Key Our Cars

Meldread over on the house rule forums has an interesting thread that I think warrants further consideration.  To sum it up, he’s looking for a way for players to ‘push’ themselves for those critical life or death situations and regain the use of powers.

A variety of thoughts have been posted many people suggest possibly having it simply cost x healing surges or action points.  My initial problem with that is, it promotes metagaming.  “I got plenty of surges left and we’re going to rest soon, boom baby, I want my daily back.”  It also helps, in my opinion, the ‘nova’ or as I call it, burn and sleep syndrome where the party uses everything and then wants to take an extended rest.

A good table rule is, “Unless you have hard information indicating you need to be at full strength then an extended rest can only occur after a milestone or when at least 1/3 of the party is low on total resources including health.  A good concept/rp group won’t be taking an 18 hour rest between encounters and any DM that let’s should be smacked, at least in something other than an overland adventure. But a lot of folks these days were raised on CRPG’s and MMOG’s where every encounter needs a full health or there’s no penalty for it.  Rarely even wandering monsters these days in CRPGS.

I’ve thought about it, considered the various posts and my first wording is this subject to playtesting:

Heroic Effort: Twice per day but limited to once per power type, you can choose to reach deep down inside yourself and regain the use of an expended power. Â  Doing so pushes your body, mind and energies to the utmost and such effort is not without costs and requires the utmost in willpower to force yourself beyond your limits.  Spend a healing surge and roll Will versus Fortitude on yourself. If you fail you cannot attempt this again without a short rest.  If you succeed then you regain the use of the power and suffer hit point damage in the amount of your healing surge + 1d20 per tier. Damage is suffered at the end of the character’s turn and if brought below 0 the character is set at a stabilized condition.

The purpose of this power is to allow for last ditch efforts when necessary.  It’s not to encourage blowing extra resources to get more power. Â  Having to make an attack on yourself, essentially using the power of your willpower to force your body to go further than it normally can, strikes me a cool.  The rending of your body’s health as a result also strikes me as cool.  As bone, I’m setting this so that it can’t ‘kill’ a player outright but instead takes them out of the fight if they take that much damage.