Ry
Explorer
I admit that I hand out a lot of Conviction. 6/day is a lot. But it's become the cornerstone of my games.
6/day has been the difference between a rinse-repeat dungeon run over a 3-day period and a continuous, dramatic assault on an enemy's stronghold.
But more importantly, Conviction is about sharing the spotlight. Everybody has this limited resource in the same supply, so everybody knows how much of a sacrifice it is to take that extra move action to get into range of the lich, and then roll 2d20 to make that hit that you hope to god downs it. So people pay attention when another player uses Conviction. Moreover, once one character's Conviction is used up, the other charcters - by virtue of still having Conviction left - proceed to take those important, central actions.
I am convinced that balance in an RPG is about what people are paying attention to.* If it stops on one PC too often, or we only care about the camera when it's on one PC, it's not balanced. If the camera moves from PC to PC and we care about each PC's actions, then it's very well balanced. Conviction has, in my experience, improved the balance of my game.
* (although there's something else, not quite the same as balance, that's about using appropriate challenges - I use monsters whose CRs are in the usual range, but I like to make my combats meaningful so that usually means there's a few more combatants, or the battle flows more naturally from one dungeon room to the next, making the situation more difficult to match with the action-drama vibe)
6/day has been the difference between a rinse-repeat dungeon run over a 3-day period and a continuous, dramatic assault on an enemy's stronghold.
But more importantly, Conviction is about sharing the spotlight. Everybody has this limited resource in the same supply, so everybody knows how much of a sacrifice it is to take that extra move action to get into range of the lich, and then roll 2d20 to make that hit that you hope to god downs it. So people pay attention when another player uses Conviction. Moreover, once one character's Conviction is used up, the other charcters - by virtue of still having Conviction left - proceed to take those important, central actions.
I am convinced that balance in an RPG is about what people are paying attention to.* If it stops on one PC too often, or we only care about the camera when it's on one PC, it's not balanced. If the camera moves from PC to PC and we care about each PC's actions, then it's very well balanced. Conviction has, in my experience, improved the balance of my game.
* (although there's something else, not quite the same as balance, that's about using appropriate challenges - I use monsters whose CRs are in the usual range, but I like to make my combats meaningful so that usually means there's a few more combatants, or the battle flows more naturally from one dungeon room to the next, making the situation more difficult to match with the action-drama vibe)
