Fate Points in Champions?

[Grow-Arm-Hair Lad]

9 minutes ago, Christopher R Taylor said:

Given how few xp you get in Hero and that they directly apply to permanent character upgrades there's no situation I can imagine in which it would be worth it to me to sacrifice an experience point for one roll in a game session.

 

Fair point. I was thinking the same thing, something more like one xp buys a +2 or 2 sixes...? (For a rewind.)

And +4 or 4 guaranteed sixes if declared before...?

 

And you could mix and match--you could say I want a +1 to my roll and to flip one damage die to a six for 1xp.

Or is even this too dear?

 

Honestly, over the years I have worried less about advancing my character with xp points. It's been stated many times on these forums that supers rarely change in comics. Sometimes they get a car or a new sidekick or a new gadget, but nothing like what the Hero system provides.

 

And I like that our characters evolve in Champions. It's cool. We're not writing a comic, we're playing an rpg. I get it. But for me, I'm seeing situations where I'd like to see xp used to make a guaranteed heroic action work rather than depending on the GM to fudge the dice rolls for dramatic effect.

Edited May 31, 2023 by Grow-Arm-Hair Lad

[Scott Ruggels]

7 hours ago, Grow-Arm-Hair Lad said:

 But for me, I'm seeing situations where I'd like to see xp used to make a guaranteed heroic action work rather than depending on the GM to fudge the dice rolls for dramatic effect.

It is that “guarantee”, that I take as the root of my objections.  Shifts it from a game, to a work of player fiction. 

[Lord Liaden]

If such adjustments are left to GM's discretion, I would assume they would only be made in exceptional circumstances. That's certainly how I approached the issue.

 

If you can't trust your GM to not be abusive, nor to let your well-earned victory fall to blind luck, IMHO you're in the wrong game group.

Edited June 1, 2023 by Lord Liaden

[Grow-Arm-Hair Lad]

12 hours ago, Christopher R Taylor said:

Given how few xp you get in Hero and that they directly apply to permanent character upgrades there's no situation I can imagine in which it would be worth it to me to sacrifice an experience point for one roll in a game session.

 

Some of the resistance is the idea of it being a guarantee. I understand that, and I have mixed feelings about that. But I think that's what Karma or Fate Points kind of promise? I could be wrong. Maybe Fate and Karma and the Hero points in 6e only give you an increased probability of succeeding at something important.

 

I agree that a guarantee is not the right word or mechanism.

 

I don't really want to add a new type of points to my game (like how 6e presents it, if I'm understanding that correctly). I think I do want Hero xp to act like FASERIP Karma, which, IIRC, can be used to improve your character or instead be "burned" to do something cool.

 

So, if I were to use xp like Karma, how many xp should be used to accomplish what die bonus?

 

(If you're dead set against the idea, coolcoolcool, but if you're seeing how this might be along the lines of Karma instead of bringing in a new currency in Hero, help me make this close to FASERIP.)

 

 

[Khymeria]

37 minutes ago, Grow-Arm-Hair Lad said:

(If you're dead set against the idea, coolcoolcool, but if you're seeing how this might be along the lines of Karma instead of bringing in a new currency in Hero, help me make this close to FASERIP.)

 

 

In FASERIP you can spend as much as necessary to make the roll (it’s been a few decades) but it took piles of Karma to raise something or get a new power so the system was more built around you spending your “xp” to influence rolls rather than build up or out. In Hero System even a couple XP can get you an improvement somewhere. They are a bit of different beasts. 
 

I might consider just rewarding “one HAP” when a complication is roleplayed, the focus of an adventure, or otherwise comes up in a story enhancing way. This will make players take more pertinent complications and lean into them possibly instead of downplaying them. If you handed out HAP and the player could roll 4 dice and pick the best three for example on a roll, it doesn’t guarantee but it does create a very likely situation. 

[Grow-Arm-Hair Lad]

14 hours ago, Scott Ruggels said:

It is that “guarantee”, that I take as the root of my objections.  Shifts it from a game, to a work of player fiction. 

