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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 4444391" data-attributes="member: 42582">Mustrum's idea of providing for varying distributions of narrative control is one idea (I put forward a similar suggestion for HARP in <a href="http://www.guildcompanion.com/scrolls/2007/mar/fatepointdevelopment.html" target="_blank">the Guild Companion</a> last year.)Other ideas are being put forward by Lost Soul in his very excellent "Emergent features of KoTS" thread.Thinking about the issue in general terms: in AD&D a wizard is, in a functional sense, forced to hoard a particular resource (namely, turns in combat in which the wizard makes little or no contribution) in return for being able to spend the hoarded resources all at once (by occasionally casting very powerful spells). The most common complaint about this mechanic is that it is boring (all that sitting around doing nothing between spells) and unreliable (because the GM can always fail to provide you with the encounters that would make your spells worthwhile).The solutions would then be to get rid of the boredom - by giving the player something active to do in the course of hoarding the resource - and to get rid of the unreliability - by shifting the metagame control from GM to player.In 4e, some monsters have hints of this sort of design - their first attack does comparatively little but it sets up their second attack to be a killer - but I haven't especially noticed it in the wizard power lists. But Warlocks seem to have something like it with their curses and pact boons - little actions performed round by round build up to a sort of crescendo of power. It is possible to envisage other versions of this (and maybe they are there but I haven't noticed them yet).Skill challenges can also perhaps support something like this - the wizard player can use Hard Arcana checks to aid another, thus contributing +2 bonuses to his/her allies, increasing the number of successes, and then (with the permission of the other players) narrate the success as resulting from the culmination of the wizard's magical power.The main challenge to this sort of design, I think, is to keep play interesting for the resource-hoarder. If this breaks down, then nova-ing, imbalance of narrative control between players, and/or the 15-minute day, are all lurking dangers.</blockquote>

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