jagardner@watmath.UUCP (jagardner) (03/11/85)
[...] Forever chattering in the wilderness about Hero Games... Our Champions group has added one simple concept loosely based on the notion of "karma points" found in TSR's Marvel Superhero Role-Playing Game. For those who know nothing about karma points, these are earned by player characters for various heroic or friendly deeds (you get karma points for spending a weekend with your elderly aunt or for saving the universe...one reason why I don't play TSR's game). You can trade in accumulated karma points for new powers or skills, or for improved levels in existing skills. You can also lose karma points for non-heroic acts; e.g. killing innocent bystanders costs you all your accumulated points. The other use of karma points is to improve chances of making dice rolls. For those times when you absolutely must zap the villain right between the eyes to save the world, you can spend karma points to add or subtract to your roll (as appropriate). It is this aspect that we have carried over into Champions (and by extension to Danger International, Justice Inc. and Fantasy Hero). One karma point costs one normal experience point. Since you only get one or two experience points in every game session, this is fairly expensive. You must set up your "pool" of karma points in advance; you can't decide halfway through a session that it would be a really good idea to spend unused experience on karma. A karma point lets you dictate the outcome of one 3D6 roll (the standard roll to determine if you succeed or fail at anything). This means that you can decide that you make an incredibly good "to hit" roll, or that you can make a good Luck roll; or conversely, you can wish bad luck on others (e.g. their force field fails its activation roll). Once you have used the karma point to dictate this roll, it vanishes forever. We have found that karma points are expensive luxuries, but they do come in handy when your back is really against the wall and you need that miracle to survive. We justify them on the principle of trueness to the genre: the lucky fluke is fundamental in fantasy/sf/comics, and this provides a good simulation of that situation. Jim Gardner, University of Waterloo