It’s gamefiend here, and I’ve got something for you. A way to “achieve” all your dreams with our alternate wealth system.
Last article we discussed using wealth tokens instead of gold for your characters. You want to check it out in detail, but to rephrase:
- Each level, characters can gett up to twenty tokens (4 wealth, 16 Karma).
- No character can have more than a hundred tokens at once.
- Characters spend the tokens instead of gold pieces to get items they wish and other effects as well (more on that later )
So…how does one acquire wealth and karma? About half of the wealth your characters acquire should be gained in typical “parcel” format. The party goes through encounters and gain wealth as karma as rewards. This half is what they earn from progressing through the story and meeting milestones, etc.
The other half the party earns by doing special things…yep, you guessed it, an achievement system! If the characters want to earn the most possible wealth and karma they fulfill items from a bounty list. The bounty system rewards “non-optimal” play and “optimal” play. You can place lateral thinking achievements in the bounty list for players who like that (“convince the princess that you are nobility”) or you can put straight number crunching bounties for your battle-hungry characters (“deal twenty points of damage in one strike”).
The bounty system rewards characters for doing more than going from point A to point B without forcing the characters to deviate. The characters aren’t reliant on wealth in a way that they are punished for not getting everything they could (you can always up how much wealth characters get by default if they do feel this way) so they can choose how much they want to get into the system. Of course, well-designed achievement systems are kind of addictive, and players may just want to see what they can do…but this is awesome too!
The Bounty System
We break down achievements at four levels:
Easy Level – things likely done in the course of adventuring. Might require some luck but nothing extraordinary. (“Get a critical hit”)
Moderate Effort – with a little thought, you could do this on the fly. (“bullrush an opponent into a wall”)
Substantial Effort – a player will probably need to engineer a way to accomplish this. Requires some planning to accomplish. (“Inflitrate the castle through disguise instead of stealth”)
Crazy Planning or Crazy Luck – something that is just going to require a wild swing of the dice (get three criticals in a row) or some serious game-planning, or both. It can also represent a slightly larger leap of logic than other achievements.
If we look at the bounty as a pyramid, the base of the pyramid are easy achievements; these don’t take much, but don’t offer much either. We ascend the pyramid until we get to crazy planning/luck. We have a few of these, which are hard to do, but give the biggest payout of the bunch. To start:
We want at least five easy bounties, worth one point each.
We want four moderate effort bounties, worth two each.
We want three substantial effort bounties, worth three each.
Lastly, we have two crazy achievements, worth four wealth apiece.
Players can get their ten per level in any number of ways. How they do it is up to them.
An Example Bounty
Assumptions are a standard, heroic tier game.
Easy:
Grab an opponent during a combat.
Hit an enemy with an improvised weapon.
Beat the DC of an Intimidate check by 10 or more.
Beat the DC of a Diplomacy check by 10 or more.
Beat the DC of an Athletics check by 10 or more.
Moderate
Score a critical hit against a dazed or stunned opponent.
Bull rush an enemy and knock them off a height.
Score a coup de grace during a combat.
Do all of the following in one round: Jump 2 squares or more, daze an opponent, give a beneficial bonus to an ally (can be healing or bonus to attack/damage/defense)
Substantial
Defeat the Mad Mage in a ritual contest.
Defeat the gelatinous cube without rolling to attack against it.
Do all of the following in one round: Intimidate one opponent successfully, Bluff another opponent successfully, deal twenty points of damage.
Crazy
Get 3 critical hits in one battle.
Do all of the following in one battle: Get petrified, get stunned, take twenty points of damage in hit. (oh yeah, survive the battle too)
You could be looking at this and think : “Some of these seem like quests.” And you would get some sortr of prize for thinking of it in that way. Bounties don’t need to be only combat activities. Defeating the Mad Mage in a ritual contest could take a lot of forms, but it’s unlikely to be a fight as one knows it.
The next thing you’re thinking is: Do I just give the characters all these up front? Probably not. Witth the above list, you give them the easy achievements, and then you give them the others as the arise in the story. Notice that many of these achievements imply that something can happen. The second crazy achievement implies there is a battle where you can get petrified, stunned, and take twenty points of damage. When the characters are in that fight, you can announceor give them the bounty. Any player crazy enough to go through all that deserves the points.
Lastly, each bounty checklist should be able to last a few levels. Three stretches it pretty thin. But two is about right.
Comments? Suggestions? Questions? Let me know.
A Jack of All Trades ,or if you prefer, an extreme example of multi-classing, Gamefiend, a.k.a Quinn Murphy has been discussing, playing and designing games straight out of the womb. He is the owner and Editor-in-Chief of this site in addition to being an aspiring game designer. As you would assume, he is a huge fan of 4e.
By day he is a technologist.
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Neat. I can picture an achievement system also replacing experience points as well. You only progress by meeting x/y achievements laid out for your level. (Abstracting and simplifying experience in a similar fashion to wealth)
You could even allow players to help create some of them. Achievements based on characters personal beliefs, goals, histories. Player created achievements could be a great way to codify player theme wishes.
It basically becomes a checklist of all of the cool stuff you and your players want to see in the game and helps encourages everyone at the table to steer the story in a way to maximize the cool.
yup, the achievement system can be spun out from the core pretty easily.
Everything you said I can see doing. If one is not comfortable with the alternate wealth system, you can easily turn it into a nifty way to award XP. micro-quests that you use to earn your next level.
Also like to see your thinking RE: player-driven achievements.
I just awed by this series of articles and want to use them very much. Only two things – these rules againg take magic items control from the DM and require high level of game mastery, which my non-English speaking players don’t have. If I find a way to solve these problems – I’d definitely will use them in my next campaign.
Ryven and I have been talking over this, and I think that we may have the thing for you: Wealth Themes. These are character-chosen lists of items they can spend the tokens on. So the fighter has a list of things he can “buy” like an extra healing surge or something similar, and the wizard can buy rituals or arcane items. The GM can then add to or change the list over time. More on this when we get to it.
If you want to use the bounty system though, you can just turn it into XP bundles. If characters want to advance faster, they can go for these achievements and get to the next level faster than normal.
Thanks for stopping by!
Wow, really interesting stuff! I like this installment! These achievements are also great ways to tease players along a certain path.
@gamefiend
Insteresting idea. Thanks. I’l think it over. Eager to see the next part.
These articles have been amazing. Thank you. I’m definitely going to try to implement the wealth tokens at some point in the future.
I do have one concern about this last article, though. Very specific combat achievements may put players in the awkward position of making the right tactical decisions in combat (i.e. the thing that would help out their group the most) versus getting more wealth for themselves. I suppose some might see this as adding an interesting layer to combat, but I’d prefer not to have my players trying to decide between getting rich and otherwise playing out combat as they would.
The random (e.g. crit) or out of combat ones are awesome though. I think I’m going to implement this system as entirely out of combat – doing the right thing, sneaking in somewhere, etc. Perhaps “bonuses” could be handed out for especially cool things in combat, but without a predetermined list of what those things are to influence player choice on such a specific level. Then straight up monetary wealth could just be the money you find in the dungeon or the like (“You find a chest of gold and two valuable gem stones set into it. Add 3 wealth tokens”).
Can you clarify for me: Is is twenty tokens per character or for the whole party to divide amongst.
And this is in addition to the magic items doles out normally, correct?