Pathfinder 2E variant Hero Points

[CapnZapp]

I believe the RAW rule is strangely generous and stingy - at once. I clearly see the rule being geared towards tournament play where each of the four players gets rewarded by one hero point each during a four-hour session. For my home play, I don't like having to think about meta issues every hour, I don't want to hand out 8 hero points in an eight-hour session, and I definitely don't want players to start competing for my attention.

At the same time, getting a reroll does not guarantee success. The worse chance you have, the more worthless the hero point. In other words, you can't use them to take control over the narrative.

Auto-stabilising isn't exactly nothing, but you still die if your friends lose the fight. Again, the narrative power of the meta currency is almost entirely absent.

Here is a variant for those of you agreeing with my objections. It is inspired by Fate Points in Warhammer Fantasy Role-Play in how it injects Hero Points with some real oomph.

 

[CapnZapp]

Hero Points
These Hero Points work differently and replace the ones from the rulebook.

You start the campaign with 2 Hero Points. You gain one more for every adventure book after the first in the adventure path (each AP features six books), so your hero is meant to gain a total of ~7 Hero Points over twenty levels if you run your own adventures. You can never have more than 2 Hero Points, so if you don't use at least one during each book, you will waste them.

You can spend a Hero Point to gain one out of three benefits:
1) change a failure or critical failure your character just witnessed into a success, or change a success into a critical success
2) immediately gain and take 2 actions
3) be removed from current danger; personal survival ensured
You can spend one (or both) Hero Points at any time, not just during your own turn.

Details
1) Change a failure or critical failure your character just witnessed into a success, or change a success into a critical success.
Use this to ensure that your character succeeds where you feel failure would ruin the character's
story or reputation, or where you want to shine and a regular success doesn't cut it. You can choose to spend your Hero Point after seeing the result. You can improve the results of other characters, as long as your character is present during the scene (physically or otherwise).

2) Immediately gain and take 2 actions.
You gain 2 actions, and use them immediately. If you do this during your own turn, you have two
extra (normally 5) actions to mix and match as you please. If you do this during another character's
turn, you interrupt them. Consider this to be a free action with the trigger "at any time, for any
reason" (see page 461). Your initiative is not changed. You can do this to jump out of harm's way,
cast a spell quickly, or use a skill before it's too late.

3) Be removed from current danger; personal survival ensured.
This is a genuine "extra life" where you and the GM comes up with a story of how you end up alive,
despite the odds. Spending a Hero Point this way will take you out of action and out of the scene.
Classic examples: you fall from a cliff but a thorny brush catches your fall. You're in a shipwreck,
but wash up ashore on a foreign beach. You're a soldier losing a battle, but are left for dead and
wake up bloody beneath some dead bodies.

Even assured death can be averted – if you fall unconscious on the elemental plane of fire,
something makes you survive! (Perhaps a fluke portal whisks you to safety, or perhaps you
spontaneously gain temporary fire immunity?) Spending a Hero Point this way only saves you (and
your gear) personally. You can't save your friends and allies this way, only yourself. At the very
least you're preventing a Total Party Kill.

Zapp

 

[dave2008]

I like all of this except option #3, I don't like being forced to develop a story reason for the character to survive when there is no logical reason other than Deus Ex Machina

 

[CapnZapp]

I like all of this except option #3, I don't like being forced to develop a story reason for the character to survive when there is no logical reason other than Deus Ex Machina

Just to say nobody's forcing anyone

I don't mean "don't use the rule if you don't want to". I mean that over decades of GMing and playing WFRP every resistance against full and unrestricted protection have crumbled.

I too began by saying "...within reasonable bounds" (waking up beneath a few dead bodies is more "reasonable" than the being-washed-ashore cliché which is more "reasonable" than the villain overexplaining his plan for so long you manage to escape and so on and so on...)

In the end, with accumulated experience, it turns out that you don't want to have to make a split-second judgement call whether a player's beloved character is permadead or not.

Plus - isn't there a more important opinion? That of the player!

If the player feels survival is ridiculous, the problem is solved. He or she simply doesn't spend a fate hero point, accepts his heroic sacrifice, and the rule still works as intended.


What I've learned from experience is that the story belongs to the players. If the player is okay with chaos portals or Bond villains saving her character from certain death I'm probably okay with it too!

If you don't feel like coming up with the story, ask the player to do it. By definition, anything he or she suggests is something he or she can live with. As long as you avoid playing with immature munchkins, (I myself play with mature munchkins ) you'll be surprised how well this turns out.

Thanks though for giving me this opportunity to expound

 

[dave2008]

Just to say nobody's forcing anyone

I don't mean "don't use the rule if you don't want to". I mean that over decades of GMing and playing WFRP every resistance against full and unrestricted protection have crumbled.

I too began by saying "...within reasonable bounds" (waking up beneath a few dead bodies is more "reasonable" than the being-washed-ashore cliché which is more "reasonable" than the villain overexplaining his plan for so long you manage to escape and so on and so on...)

In the end, with accumulated experience, it turns out that you don't want to have to make a split-second judgement call whether a player's beloved character is permadead or not.

Plus - isn't there a more important opinion? That of the player!

If the player feels survival is ridiculous, the problem is solved. He or she simply doesn't spend a fate hero point, accepts his heroic sacrifice, and the rule still works as intended.


What I've learned from experience is that the story belongs to the players. If the player is okay with chaos portals or Bond villains saving her character from certain death I'm probably okay with it too!

If you don't feel like coming up with the story, ask the player to do it. By definition, anything he or she suggests is something he or she can live with. As long as you avoid playing with immature munchkins, (I myself play with mature munchkins ) you'll be surprised how well this turns out.

