

Now, this was just a conversation, on the Internet no less, so it has just about the statistical significance of a gnat’s fart, but it caught my interest all the same. Follow RPGs for any period of time and you know that the demand for that unified ruleset is out there, serving as a holy grail for many would-be designers.

This is one of those ideas you buy or you don’t. I don’t, but I don’t hold it against anyone who does. The fact that I think it’s asking the wrong question is another gnat fart – more power to them for trying. My sole warning (and this applies to a lot of things): if you reach a point where you feel the only thing that has been missing in solving this big a problem is your unique insight, take that as a reason to re-examine your understanding of the problem.

Anyway, the reason that Cam turns this into an interesting discussion is that it speaks pretty directly to how Cortex Plus is positioning itself and attempting to address one common failing of universal RPGs – that a specific game can produce specific ends more effectively. The CP model, as seen in Leverage and Smallville, is a reasonably thin engine – just enough to tell you how to roll and read the dice and teach a few concepts – with a custom build to reflect the specifics of the game in question. Even setting aside my own fondness for Cortex Plus, this is a pretty smart model. Combine it with the fact that CP is one of the two post-4e game engines to really grab me (the other being Dragon Age) and you’ve got the formula for some good stuff.

Now, I’m not going to tout this as super novel. Frankly, it’s the model that White Wolf has been using forever, but without WW’s approach to setting. Nor am I saying this is a panacea – the reality is that as easy as it is to _say_ you just build on a light framework, it takes work. It is entirely possible to suck.

But what does intrigue me is the way the model creates a tiered structure. You have the core game, as held and owned by MWP, surrounded by a second tier of specific implementations (Smallville, Leverage). What grabs me is the third tier, the personal hacks, which are much more derived from the second tier than they are the first. That is to say, the core may remain important for communication and clarity, but the real fiddly bits are outside of it.

This is not to say that an industrious amateur couldn’t produce a tier-2 work. Such a thing will almost certainly happen. But for the vast majority of hackers, tier 3 is a sweet spot. They can pick and choose bits they like and add in only enough stuff to feel good about it. It’s like knitting without needing to make the yarn yourself. That’s a powerful place to be.

Will this stay interesting? I dunno. A lot will depend on what MWP does in the future and how they interact with the fan community. I have a lot of faith in Cam, but the future is fickle. But I’ll be curious to see how it goes since it’s such an interesting mix of classical and nouveau hacking that I expect very interesting things of it.

Necessity of Frustration

I am totally that guy who saves his RPGs regularly so I can go back and explore a different choice. I kept my thumb in the page of choose your own adventures too. I’m a completest, and I hate the idea that maybe I missed some interesting branch or event because of a bad choice early on, so I take steps to protect myself against it. I don’t think this is uncommon, though obviously it is a matter of degree.

Computer Games seem to be built on the same assumptions I’m making. Some of this is a function of the medium – if you can save and try something else, why wouldn’t you? – but some of it is also habit. We understand completion. Computers and computer interfaces are really good at expressing ideas like percentage complete, but more nuanced ideas can be harder to express within the medium. Most and least are easy, but fuzzy numbers are hard. Plus, for programmers, it’s stupid to build content to NOT use. Writing a game which a player will only experience a fraction of might be a great idea, but it’s a rough allocation of resources.

This point came to mind while listening to the excellent Walking Eye podcast featuring Ryan Macklin, John Wick and Eddy Webb. Unsurprisingly, it’s an great listen, but there’s a brief moment of talking about engagement in video games that left me chewing on my own experience and considering that the prices of a compelling narrative in play may be paid out of traditional gameplay rewards, and that price might be too high.

One of the hardest lessons in life is that everything you do is ten thousand things you don’t. This is an important thing to learn to understand yourself, and it’s also something important to understanding drama. A story that could only have ever gone one way is a poor start as a story, and dead weight as a game. Sure, you can get some mileage out of illusionary choices, or choices that exist solely within tight boundaries, but we’ve already milked those about as far as we can. If you accept that deeper, more personal drama in video games is a desirable outcome, then I suggest something more drastic is in order.

