This is RPG-ology #78: Recoil, for May 2024.
One of the purposes of this series, drawn from its predecessor Game Ideas Unlimited, is to provide you with tools you might use in your games. This might be one of those tools.
Some years back at The Forge a designer was seeking a way to make his fights more cinematic. What he had noticed specifically was that in movies it is often the case that the hero is losing the fight, and quite obviously losing, and then abruptly finds some inner strength, rises up, and knocks the villain back, snatching victory from the jaws of defeat. This doesn’t happen under most game mechanics, he noted. In standard ones characters have pretty much the same ability until they are dead, and in some of the more detailed ones that ability weakens gradually as they do. Was there a way to create this situation, that a character could be losing and then suddenly spring back to win?
I put forward the germ of an idea, but realized that my idea wouldn’t work because of my commitment to Playing Fair. One thing I frequently tell my players is that if I allow a particular ability or power for their characters, I have to allow it in the game generally, and that means that the super power they want to use will be out there waiting to be used against them. I could see a system by which a character being pummelled to near death could suddenly spring back and bring retribution upon his attacker, but in my mind fairness then kicked in, and the attacker would get the same benefit when he in his turn was near dead.
Was there a way to do it?
Well, some things percolate on the back burner for years, and this one just boiled over. If I wanted to do this in Multiverser, I would create it as a skill, and find a way for certain characters to learn or gain it so that my heroes, my player characters (or some of them), would have it, but their opponents, or most of them, would not. The skill would in essence involve having the character accrue points based on damage taken, but then having the option to decide that he had taken as much damage as he dared and it was time to activate the skill, converting the points into combat bonuses. I haven’t worked out the details, partly because they would be very system-specific, but I’m inclined to think that in Multiverser the total of the bonuses should be the amount of damage taken doubled and given as a sit-mod to attacks (which increases chance to hit and damage) and to target value (which reduces opponent chance to hit and corresponding maximum damage). It would be different in Dungeons & Dragons where a character’s hit points quickly exceed any reasonable bonuses on chance to hit, damage, or armor class, but I could work out a fair system. Indeed, since I’m treating this as a skill, I could customize it for each character who has it, some suddenly becoming nearly impossible to hit, some abruptly becoming superhuman powerhouse attackers.
Now that I’ve solved that, I have space on my back burners for some other problem. Any suggestions?
For a while, I’ve been kicking around an idea for a mechanic based on shonen anime–the sort where this idea of a comeback is turned up to eleven. I’m working it into a variation of the Year Zero engine from Free League. Some YZ games use a series of Conditions to stand in for hit point loss (though they’re usually emotional conditions rather than physical ones). Each Condition checked reduces the number of dice the player can roll by one. And when all Conditions are checked, the character is so beaten down that they can’t make skill rolls at all.
The Limit Break mechanic kicks in when the character is in this broken state. They can call on their reserves of determination to take just one more action. They get to roll the action as though no Conditions were checked, and they get to add +1 to whichever Attribute they’re rolling with. If they succeed, the +1 becomes permanent, even if it puts the Attribute above its normal cap, but afterward they immediately return to their broken state and probably urgently need medical attention.
If they fail, the GM can impose dire consequences. Usually not the character’s death because that’s not what the game is about. But perhaps an innocent is killed, or the villain’s plan moves forward significantly.
Over time, the PCs are likely to perform several Limit Breaks and become super-powered, emulating the progression of characters from My Hero Academia, Inuyasha, or Dragon Ball. And, of course, significant bad guys can do the same.
Sounds good. And here I was trying to solve a problem you’d already solved….
Thanks for the thoughts.