 

Maybe. But that's why the cost should be prohibitive is what I'm saying.

 

Like, looking back at Christopher R Taylor's example of the cool moment that was ruined by rolling all ones, if his character had 3xp that he hadn't spent, and he saw those ones and the GM said, "Hey, if you burn those 3xp, I'll let you have your moment," I'm thinking some players would take that offer. 

 

I'm seeing it less as giving the player the driver's seat and more as a very rare moment where the player can pull a victory out of her butt.

 

It would work well in my campaigns because I do have PC death on the table. I do let the characters fail sometimes. But there have been times in the past where I misread the importance of moment to a specific player, and that player has been crestfallen, and this mechanism would be an ace-in-the-hole to make sure everyone feels heroic at the most key moments.

 

For me personally, I don't use xp so much as a player anymore. So I would have 100% burned 3xp to make (i.e. "fix") that roll that Christopher Taylor mentioned earlier on this thread.

 

I think the FASERIP developers had a good idea, and that I want to adapt it in my Champions game. So, even if you wouldn't do it yourself as a GM, I'm asking y'all to put on your thinking caps and consider it an intellectual exercise.  How much would you have the player burn in Christopher R Taylor's example, would you allow it after the fact, and what value/power would 1xp have?

Edited June 1, 2023 by Grow-Arm-Hair Lad

[Doc Democracy]

3 hours ago, Grow-Arm-Hair Lad said:

Like, looking back at Christopher R Taylor's example of the cool moment that was ruined by rolling all ones, if his character had 3xp that he hadn't spent, and he saw those ones and the GM said, "Hey, if you burn those 3xp, I'll let you have your moment," I'm thinking some players would take that offer. 

 

Hmm.  I think that I would be loathe to burn 3XP on that.  I might want to ask Christopher if he REALLY wants to make this work.  If so, the dice say he doesn't but the universe might simply be saying he doesn't get it without cost - what lasting damage might result from it.  We could agree that, after the session we could sit down and consider a complication we might add to the character sheet (we can work out if he also gains some XP to spend due to the additional complication).

 

Doc

[Duke Bushido]

14 hours ago, Grow-Arm-Hair Lad said:

, looking back at Christopher R Taylor's example of the cool moment that was ruined by rolling all ones,

 

 

 

See?  I _live_ for moments like that in a game.

 

When you tell the stories of game sessions long ago, how many tales do you tell of "everything went exactly the way I expected / wanted"  versus the number of tales you tell of the most miraculous and the most miserable of die rolls?

 

And even when it's bad dice, the tales most often have further tales of the astounding ways you coped on the fly.

 

They are more memorable than "I re-rolled it until I got what I wanted" or "I burned some brownie points to make come out fine."

 

 

10 hours ago, Doc Democracy said:

, the dice say he doesn't but the universe might simply be saying he doesn't get it without cost - what lasting damage might result from it.  We could agree that, after the session we could sit down and consider a complication we might add to the character sheet 

 

 

Yet another thing I enjoy about wild die rolls.  How does it affect the game?  What do we as a group do to keep things moving?

 

 

Anyway, I know that you aren't me, but other than Scott, I am rather in the minority here on the "don't like them" side of "how do we change the dice?"

 

I mean, we don't have to use them at all- there are lots of systems that don't.  I find little reason to use them right up until I am not happy with them.

 

Or maybe I am happy with then no matter what, as they are extremely impartial arbiters of what went down and what we have to deal with now.

 

 

Edited June 1, 2023 by Duke Bushido

[dmjalund]

a third option is to only allow brownie points to turn fails into fail-forwards

[Duke Bushido]

42 minutes ago, dmjalund said:

a third option is to only allow brownie points to turn fails into fail-forwards

 

 

More reasonable, I think, but,you don't really need points for that, either.  If that is how you want to roll, you are much more likely to just play that way.  With the points, the GM has to alter the follow-up into a fail forward.  There is nothing stopping him from doing that without the points.

