| Artificial 20 |
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You have a pool of resonance. I'll get to its size later.
Resonance can be used 3 ways:
- Investing: Magical items with passive effects require a one-time investment of resonance, renewed each time you regain resonance. A suit of magical "Flameward" armour, found in a pile of loot, can be donned for 1 resonance to gain all of its benefits. If you do not spend resonance, then wearing the armour will still grant mundane benefits, like AC bonus and anything its quality level provides. As mentioned above, when you refill your resonance points (e.g. by resting), you must again spend 1 resonance to gain the armour's magical benefits. This can be done right then, or later on in the day if unsure what you will face.
- Activating: Magical items with active effects require spending resonance for each use. Some lesser effects don't cost resonance, like the item version of cantrips. As an example of active effects, my made up "Flameward" armour has a passive and an active effect. Investing in the armour grants you the "Energy Resistance (Fire)" passive effect. If you spend 1 resonance point as a reaction, the passive's effects get doubled for a single round. If you're facing a red dragon, planning a dip in some lava, or facing another situation where your passive fire resistance won't cut it, spend some resonance to double down.
- Urgency: Urgency is for tough spots. In my head it can only be used for active resonance effects, but maybe something, potentially a feat, can extend it to passive effects. When you choose to use urgency, it has the same effect as spending resonance without actually depleting any. You then roll a flat D20, DC is 10 plus your previous number of uses of urgency today (so your first roll is DC10). If you fail on this roll, you lose access to urgency until you next refill your resonance pool. Rolling a success will avoid this, and a critical success does not count toward your growing daily DC. I'm not sure what a critical failure should do at this time, maybe drain 1 resonance point anyway. Urgency lets you drink a potion, trigger an item and so forth, when you've run out of resonance or are trying to conserve it, and know that it will work. It's the next one that won't if you fail that flat roll, keeping the limitations while avoiding the risk of wasting actions and items.
Regarding how much resonance you get, I would like to propose 5 + 1/2 level + Cha mod. P2E's design has striven for consistency, with features like +level to roll. 5 + 1/2 level fits this by smoothing the growth of resonance, tightening the scarcity / abundance at the lowest / highest character levels, while keeping a sense of progression. It also makes Cha more valuable, since at maximum level it forms a larger portion of your resonance (at level 20, 15 + Cha mod vs. 20 + Cha mod).
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Working with this take on resonance, magic items have 3 basic types:
- Passive: Invest resonance to gain their benefits until you next refill your resonance
- Active: Spend resonance each time you use, otherwise has unlimited uses per day
- Consumable: Spend resonance to use (like Active), but is consumed upon that use
You could have advanced item types, such as "Charge" for staves perhaps, which act like batteries of resonance, letting you invest ahead of time, then spend from its stored charges to trigger the item's active effects.
I think non-artefacts should not get more complicated than that.