Thanks though for giving me this opportunity to expound

I don't disagree with any of this, it is just not something I'm comfortable with. I'm not sure about my players. I give them a lot of agency, but never tried something quite like this. Not sure how they would react.

 

[kenada]

I believe the RAW rule is strangely generous and stingy - at once. I clearly see the rule being geared towards tournament play where each of the four players gets rewarded by one hero point each during a four-hour session. For my home play, I don't like having to think about meta issues every hour, I don't want to hand out 8 hero points in an eight-hour session, and I definitely don't want players to start competing for my attention.

I think this is an astute observation, but it’s also easy to just ignore the guideline. I’ve started handing out hero points much more liberally (essentially, whenever someone does something entertaining or awesome, or when there’s MVP). When in doubt, hand them out (so to speak).

Of course, my players seem keen to accumulate theirs without using them, so I’ve added a couple of uses to entice them to spend their points more often. We just started doing it, but they seem more excited about the possibilities than before.

• Spend 1 Hero Point to have a flashback where you retroactively prepare for the current situation. Flashbacks must not create paradoxes in the fiction, and they are subject to approval by consensus.
• Spend 1 Hero Point to increase the result of another player’s roll by one step. This is not a fortune effect.

You can spend a Hero Point to gain one out of three benefits:
1) change a failure or critical failure your character just witnessed into a success, or change a success into a critical success
2) immediately gain and take 2 actions
3) be removed from current danger; personal survival ensured
You can spend one (or both) Hero Points at any time, not just during your own turn.

I think #1 is fine (obviously, since it mirrors one of my own additions), and #2 is suitably strong given the relative rarity of hero points. #3 reminds me of conceding in Fate. If someone chooses to survive, do they suffer any repercussions? Can players use it tactically (e.g., I go on a suicide mission then spend the point to not die at the end)?

 

[CapnZapp]

Actually, it doesn't mirror my #1. I consciously decided against "increase the result by one category" implementation - converting a critical failure to a failure just doesn't cut it, meaning it doesn't give the Hero Point enough power; from a narrative viewpoint you need the power to convert a failure into a success just as much when you roll 1 as when you roll, say, 4.

Just wanting to point out the difference. Maybe a small one, but one I feel is important enough to mention.

 

[CapnZapp]

#3 might resemble Fate, since that's a narratively strong rpg. But as I said, it's directly lifted from WFRP, a much more "classic" old school game.

And no, I would say it counts as abuse to use Fate Points to survive suicide missions. But that's a valid point, since already the 1st edition of WFRP contained the mechanism (so I'm sure it has been discussed several times over the decades since!).

Here's the original definition (I've checked; it matches pages 15 and 74 of the original book):

Fate Points

Fate is the essential difference that marks the character as an adventurer, rather than an ordinary run-of-the-mill citizen. Adventurer characters have a destiny, a mission, a definite goal in life. They may not be aware of what this is. It may not be very glorious, it may not even be...

wfrp1e.fandom.com

The first paragraphs (up until the table) was in the players' section. The remainder is from the GM's section. Here are some choice excerpts (remember, this stuff is from all the way back in 1986 )

Fate Points are powerful things and players should be reminded that they are precious.

The function of Fate Points is threefold:

First, they allow our Heroes to make miraculous escapes, as in all the best adventure stories. Adventurers can dodge falling stone blocks by a whisker, survive slipping off a cliff by landing in a convenient patch of bushes, run unscathed through a hail of arrows, and so on. With hairs-breadth escapes and twists of fate, players are willing to risk their characters, making for a faster and more exciting game than would otherwise be the case.

Secondly, Fate Points reflect the idea that our heroes have a destiny which sets them above the rest of the world. Just as in films, John Wayne can make it to the machine-gun nest with marines being cut down around him, so our adventurers can take great risks - and get away with them.

Lastly, combat is more dangerous than in other RPGs. This is partly because combat is dangerous in real life and partly because if combat is always the easy way out, players will be less inclined to try something a little more subtle, like thinking! Obviously, there will be some occasional when fighting is the only course of action and, even in the ordinary run of things, characters can get killed very easily if the players don't learn caution.

I would say there's a difference between taking risks, making miraculous escapes and whatnot on one hand, and directly gaming the mechanism on the other. In the four decades I've played and GM'd Warhammer, the issue has never come up, honestly.

This is because it is still under the Games Master's power to describe how the player character survives. If the players start trying to pull off stunts like this, tell them their character survives... but only wakes up after a month in a coma... or finds him- or her-self alive, but imprisoned in a Dimensional Gate...

...but all that is the old tired antagonistic GM:ing style that never actually works. If the players aren't genuinely "on board" as it were, there is nothing you can do, and I suspect you would have issues even if you scrap Hero Points entirely.

That is, the Hero Point usage isn't the disease, it's a symptom. You need to talk to your players. It isn't the job of a game mechanic (like Hero Points) to keep players in check. That job belongs to the players.

That is, it shouldn't be hard to arrive at a consensus with your players on what kinds of stories you want to tell. Talk to your players. Trust them.

That, or get a new crew to play with.

 

[dave2008]

Do you find the game needs hero points? It is not a mechanic I like conceptually, but I have never really played with either. My instinct is to drop them all together.

 

[CapnZapp]

Do you find the game needs hero points? It is not a mechanic I like conceptually, but I have never really played with either. My instinct is to drop them all together.

We played out first mini-campaign without any Hero Point mechanic at all.

Now, as I'm headed into my very first official Paizo adventure path (Extinction Curse) I wanted to adhere closer to the intended ruleset.

I couldn't live with the Hero Points of the CRB, so I'm using this variant.

At least the players get some kind of Hero Point! That's better than no kind, right?