Victories, Recoveries, Resting & XP

Great ideas (hit dice, death saves), and a very well written post. Skål!

Michael Petersen

I'm not sure whether this is or isn't the place for this observation, but I've been listening to the videos on victories and recoveries. I'm not a game designer, and I'm not saying I'm right, but, it seems to me that they are the same resource. James has said that victories lead to XP, but that feels a bit redundant to me since we all gain experience IRL from our screw ups as much as our successes. It feels like there is really one resource, call it "power" or something, and you can spend points to power up your attacks or abilities, or power up your body to shrug off damage, strain etc. Then, you accumulate some through the fighting day, so it doesn't become the attrition slog. but, it feels weird to me to reward parties with lots of victories if they don't get hurt. Full disclosure: I'm coming at this from the POV of having built some (successful in my campaign) homebrew items that allowed spending hit dice or death saves to power things up. One was a crown where you spent hit dice to be able to concentrate on two spells at once for some rounds. One let spell casters spend death saves to ensure they did max damage with an attack. These felt like the same basic idea - trade off safety and survivability for power, and to me that felt heroic. I think some of my favorite moments as a player have been when I had single digit HP left and had to choose whether to burn an action to heal, or try for another hit. It feels like the "heroes keep going" mechanic they are wanting feels more desperate and more fun if you're pushing for close calls.

Alex Bakker

Will DMs have a way to throttle up or down the amount of victories players get that way we control the pace of leveling?

Dana Holland

It's been a time coming, but this foundation feels solid. Curious how leveling will work out since original expectations were 1 level per Adventure.

This is my actual favorite part of the system. I am very good at running time sensitive events to force players to keep playing at attrition. But now I can have time sensitive events AND have players want to push so they keep getting stronger and stronger until eventually they tire out. Also cashing in victories for XP is incredible as it ties directly into what we want players to do in the MCDM game.

Samgel Gendriz