As I've recently been giving some thought to HP and reserves, the idea of doing a 'basic' and an 'advanced' version of TNP has recently popped into my head... but we'll shelve that discussion for now. A lot of the numbers for these player statistics are essentially built off of using the dice to generate values similar to those in 4e D&D, when it might be more practical to just scale things down -- say, by using a flat 10 for HP and also for reserves.
The problem that this bumps into is how reserves scale over levels, and this dovetails into a broader design discussion, which I haven't really brought up on the blog before.
In my experience, there are essentially two different ways to scale up player power in RPGs: either the PCs get stronger, and enemies stay relatively static, or the PCs get stronger while the enemies also get stronger. I would say the latter describes the previously mentioned "MM3 on a business card" ethos for 4e D&D; if your chance to hit goes up by +1 every level, but your enemies' defense also goes up by +1, then the relative math stays about the same (assuming a d20 system.) This is what I often (uncharitably) refer to as "the illusion of progress," because while your numbers go up, your ability to hit remains mostly unchanged. The flexibility of this method is that when you fight enemies of considerably lower level, the PCs should be able to absolutely dunk on them; the question that arises is whether or not this is a valuable metric, or if the challenges the PCs face should always remain relatively equal to their level.
The drawback to the alternative method is that you end up with a system where the game starts off hard, but as the PCs become more powerful, the game unintuitively becomes easier. The proper way to execute this idea is to make the opponents more challenging in other ways (generally, AoE or multi-attack, or other similar 'action economy' advantages) but this requires a great deal of mathematical crunch, to get just right. It also means gating more difficult enemies to higher levels.
The circle which I am trying to square with TNP is how the reserves per day mechanic should be handled. The skeleton idea for the card-based random campaign generation system would essentially proscribe that at starting level you would have 4 encounters, and at your final level, you would have 14 (half of which statistically would be combat encounters.) So, if the idea is that you would need to spend 1 reserve to heal up from each combat, then you only need to spend 2 reserves at your starting level, but 7 reserves at your final level. This is an inversion of the previous example, since the PCs are starting out with more than enough reserves, but at later levels they are going to be riding a fine line; whereas the expectation is that the PCs would get stronger (even though the enemies might get stronger, too) in TNP they're getting relatively weaker, since all other math is kept flat (attack, damage, HP, etc.)
What ends up happening with "reserves based on max value of class dice" is that the range of numbers has quite a bit of variance (from 4 to 12.) Using two class dice for 10 of the 15 classes helps with this, but to really mitigate the variance, we need to raise the floor for the other 5 classes -- essentially, by raising d4 and d6 to "2d4" and "2d6" when it comes to reserves. This gives us a variance between 8 and 12.
So, this begs a few questions: does the minimum need to be 8? Or is 6 enough (if the highest average number of combat encounters per day is expected to be 7)? If the variance is as small as 8 to 12, wouldn't it make sense to do something like say "everyone gets 10, period, end of story," and just save all the useless overhead? Well, for a 'basic' version, I would argue absolutely it makes sense... and sometimes what's good for the goose is good for the gander.
This is where we circle back to the idea of "reserve burning" abilities. For the sake of argument, let's say that 8 is considered to be the minimum number of reserves needed, just to get by with healing. What this essentially does (by implication) is make "d10 reserve" classes into the ones that should get 1/day reserve-burning mechanics, whereas the "d12 reserve" and/or "2d6 reserve" classes end up with the 1/encounter reserve-burning mechanics. So how would this shake out in practical terms?
Cleric (d4/d10) = 8 or 10
Fighter (d6/d12) = 12
Acrobat (d4/d8) = 8
Paladin (d6/d10) = 10 or 12
Warlord (d8/d12) = 8 or 12
Druid (d4/d12) = 8 or 12
Guardian (d4/d6) = 8 or 12
Adventurer (d6/d8) = 8 or 12
Ranger (d8/d10) = 8 or 10
Barbarian (d10/d12) = 10 or 12
If we reverse-engineer the numbers a little bit, this essentially means that any d10 class either needs to be a tankier class (expected to burn through more healing than average) or needs to have a 1/day ability; d12/2d6 classes need to be both tankier AND have a 1/day ability, OR they need to have a 1/encounter ability. It makes for some potentially interesting added design space, but it doesn't always line up smoothly. The interesting thing is that since most classes could potentially operate off of two different numbers of reserves, this also makes it possible for each subclass within a class to have some variance w/r/t reserve-burning mechanics. The trick of it is to not bump at-will abilities to being per-encounter abilities, simply because we can give a class enough reserves to do so.
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Next post is due on April 14th, so check back then!
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