 

In this case, the onky thing the points are doing is limiting the  number of times you can fail forward versus a regular fail, which, if the group is more "I prefer a lighter tone" or "let's not have horrible failures, but maybe lucky setbacks," is ultimately just going to be _more_ frustrating, I think, when there srent enough points to do the thing the pleasant way.

 

 

 

 

[Christopher R Taylor]

OK If I was going to make this work, I would multiply everything by 10.  So you build characters on 1000 points, not 100, Strength costs 10 points per 1 STR, not 1, and so on.  Then if you spend 1 xp to adjust a roll, that investment feels doable, its not that penalizing, but does involve a cost.

[Khymeria]

34 minutes ago, Christopher R Taylor said:

OK If I was going to make this work, I would multiply everything by 10.  So you build characters on 1000 points, not 100, Strength costs 10 points per 1 STR, not 1, and so on.  Then if you spend 1 xp to adjust a roll, that investment feels doable, its not that penalizing, but does involve a cost.

This is what I was trying to get at when I pointed out the difference in Karma in the FASERIP system and Experience Points in Hero System. If you earn 450 Karma in an adventure and it costs a thousand Karma to raise a stat or power, than you might spend 45 points in an adventure boosting misses to hits or yellow results to red roll. I don't think it is an attractive player option to even spend one XP out of 10 to boost a single roll. Especially if it only costs 2 XP to get a +1 with their punch for example. It hasn't been mentioned I believe, but this all pretty much sounds like some use of LUCK, which is fairly underused in games but with a bit of tailoring to the campaign could probably handle the whole thing.

[Scott Ruggels]

18 hours ago, Grow-Arm-Hair Lad said:

Maybe. But that's why the cost should be prohibitive is what I'm saying.

 

Like, looking back at Christopher R Taylor's example of the cool moment that was ruined by rolling all ones, if his character had 3xp that he hadn't spent, and he saw those ones and the GM said, "Hey, if you burn those 3xp, I'll let you have your moment," I'm thinking some players would take that offer. 

 

18 hours ago, Grow-Arm-Hair Lad said:

 

Like Duke, I live for those “all ones”, situations. Those are the stories I prefer rather than the player fiction that a lot of modern games pursue. 
 

18 hours ago, Grow-Arm-Hair Lad said:

I'm seeing it less as giving the player the driver's seat and more as a very rare moment where the player can pull a victory out of her butt.

 

For us, victory was achieved by teamwork, and coordination, rather than an expectation of a single team member clocking the bad guy with a perfectly timed soliloquy and punch. I will admit, that on the subject of superheroes, I am Lukewarm, but will play with good GMs and I had an embarrassment of riches, with my high school group, The Heroes of Hero Games, and the ‘zine writers. But other than Champions, I didn’t seek it out. Therefore I have no experience with other superhero systems like FASERIP. Most other systems seemed illogical when compared to Champions. 

 

18 hours ago, Grow-Arm-Hair Lad said:

 

It would work well in my campaigns because I do have PC death on the table. I do let the characters fail sometimes. But there have been times in the past where I misread the importance of moment to a specific player, and that player has been crestfallen, and this mechanism would be an ace-in-the-hole to make sure everyone feels heroic at the most key moments.

 

For me personally, I don't use xp so much as a player anymore. So I would have 100% burned 3xp to make (i.e. "fix") that roll that Christopher Taylor mentioned earlier on this thread.

 

I think the FASERIP developers had a good idea, and that I want to adapt it in my Champions game. So, even if you wouldn't do it yourself as a GM, I'm asking y'all to put on your thinking caps and consider it an intellectual exercise.  How much would you have the player burn in Christopher R Taylor's example, would you allow it after the fact, and what value/power would 1xp have?

If the moment is supposed to be that important, then why does it require a die roll in the first place? The GM could just hand it to the player, if it is that important. A lot of incidents occur in a character’s blue book without rolls. Another way to handle it would be to hand the players a card that just has “successful roll, can only be used once. Choose wisely. “. This also decouples it from the experience points. 
 