What is that something? If I had a whole answer to that, I’d be off in Austin making big bucks. But I have bits of it, and the bits I’m really staring down the barrel of is this: Meaningful choices demand that the paths not taken be rich, and doing that well demands a patience for waste and frustration which, I think, is far riskier than most game designers can afford.

Active Stats and Leverage

One other interesting thing that came out of the Leverage game at PAX-east was a discussion of stats. For those unfamiliar with the game, it’s worth noting that Leverage has some very normal stats (Strength, Agility and whatnot) but no “social” stat. This may seem a bit odd in the context of a game with such a strong social component, but it’s something the book tackles head on. See, it’s not that there’s no charisma equivalent, it’s that EVERYTHING is a charisma equivalent.

To illustrate that, let me point to the very specific case in the game that Logan Bonner‘s magnificent Grifter made more than a few rolls of “Strength + Grifter”. At first blush, that seems like a nonsensical combination, but that’s only the case if you think very literally. Instead, in this case, Strength also represented a kind of approach. The Grifter was coming across forcefully, relying on strength of personality (natch) to carry things through, so strength was the appropriate stat. If he’d been talking fast, it might have been Agility.

Using stats this way – to reflect HOW you do things, rather than what you do – is an idea I’ve grown more and more fond of with time, and I recently heard Cam Banks use the term “Active Stats” to describe them in conversation, and it’s stuck with me. It puts a lot more of play in the player’s hands, and that’s always a good thing.

Now, this is not always easy. Leverage’s stats are intentionally backwards compatible with previous Cortex products, if only to make things more familiar to old fans. This means the mapping of stats in this way is not always intuitive, and it’s a big reason why I tend to re-tune the stat list when I do a new hack. Interpreting active stats from an existing list is always going to be harder than starting from scratch.

This is why I was delighted to get a mail from Logan Bonner proposing the (awesomely named) FAQ hack for Leverage. While he didn’t call it such, he basically proposed a trio of active stats: Forceful, Analytical and Quick. He explicitly excluded an endurance-equivalent as out of genre (and he was right to do so) but in doing so he did a couple of things. First, he proposed a very workable hack – one I could totally get behind – but second he provided some independent confirmation of a suspicion of mine regarding the 4 core active building blocks.

See, my default active 4 are Force, Grace, Insight and Resolve, and the map directly to Force, Quickness, Analytical and the unused fourth. That pleased me because Logan’s a pretty sharp guy, and if we both hit on this same pattern, it suggests it may have some backbone.

Anyway, I mention this now for all you folks looking to hack Leverage and thinking about stats. I would absolutely encourage you to pursue an active stat model since I think you’ll find it a lot more rewarding in play, and I’d be very curious to hear if other people have active stat models of their own that differ from this 4 pointed structure.

A Tip for Masterminds

I only managed to run one game of Leverage at PAX, and despite my degraded health, I think it went decently well. I’ve found I like paying a lot of attention to what the group takes as their secondary role, since it often tells you a lot about what the group is really like. In this case, we had a lot of Hitter, with the non-violent Thief in the leadership role. The mastermind was the political guy, a former lawyer, and he did a great job with it, and at the same time underscored something that I’ve been doing to help out Masterminds.

See, a generic Mastermind is a little bit rough to really engage in play. It’s so open ended that unless you have a player who likes to scheme purely for the sake of scheming, the Mastermind can be left at something of a loose end. He can do things, certainly, but they’re not necessarily things that will distinguish him from the rest of the crew. Worse, the fact that he could do almost anything introduces a degree of option-induced paralysis.

To this end, I’ve started treating the Mastermind as something of a specialist – the Mastermind picks some arena of expertise, and within that, I just treat his knowledge as absolute. Nate Ford, for example, knows insurance in and out, which extends to things being insured. Other Masterminds might know taxes, high finance, the law or some other professional pursuits. Specialties might also be more abstract, like “being the guy who knows everyone” or the like – so long as the idea is very clear, then its probably workable.

