Nuclear Beasts

Luck as a Psychic Power

Okay, the Luck power.

When you want to reroll a test during a game, you can roll your Luck power. On anything other than a Botch, you get a reroll.

The Risk of using this power starts at 1. Each time you use it during a session, though, the Risk goes up by 1. So your first reroll attempt only fails on a 1. Your second fails on a 1 or 2. Your third fails on a 1-3.

Worse, when it does botch, you end up making things worse. Something bad happens, or you apply an additional -2 penalty to whatever you were doing, or your power goes away for the rest of the session, or whatever. It might take playtesting to see how overpowered this is, but the increasing Risk should ensure that you can't get more than 12 rerolls per session, no matter how powerful you are.

If that wasn't potent enough, we could make it to where your Luck dice roll replaces whatever you just rolled, if it was better. If you rolled a botch, you take whichever result was worse. Botches don't increase the Risk, but once you get high enough, you'd be better off not using Luck at all.

If I do this, I'll probably dump the Luck stat, perhaps just replacing it with the equivalent of an Arbitrary Justice roll... just roll a d12. Luck, of course, could be used to reroll Arbitrary Justice rolls, too.

Should the Risk really be based on a per-session thing? Or perhaps it should go away at a rate of 1 per hour or day? Dunno. Rerolls is one of those things that might actually justify a per-session rule... it's unrealistic and can lead to metagame thinking ("Let's put off going there until next session... I want my Luck to be fully charged before we do."). On the other hand, not doing it that way means that you get screwed if your game sessions all occupy only a tiny amount of time, and you really benefit if your encounters are separated by days of travel.

Ooo! One more option. Botching causes something bad to happen to you, but afterwards it actually reduces the current Risk (to a minimum of 1). There would definitely have to be a serious downside to the botches, then, just so that folks don't call for rerolls on minor crap in order to recharge.

Hm... Risk drops at the rate of 1 point per day, or by 1 point immediately after you use Luck and botch on something the GM considers important.

Posted by Kiz at June 5, 2004 08:39 AM