Now I took a more sports oriented attitude about victories in Champions games. It was a team effort, won through effective teamwork, tactical coordination, knowledge and research (detective work by the team), and training (we would game danger room scenarios to try new formations and tactics). Sometimes team members had dice lice and could not roll below a 15 all night, but that’s when the other team members could cover for them. But if it’s important for that one player to get their “one, shining moment of awesome”, then allow them the card. Otherwise it’s nearly alien to me, unless it was a team effort. 

 

 

 

[Doc Democracy]

5 hours ago, Christopher R Taylor said:

OK If I was going to make this work, I would multiply everything by 10.  So you build characters on 1000 points, not 100, Strength costs 10 points per 1 STR, not 1, and so on.  Then if you spend 1 xp to adjust a roll, that investment feels doable, its not that penalizing, but does involve a cost.

 

But there is no need for that.  Award HAP instead of XP, used HAP become XP and you can buy powers with XP and HAP.  It delivers a little extra flexibility for players.  If you want that in your game, the opportunity is already there.

[Mr. R]

On 5/31/2023 at 6:56 AM, Grow-Arm-Hair Lad said:

 

This is exactly the situation I am thinking of.

Honestly, I've been playing Champions a long time. I respect that everyone has a different take on this. But after reading the responses so far, I really believe the "one xp to raise the roll by one" is the answer here.

 

In Christopher R Taylor's example, I would say you could use one xp to flip any of those dice from a "1" to a "6".

 

So my rule would be: "Use 1xp to raise any roll by 1 or to flip any die on a damage roll to a 6."

 

And, using xp in this way will be allowed after the fact. So if you blow the roll, you can rewind and use as much xp as necessary to make it a success.

 

I would consider an additional rule: You can use xp to raise your roll by two and flip two dice to 6 if you declare before the roll. So you get a better deal if you worry about it ahead of time than rewinding after you have failed.

 

Thoughts?

 

View my comment above about a PC falling behind.  Given your usual roll for damage is 8-10 dice, this means, in the case mentioned, burning at least 6-8 exp.  At 1-2 exp per session, that is four sessions minimum, six on average.  What can I get for 6-8 exp?

 

Two new skills

+1 all combat

A new talent or two

+3" fly at 1/2 end

Yeah..... no thanks.

 

Please get away from this idea of burning exp. for dice rolls.  It looks cool, but in reality it is a death spiral as the PC that uses it is now in a hole compared to the rest of the group.

 

I am going to go heretical here and refer to ADnD.  For the quick benefit now, you get NO Exp. for the next 4-6 sessions.  It matters not the level, you get NO EXP.  Now all you group mates are at least one and maybe two levels higher, with the extra to hit, HP, skills, skill checks, spells, special abilities.  NOPE!

[Grow-Arm-Hair Lad]

I want to be clear about presenting this Fate Points idea--I think it could really work and improve the game. I re-offered it as a mental exercise because I still wanted to utilize the brain power of those turned off by the idea itself.

 

I am honestly, as a player, closest to Doc Democracy and Scott Ruggels and Duke Bushido. I have blown my rolls many times. I have even had superhero PC's die from a bad roll--when I first started gaming in the 80s--but as my group got a handle on the spirit of Champions, that kind of thing never happened.

 

I am very much a "let the chips fall where they may" type person in Champions, as a player. My current quest for this new "xp as Fate Points" comes from playing a lot of Champions games online. I find this group of new players really wants more narrative control as compared to players who have grown into the system. I don't think that's a bad thing or a game breaker. So this is a compromise that might allow for more new players to join in.

 

This has been my experience and I'm offering up this anecdotal data for analysis and attack.

 

GMing is an art. If you have someone new to Champions, a new GM, they don't often GM it the way I would. You will usually get a very literal "the roll is the roll" style of GMing. So a situation like the example I keep referring to with Christopher happens. And what is the solution? We all see that the GM should step in and make it more narratively effective, or else go with "the roll is the roll": i.e., the hero fails and we move along and work towards a win later in the story instead of the cool moment that would have tied it up nicely. But the other kind of player, they want the scene settled with the nice, immediate resolution. You're still building trust at this point. So, since I don't have any Hero gamers in my area and I play online, I have to find a way to work with the players that I pull together. 

