Can’t believe I missed a show. Ah well. Let’s see some hands – how many of you all have played FASERIP Marvel? Hunh? Put up ‘em up! ten… twenty… thirty…. so less than a third, but still enough. Cool. Hands down. For those of you who haven’t, it’s an older TSR superheroes game set in the Marvel universe – so old in fact that the licensing has expired on it and you can legally pick up pdfs of the game for free. I’ll post the link in the forums when this show hits, so you can look it up. I really enjoyed Marvel in all its table-y glory, particularly for its use of Karma points and power stunts. I’m not going to cover karma points here, so go read about them in the books if you’re interested, but I do want to discuss power stunts here for a couple minutes.

Power Stunts are exactly what they sound like – unorthodox uses of a superpower in order to do something the power didn’t necessarily intend. Superman flying around the world backward to reverse time for instance, is a power stunt. The Flash phasing himself through solid objects by altering the vibrations of his molecules is another. Classic Silver Age stuff right there. Earlier editions of D&D had their own form of power stunts – metamagic feats but even moreso, the creative interpretations of spell effects based on their flavor text. Can you look like a small treant if someone casts Barkskin on you? How about shooting an arrow out of the sky with your own Magic Missile? And can you get a paladin out of his armor by polymorphing him into a snake and then using Animal Control to force him to shed his skin? These are the sort of creative solutions that players love to come up with and DMs either ignore completely or tremble in fear of. It’s important to notice though, that classic power stunts rarely deal damage and if they do, the point of the stunt is not actually the damage but some kind of utility effect – terrain modification, movement, etc.

4E has a weird way of discouraging this sort of thing. I don’t believe it was any intention of the design staff, but something about the way powers are written keeps a lot of people well within a precision-tuned box. But you know what? I’m an Instigator dangit; I like to see crazy stuff happen in my games and the best way I know to promote that sort of thing is to give it its own economy, in this case the FATE point.

I need to dip briefly into system design here for a second. The other uses of a FATE point were pretty tame. A +2 to a d20 roll is the standard “DM’s best friend” circumstance bonus. A reroll with a +3 bonus to skill checks sounds awesome – and can be! – but think for a minute. You’re only supposed to make right around half of your attack rolls according to proper game balance but you need to make two-thirds or better of your skill checks (4 successes out of 6 rolls for a complexity 1 skill challenge) so even a hefty reroll bonus isn’t too “out there”. Player narration, though it may mess with the plot in unexpected ways, has no mechanical effect on the game and so is safe as well. Using an attack power as a utility power – which is what we’re going to do here – does have mechanical impact on the game, and so we have to keep some kind of limit on it. Also, applying an artifical, arbitrary limitation on doing something triggers the natural human rebellion instinct, so in limiting usage, you’re also encouraging usage.

All that talk leads up to this idea. By spending a FATE point, the player may use an attack power in a predetermined utility way until the end of the encounter. Example – let’s say you have an underage kawaii pyromaniac tiefling assassin who does incredibly well with her relatively modest 20 AC at level 5. She wants to use her Executioner’s Noose to go all Spiderman and stuff. It’s an at-will power, so you want to limit the movement to standard speed or less but you think that a standard action to fly 5 is probably fair. She hands over the FATE point and until her next short rest, she can swing on branches, stalactites, clotheslines, whatever happens to be handy. What about using Dire Radiance to light up a room? It’s radiance, right? Another at-will power, so let’s use it like the Wizard cantrip Light except again as a standard action to not step on the Wizard’s toes too much. If you can find an already written utility power for what you want to do of the same usage and approximate level, that’s your best bet. I’d love to see some of your ideas, so please! Post them on the forums.

As a parting note, this will up your characters’ overall power levels a little bit, so to compensate I as a DM would raise all encounter levels by 1 and award Action Points only after milestones to keep roughly the same challenge. Depending on the way your PCs play, your mileage may vary.