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Paizo adventures like Tides of Dread and the AoW festival of Zeech have used victory points as a mechanic to allow PCs to achieve varying degrees of success (or failure) in their strategic goals by accumulating points through a range of appropriate actions.
I think this is a great mechanic and I'd love to see it become part of the core Pathfinder RPG framework, instead of having to be reintroduced each time an adventure designer wants to use it. It'd be cool to have guidelines for using victory points to do a number of classic situations, like chase scenes, complex negotiations, and wilderness navigation, as well as design principles for GMs to create situations using VPs.
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Paizo adventures like Tides of Dread and the AoW festival of Zeech have used victory points as a mechanic to allow PCs to achieve varying degrees of success (or failure) in their strategic goals by accumulating points through a range of appropriate actions.
I think this is a great mechanic and I'd love to see it become part of the core Pathfinder RPG framework, instead of having to be reintroduced each time an adventure designer wants to use it. It'd be cool to have guidelines for using victory points to do a number of classic situations, like chase scenes, complex negotiations, and wilderness navigation, as well as design principles for GMs to create situations using VPs.
Victory Points could conceivably mimic Star Wars Saga Edition's Destiny Points. Destiny Points are an interesting addition to the game, especially when you don't have to play with them. In a similar vein, Victory Points could be that special little "umph" some players want while others can live without.
Slightly off-topic question - are Action Points considered SRD? (It would have been nice for WotC to have updated its SRD . . . but that won't be happening anytime soon . . . or ever.)
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Paizo adventures like Tides of Dread and the AoW festival of Zeech have used victory points as a mechanic to allow PCs to achieve varying degrees of success (or failure) in their strategic goals by accumulating points through a range of appropriate actions.
I think this is a great mechanic and I'd love to see it become part of the core Pathfinder RPG framework, instead of having to be reintroduced each time an adventure designer wants to use it. It'd be cool to have guidelines for using victory points to do a number of classic situations, like chase scenes, complex negotiations, and wilderness navigation, as well as design principles for GMs to create situations using VPs.
This is definitely an interesting idea; VPs give a way to handle large-scale combats without directly worrying about the tides of each side of the struggle, and of being able to produce a module (like the Conquest of Bloodsworn Vale) where the actions of the PCs has a direct, measurable impact on the final result in more than a 'we killed the evil dude, he's toast, we're taking his loot and spending it on beer' fashion.
On the other hand, it's such a simple idea that actually executing it is more a matter of balancing reward vs risk than worrying about sticky mechanics.
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It's such a simple idea that actually executing it is more a matter of balancing reward vs risk than worrying about sticky mechanics.
The mechanics get sticky because they have to be back-compatible with 3.5. And it'd be ideal to have rules for earning VP that are less adventure-level design (like in Tides of Dread, or Heroes of Battle) and more tightly defined by the rules.
For example: Finding a criminal in a foreign city is a difficult task, so the DM looks up how many VP the party needs for complete success, partial success, or partial failure, and defines what each will mean. As the players come up with actions, the DM selects DCs for their skill checks based on the encounter level & modified according to the situation. Each point by which the skill check is over the DC gives the party 1 VP.
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Slightly off-topic question - are Action Points considered SRD? (It would have been nice for WotC to have updated its SRD . . . but that won't be happening anytime soon . . . or ever.)
The best place I have found for updated SRD is to go to www.d20srd.org
Very user friendly and easy to find almost everything you want. AND it includes the Unearthed Arcana additions.
The mechanics get sticky because they have to be back-compatible with 3.5. And it'd be ideal to have rules for earning VP that are less adventure-level design (like in Tides of Dread, or Heroes of Battle) and more tightly defined by the rules.For example: Finding a criminal in a foreign city is a difficult task, so the DM looks up how many VP the party needs for complete success, partial success, or partial failure, and defines what each will mean. As the players come up with actions, the DM selects DCs for their skill checks based on the encounter level & modified according to the situation. Each point by which the skill check is over the DC gives the party 1 VP.
Great idea - so the rules say you need 15 VP and the DM says
1- find his fence gather information DC 15 2VP- make him friendly diplomacy DC20 (less 2 per 100gp bribe) +2VP
2- find out his usual haunts DC20 gather information 2vp
etc
Yup I would love guidelines for this kind of mechanic