 

So I'm GMing and often everyone wants the rolls on the table for everyone to see. Some of us here do it that way. When I GMed a lot of tabletop I kept the rolls hidden 95% of the time and rolled sometimes in front of the group and went with "the roll is the roll" when it was a visible roll. But, when I play with the online players, if I do a "roll is the roll" and their character fails...sometimes they just kind of quietly quit the game. Not because they are sulking, but because we've put all this work into the game (building a Champions character for the first time!) and we reach this critical moment and they are constantly evaluating whether the game is worth their time investment. So a failure early on is a downer and it's read as a "so this is how the game is going to be" moment.

 

So I thought about a way that could prevent that icky moment from discouraging new players. 

 

If I was playing with my old group, we would have giggled the heck out of this idea. But I really like the fresh players who turn up for my games. I want them to stay. They often make decisions and comments I would never have considered. They are hilarious. They are brave. They get the genre. But we are not a group of people who sit at a table in the real world and have a social contract with one another. I used to go to the same school as all of the players in my original group. Champions was maybe 15% of what we did together. That's a different situation, is what I'm saying.

 

People wonder why it's challenging to attract new players to Hero, why everyone doesn't embrace Champions as the One True System. (It really is. I love it to death.) But many of us adherents started with these groups where we were socially attached, socially obligated. I'm currently playing in games where this is the first exposure to the Hero system for half or more of the players, and I am finding it wanting in this exact way.

 

I'm not at all annoyed or bitter when I write all of this. (In fact, I may not even be right.) As always, bouncing an idea off you folks has led me to a moment of better understanding, I think. If I asked this question anywhere else, I wouldn't have figured out anything.

 

PS: The xp as Fate, that's just because I really don't worry that much about xp as a player anymore. A good GM can have a freshly-made character and one with 100 points of xp operate together seamlessly. However, most people do care about xp and character advancement. I realize I am in the tiny minority on that. I think that the players I am trying to keep wouldn't like xp as Fate, because they do want character advancement. So I'm seeing Doc's idea as probably what I will go with:

16 hours ago, Doc Democracy said:

 

Award HAP instead of XP, used HAP become XP and you can buy powers with XP and HAP.  It delivers a little extra flexibility for players.  If you want that in your game, the opportunity is already there.

 

Edited June 3, 2023 by Grow-Arm-Hair Lad

[Khymeria]

2 hours ago, Grow-Arm-Hair Lad said:

People wonder why it's challenging to attract new players to Hero, why everyone doesn't embrace Champions as the One True System. (It really is. I love it to death.) But many of us adherents started with these groups where we were socially attached, socially obligated. I'm currently playing in games where this is the first exposure to the Hero system for half or more of the players, and I am finding it wanting in this exact way.

First good on you for wanting to share the system with new players. The fact that you have a lot of new players in your group is a great opportunity. I think it’s great to seek the advice of the hive mind as well. 
 

You could give out some HAP and as a twist to keep the new blood, and all players engaged really, allow them to spend it on teammates rolls as well as their own. But, encourage them to set up the event with a bit of description. New players are great and I would drop rules while the basics get learned and then add in fiddly bits later, but new players, especially ones coming from other systems, might like this gimmick. 

[Ninja-Bear]

On 6/1/2023 at 6:42 PM, Duke Bushido said:

 

 

See?  I _live_ for moments like that in a game.

 

When you tell the stories of game sessions long ago, how many tales do you tell of "everything went exactly the way I expected / wanted"  versus the number of tales you tell of the most miraculous and the most miserable of die rolls?

 

And even when it's bad dice, the tales most often have further tales of the astounding ways you coped on the fly.

 

They are more memorable than "I re-rolled it until I got what I wanted" or "I burned some brownie points to make come out fine."

 

 

 

 

Yet another thing I enjoy about wild die rolls.  How does it affect the game?  What do we as a group do to keep things moving?

