Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
ShortQuests -- Pocket Sized Adventures! An all-new collection of digest-sized D&D adventures designed for 1-2 game sessions.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kannik" data-source="post: 9877605" data-attributes="member: 984">I want to give this many thumbs up both for its sentiment and because it well articulates (in a way I might not have myself been able to put my finger on it).  Just about any mechanic has examples of where it was executed with great elegance and examples where it was poorly done.  Similarly, there are examples of inclusion in games where it supports and emphasizes from the games' intent/genre/tone/etc, and those where the mechanic undermines the same.  So yeah, to that end I am totally fine with the concept "spendable resources to fuel abilities" if the sum of all its  parts supports the game.  To use Reynard's examples, END in HERO was classic and I enjoyed it (even if doing supers today HERO wouldn't be my prime inclination anymore).  But the fueling resources in Draw Steel left me cold, perhaps because of their varied rates of accumulation that both felt arbitrary and that the difference didn't seem to affect the play or the narrative in a meaningful way.  The name escapes me at the moment, but there's an Anime-influenced RPG that tracks a couple of resources, one of which is needed to inflict stress/damage/whathave you on an opponent.  Except when you begin a scene, you have none of that resource.  You must instead generate it through other actions that don't directly "attack" the opponent but are more around the margins (could be social, might be throwing them off their game through verbal sparring, could be changing the environment, could be things like boxing them in or taking their stuff, or...).  This works to create the genre conventions that characters in stories don't go in and take down someone in one shot; they have to work hard to get them into a position where they become vulnerable and/or open for the attack.  Alpha striking is off the table.  (Though now that I think about it, there might be some mechanism where some amount of that resource could be banked or be made available so that opening with an alpha strike is possible for those perfectly dramatic moments.)</blockquote>

Verification