This ends up making very little mechanical difference. Leverage characters are already awesome, and putting a a bit of spin on the awesome doesn’t actually shake up the table much. But what it does do is give the table a much stronger sense of what the Mastermind’s role is and how he contributes to the team. For the Mastermind’s player, it imposes fruitful limitations. Because the Mastermind has a clear strength, when in doubt, he knows he can play to it. It gives a lens to look at problems through, and that can be utterly invaluable. For the GM, it also makes it a lot clearer when Mastermind is the right thing to be rolled. Lastly, it has the thematic effect of giving the Mastermind a stronger connection to “the real world”, and given the source material, I think that’s pretty cool.

It’s a small thing, and like most good Leverage tricks it’s a bit of a con, but I put it out there for others who might find themselves in a similar situation.

Keeping Tempo in 4e

I often feel that the places that 4e falls down are often a result of false starts. The game may have the core of a good idea, but fail to pursue it far enough. One of the best examples of this is tempo – the pace of encounters.

Historically, D&D has had a problem with the “5 minute work day”, where players would load for bear and go into an encounter guns blazing, using all their big spells for a quick, decisive win. They would then withdraw and rest long enough to recover spells and repeat the process. Numerous GMing techniques have emerged over time to try to mitigate this behavior, and players have responded with more and more clever tricks. It’s simply such an effective technique that it will always have some allure.

4e took steps to reduce this by changing the power structure so there were fewer buffs (spells that enhanced a character over a period of time) and fewer one-shot abilities. Characters would always have their at-will powers and usually have their encounter powers, and that left only the daily abilities. This meant that there was no longer the problem of the “useless” magic user being left without options, and that was a big help, but there’s still some temptation to go whole hog with the dailies, then recover.

To offset this, 4e introduced a pair of tempo mechanics. First, you’d pick up one action point every 2 encounters, and if you took a long rest, your pool would reset back to 1 AP. Second, some of your magic items would get better after a certain number of encounters. The idea behind these mechanics was straightforward: to provide incentives to keep pushing on rather than just stop and replenish resources. It was a good idea, but fell short in practice. The magic item improvements were fiddly and rarely worth the effort, and the action point economy was…flawed. Setting aside spending limits and slow accumulation, there was a simple piece of math that if you used you AP in your first encounter, there were two ways to get it back: have another encounter or take a long rest. The optimal choice was pretty obvious.

But the thing is, I like the _idea_ of tempo a lot. I really want to give players a reason to conserve their dailies and push on without feeling like they’re being screwed.

One obvious fix is to change up the action point economy. Give more points, allow broader use of them and so on. This is an interesting enough topic in its own right, but I worry a little bit about it because decisions of use vs. stockpile always seem to work better on paper than they do in play. It tends to go to extremes of behavior very quickly.

So I’m now considering something much more simple: grant a tempo bonus equal to the number of encounters so far. That bonus applies to attacks and damage but not to defense. So after encounter #3, you’re at +3 to hit and +3 to damage.

Now, my first instinct was to back off from that as overwhelming, maybe cut it down to +1 per two encounters even, but I think that’s wrong. The bonus needs to be immediate and appealing enough to offset the loss of recovery, and by allowing it to escalate dramatically, you introduce some real choice. After the 5th encounter, you’re hell on wheels, but you are probably also very nearly dead on your feet. Do you take a break and give up that huge bonus, or do you push on and risk it? Remember, your defenses aren’t going up, so even though you can kill enemies more quickly and reliably, you’re still going to be taking hits.

To me, that feels like a more substantial choice. One with real opportunity costs, and one that invites more complex spending behavior than is currently encouraged. What’s more, once I get past that reflexive twitch against giving the players an ‘abusable’ option like this, I think about the things it invites (less whiffing, faster fights but with real risk) and the possibility that it moves the “sweet spot” a few encounters deeper into the dungeon, and I really like it. A lot. Enough that I wish I was running it right this second.