 

 

Anyway, I know that you aren't me, but other than Scott, I am rather in the minority here on the "don't like them" side of "how do we change the dice?"

 

I mean, we don't have to use them at all- there are lots of systems that don't.  I find little reason to use them right up until I am not happy with them.

 

Or maybe I am happy with then no matter what, as they are extremely impartial arbiters of what went down and what we have to deal with now.

 

 

Well I had player in Star Wars D6 who burnt character rolls like candy and still couldn’t make his target number and its still just memorable. I’ve also made bad rolls where a HAP really would’ve helped. Jumping over a person and landing on a small child really ruined that game. GM later admitted that that was something he shouldn’t allow to happen.  Still memorable but for the wrong reasons. The point of the game is to have fun and a little bit of fantasy fulfillment correct? Correct use of HAPs doesn’t take away from it.   

[Cloppy Clip]

I think some form of HAP are an important addition to the system as long as they're easy to remove for groups that have decided they don't need them, because this is at the end of the day a social game played by friends, and if everyone in the group agrees the result decided by the dice isn't doing it for them personally then a system that lets you tweak what happened without having to throw out all the rules and go freeform gives your group a useful tool to play with. There are problems with making spending XP the only way to affect things, because it puts players in the unenviable position of pitting permanent power against temporary power and will likely end up frustrating a number of them no matter how well you balance the trade-offs, but I can see there being promise of it as an option alongside HAP or something else that work more like Fate Points.

 

This is a bit of a tangent, but I remember a GURPS supplement having rules for spending XP to gain temporary points. If I remember rightly, the rate was 1 XP paid to gain 5 points worth of abilities for the duration of that scene. This might feel more impactful than changing the results on dice, since the abilities bought would last for more than one dice roll, but even if there's no difference in it for you it could be another tool in your toolbox to play around with.

[Grow-Arm-Hair Lad]

6 minutes ago, Cloppy Clip said:

I think some form of HAP are an important addition to the system as long as they're easy to remove for groups that have decided they don't need them, because this is at the end of the day a social game played by friends, and if everyone in the group agrees the result decided by the dice isn't doing it for them personally then a system that lets you tweak what happened without having to throw out all the rules and go freeform gives your group a useful tool to play with. There are problems with making spending XP the only way to affect things, because it puts players in the unenviable position of pitting permanent power against temporary power and will likely end up frustrating a number of them no matter how well you balance the trade-offs, but I can see there being promise of it as an option alongside HAP or something else that work more like Fate Points.

 

This is a bit of a tangent, but I remember a GURPS supplement having rules for spending XP to gain temporary points. If I remember rightly, the rate was 1 XP paid to gain 5 points worth of abilities for the duration of that scene. This might feel more impactful than changing the results on dice, since the abilities bought would last for more than one dice roll, but even if there's no difference in it for you it could be another tool in your toolbox to play around with.

 

 

Yes! This is very interesting. You're right in that I would use the HAP as crutches or training wheels at the beginning to make sure everyone feels they have some control and they are having a good time. But once they get into the spirit of the game, I think the training wheels would be removed. Definitely how I would hope it would go.

 

I like the GURPS idea. I'll have to take a closer look at that. Kind of like Cramming but more immediate yet more temporary.

[Khymeria]

43 minutes ago, Cloppy Clip said:

This is a bit of a tangent, but I remember a GURPS supplement having rules for spending XP to gain temporary points. If I remember rightly, the rate was 1 XP paid to gain 5 points worth of abilities for the duration of that scene. This might feel more impactful than changing the results on dice, since the abilities bought would last for more than one dice roll, but even if there's no difference in it for you it could be another tool in your toolbox to play around with.

I remember the Marvel Super Heroes game that came out about a decade or so ago from Margaret Weis Productions have a reward element that allowed for having something in a scene or an adventure, like a piece of technology on loan from S.H.I.E.L.D. for example. That is another direction you could take HAP in. I would like this also as a mechanism to get some role-playing in as the character has to plead their case or such.