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.

Except for my Wave Dogs in the Vineyard game, I don’t get to play enough RPGs that aren’t D&D. Wait, Ryven, this is a 4E podcast. Yeah, yeah, I know, just run with me on this for a second. There are some mechanics I really want to play from other systems that I’m probably just not going to be able to play, so I’ll just have to port them into 4E, conveniently enough in the next few segments! Power Source folks be warned – some things will be changed after the end of the first arc here in about 6 weeks so pay attention! This week, the FATE point.

Actually, think of this more like Bonus Tokens Part II – Beyond Thunderdome. My original Bonus Token concept was specifically for skill challenges and while I like that option there, I want to expand it. A couple shows back, Jared and I briefly tossed around the idea of a roleplay build for 4E characters and FATE points and so this is really just the result of that discussion. Imagine – after you create your character at level 1, you have 5 Aspects – words or phrases that you use to describe your character. The first two are your race and class. The next three, you create on your own. You get more as you increase in level, but don’t worry about that right now.

At the end of each extended rest, you gain 2 FATE points + 1 per tier. You gain another after each milestone. A Bonus Token is then just sort of a temporary FATE point. You can use a FATE point to do one of four things. First, you can play it to gain a +2 to any d20 roll you’ve already made. Not a bad use, but as we’ll see, there are better. Second, if you spend it on a non-attack roll that goes along with one of your Aspects, you may reroll the d20 with a +3 bonus. Finally, you may spend a FATE point to declare a fact about the game world, again in accordance with one of your Aspects. The declaration can’t directly contradict something the DM has already said, but you can twist it. The DM may also Compel your Aspects, making an event occur because of your character’s habits and such. You may pay a FATE point to deny that event, but if you can’t the event happens and you get another FATE point for your trouble. Need some examples to sort this all out? No problem.

Mircolis is a half-elf star pact warlock. (this guy should be familiar to some of you). He’s level 8 and has 6 Aspects: Half-Elf, Star Pact, Evil-Looking Goatee, Ritual Master, Street Hustler and Love of Comfort. In this situation, he’s trying to pry some information about a cave from a hunter in town. The DM has already specified that the hunter doesn’t trust Mircolis enough to give him the information. Mircolis could try to roll Diplomacy to improve his mood and get a +2 bonus by spending a FATE point. However Street Hustler is one of his Aspects, so instead if he tries to Bluff to gain that trust, he can reroll with a +3 bonus if he doesn’t like the first roll by spending that same FATE point. Even better, though, I can plop down that FATE point and say “Mircolis reads the man’s fortune using his connections to the Far Realms and finds a mistress. Will he tell me if I threaten to expose him to his wife?” The twist opens up all kinds of fun options – maybe the hunter now gives Mircolis false information out of spite, or feels compelled to redeem himself by leading Mircolis to the cave personally. On the other hand, the DM could Compel the Evil-Looking Goatee Aspect to outright deny the information and force Mircolis to go some other route, but I still at least get another FATE point out of it. It’s a quick but robust system and after a couple playtests, I hope to implement it permanently.

Now astute listeners may have noticed that earlier I said four things to do with a FATE point, but I only gave the player three – the Compel is a DM option. That’s because next week we’ll talk about the fourth option for your FATE point purchases – the power stunt.