2 powers everyone gets in Eberron. Please critique.

[cmrscorpio]

Perform a Trick (No Action; Encounter)
Effect: Gain a +5 bonus on your next skill-based action.
Special: You must describe the action so that it sounds cool.

Perform a Stunt (No Action; Daily)
Effect: On your next skill-based action, do not roll. Instead, assume you rolled a 10.
Special: You must describe the action so that it sounds awesome.

My goal in creating these powers is to replicate what 3.x Eberron Action Points did, which made the heroes in Eberron a little more over-the-top than the heroes in other settings.

 

[Fredrik Svanberg]

That's strange. My characters in our home-made setting are already way cooler than everything else without having these powers. What am I doing wrong?

 

[Arlough]

Perform a Trick (No Action; Encounter)
Effect: Gain a +5 bonus on your next skill-based action.
Special: You must describe the action so that it sounds cool.

Perform a Stunt (No Action; Daily)
Effect: On your next skill-based action, do not roll. Instead, assume you rolled a 10.
Special: You must describe the action so that it sounds awesome.

My goal in creating these powers is to replicate what 3.x Eberron Action Points did, which made the heroes in Eberron a little more over-the-top than the heroes in other settings.

Cool ideas. But I would make it a point based power, and make the points a DM rewards that is given liberally for pulling off (and describing) cool stuff. And yes, this does mean that someone can earn a point in an action pulled off by spending a point, but it has to be extra cool.

That's strange. My characters in our home-made setting are already way cooler than everything else without having these powers. What am I doing wrong?

This is a particularly unhelpful comment.
If someone is asking about a way to make the game more fun, then you should comment on how you think this will help or hurt game play.

 

[Fredrik Svanberg]

Very well, I will provide helpful commentary instead of joke commentary.

Perform A Stunt seems quite weak for a daily. "Taking 10" is something I would do on pedestrian activities, not awesome stunts. If it can only be used once a day, make it count.

 

[Siberys]

Cool ideas. But I would make it a point based power, and make the points a DM rewards that is given liberally for pulling off (and describing) cool stuff. And yes, this does mean that someone can earn a point in an action pulled off by spending a point, but it has to be extra cool.

I'd do this; mechanically, I'd probably base them off of bennies from Savage Worlds.

In fact, since I've already house-ruled Action Points to be an encounter power each PC gets, I just might do that.

 

[cmrscorpio]

Very well, I will provide helpful commentary instead of joke commentary.

Perform A Stunt seems quite weak for a daily. "Taking 10" is something I would do on pedestrian activities, not awesome stunts. If it can only be used once a day, make it count.

but, I worded the Perform a Trick so that it could be used in conjunction with Perform a Stunt. If you spend both of them, then it is a 15 before modifiers. I want this to be used in situation where the players are pretty sure they can accomplish something, but don't want to have to run the chance of rolling abysmally low. I didn't want to go higher than that because I didn't want to give the players an almost-guaranteed success, which is what a 20 would do. I wanted to leave a little doubt as to whether a roll might be better.

 

[aurance]

Perform A Stunt seems quite weak for a daily. "Taking 10" is something I would do on pedestrian activities, not awesome stunts. If it can only be used once a day, make it count.

It's not weak, because: 1) It's free, and 2) It provides a certain measure of guaranteed success for in-combat skill checks, when taking 10 would otherwise be unavailable.

 

[Wik]

With all due respect, I think the encounter power is a bad power to give to PCs, and in play will actually go against your main goal, which is to have PCs be "cool" and swash-buckly/high-action.

Essentially, what you are doing is granting a +5 bonus to any one skill check per encounter, at the "cost" of having the player describe it so that is cool. What you are doing is rewaring players for using their skills in combat (which is a good thing). However, most players will not use this +5 as a buffer to try out weaker skills, but instead as a means of guaranteed success at the skills they are good at. In addition, when it's compounded with other skill boosting powers (such as the bardic words of friendship, a +5 to diplomacy encounter power), you are essentially allowing an "I win" button.

Basically, instead of your power contributing to a "now I can jump off that airship onto that chandelier and then land on the bad guy's cape, tripping him!" you are instead allowing a "how can I use my already super high athletics skill to gain an in-game advantage?"

Players will quickly learn that it is in their best interest to spam their major skills. It happens.

This also changes the DC system in your campaign - if a hard DC is normally 23 for your level, this rule might change it to 25 or something. Fundamentally making harder tasks harder for those who used their power the way you intended them to do (using them to make awesome scenes, rather than to improve their odds of succeeding on difficult skill checks).

We have a bard in my campaign, and he'll use his encounter power whenever possible to guarantee success with diplomacy. It can be kind of annoying.

I think a better variant would be to expand upon what action points could do. Maybe action points allow re-rolls. Or grant extra saves. or something else. Personally, I allow players to negate conditions upon their characters with skill checks (but if they fail the check, the condition actually worsens).

 

[webrunner]

I've thought a lot about this, and thought about how Eberron lacks any sort of Action point flavor.. so I thought about something like this:

Eberron Action Point
Utility - Encounter
Trigger: You make a d20 roll
Requirement: You must have an action point
Effect: You spend an action point, and add 10 to the roll. If the resulting roll is above 20, it is considered critical, even if it normally could not critical (the DM decides what 'critical' means in these situations. Usually it means awesome) You may use this power even if you have previously used an action point this encounter or turn.

 

[Logos7]

The Thing is, the kewlness of taking an extra action or activating your paragon action point ability I think really outshines your stunts.

I think if you wanted to incorporate stunting, it may be easier to just steal someone elses system and weld it on. Try this

Whenever your characters does something awesome, they gain a +1d6 die to the d20 roll for that action. Whenever your character does something really awesome, they gain +2d6 bonus to their d20 roll and if they do something totally epic they gain +3d6 to their roll. THe Gm decides if something is appropriately awesome, really awesome or epic.

If you didn't want to mess around with the D6's you could have something like, whenever your character does something awesome, they roll their d20 normally but all results below 11 have 10 added to them. All results of this die that sum 20 are considered 'natural 'ie rolling 10+10 still counts as a crit, but 1+10 only counts as an 11 not a crit fail. etc