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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Staffan" data-source="post: 8921246" data-attributes="member: 907">TORG Eternity's Destiny cards and the way they interplay with combat encounters.A Destiny card generally gives the player a momentary bonus of some sort – a reroll, a bonus to any or a subset of actions, turning an opponent's roll into a failure, and so on. There are also some that affect how other cards are played or refill your hand and such. However, once in combat or other encounter situation, you can't play these cards directly from your hand. Instead you need to put them into your "pool", meaning face-up on the table in front of you, one per round. Once in your pool, you can also trade them with other players.The effect is that you build up a collective party resource over the course of an encounter. This lets you turn a seemingly dire situation into something the PCs can actually win, snatching victory from the jaws of defeat. The Escalation Die in 13th Age serves a similar role but without creating its own mini-game. Whether that's a good or bad thing is a matter of taste.FATE's Aspects and Fate Points are also a really cool mechanic, particularly as expressed in the Dresden Files RPG.Depending on the campaign's power level, each character has a certain "Base Refresh". If you have no special abilities, this is the minimum number of Fate points you start each session with. Should you have ended the last session with more than that, you get to keep the excess. Every special ability or "stunt" (a special ability letting you use a skill in a different way than usual or better in a specialized situation) costs one or more of this refresh. Fate points are used to boost rolls and to trigger various abilities as well as some amount of "dramatic editing" ("Of course I brought my handcuffs!").Aspects are true statements about your character, and are linked to Fate points. One of these is your character concept, another is your Trouble, and the rest are just things that are true. Aspects are generally double-edged swords: they can be both good or bad. In a circumstance where an aspect is good, that's easy: spend a Fate point to reroll something or get a bonus. In a circumstance where it could potentially be negative, things get a little more interesting. The GM can "compel" an aspect by saying "Wouldn't it be really interesting if X happened right now?" The player then has the option to either accept the compel and get a Fate point for their trouble, or reject it by paying a Fate point. For example, if you have the aspect "Defender of the innocent" and you're defending someone, you can spend Fate points to help with the fighting. But in another situation, someone might come to you and ask for help, and to turn them down you need to spend a Fate point.The effect here is that people with lots of supernatural powers will naturally have a lower Refresh, which means they have fewer Fate points. That means they literally have less control of their fate. From a meta-game perspective, they will need to accept more compels and get into more trouble to get the fate points they need to spend for other stuff. Power has a price.First game I saw them in was Advanced Marvel Super Heroes, published in 1986 (the Basic set also had a Resources stat, but that only gave you a particular income in resource points, you rarely rolled it).</blockquote>

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