NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8315383" data-attributes="member: 42582">Re-read the discussion of skill challenges in the Essentials rulebooks. You'll see that they adapt a variation of what you speculate about here: if in the course of the challenge a player wants to retry a particular skill (which is to say, wants to reengage the evolving situation using essentially the same strategy), then the GM is entitled to step up the difficulty of the check. And this also interacts with the rules around spending "advantages" for re-rolls etc.I don't think the concepts are fully developed - to begin with, it would benefit from explanatory text a bit like that provided by Robin Laws in his discussion of difficulty-setting in HeroQuest revised - but it's not hopeless either.I've been getting ready to play Agon 2nd ed, and it uses multiple player-side resource tracks - Bonds, Pathos, Divine Favour and Fate. The first three all allow building up the dice pool. The middle two also serve as "hit points" in a limited range of circumstances (by default there is no harm suffered by losing PCs in Agon). The last comes into play mostly when Pathos or Divine Favour have been exhausted but the rules tell the player to spend some. Unlike the first three Fate is never recovered, and when you run out your character's story is finished; but as you use up your Fate you also get character improvement.You earn Bond with your fellow PCs during downtime, at a fixed rate. You can also earn it by choosing a support action rather than a more full-blooded action in a contest. But if you do that you get less Glory from the contest; and Glory is the only way to grow your Name die, which is the only die you get to include in every contest dice pool as of right. You can also earn Bond with NPCs and gods as part of the stakes of a contest.Pathos is replenished automatically during down time between scenarios.Divine Favour is earned by pleasing the gods, which can be ad hoc - as part of the stakes of a contest - but is also addressed systematically during downtime, when it is determined which gods the PCs pleased and angered through their choices in the scenario. As well as earning Divine Favour, this process generates Wrath - a sort of Doom Pool for the GM to use in contests - and also can generate PC improvement without having to burn up Fate.Because I haven't played yet I haven't seen all the ways these multiple resource pools and recovery tracks interact. But the multi-dimensionality seems pretty interesting.So I don't think it's always desirable to merge resource pools. Even in 4e, I quite enjoyed the difference between healing surges, action points and encounter powers as distinct pools to be managed in combat. (In skill challenges I'll concede there is a tendency for them to meld into one omni-pool.)</blockquote>

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