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Old 12-26-2014, 12:08 PM   #12
johndallman
Night Watchman
 
Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: Cambridge, UK
Default Re: Lite version of buying success for a Borderline Realism campaign

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Originally Posted by BraselC5048 View Post
Still, the general idea was that you'd keep several points "in reserve," unspent
That's a necessity for almost any system here you spend character point for re-rolls. Allowing characters to lose skills or abilities they already have to avert bad things happening is way beyond "Borderline realistic".
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and also that the characters are built to character level, not point total (mostly),
Without a lot more explanation, this doesn't really tell me anything.
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I just don't want players to decide to take insane (in odds) risks planning to buy success. I think I'll halve the point costs.
I've done quite a bit of play with variant Impulse Buys rules in the last couple of years. With the normal costs, characters try to accumulate a stock of points in the early parts of a scenario to spend when things are getting hard. However, different character niches can easily have very different spending patterns: a detective does it under quite different circumstances to a commando who's mostly there for the fights at the end.

High costs to deter them from taking big risks depends on them being able to see ways to tackle problems that don't involve those risks: Impulse Buys rules seem to be mot useful where there is no time to think of a clever way of doing something.

Even halved, these costs are high enough that I think I would tend to play as if I didn't have the Impulse Buys option. If you want them strictly as insurance against players and GM errors, that may be fine. If you want them to promote daring and dashing play, you may be disappointed, and the players annoyed.
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