Creating Own RPG: Mechanics

[HumanFighter]

Hello forum, I've been in the business of creating my own tabletop rpgs for some years now, not as a job, more of as a hobby. Yes, D&D is great and all, and a reliable source of inspiration and something to fall back on in case things don't work out as planned, but I have often strived to make something a little different for myself and others to enjoy too.
Was wondering if any of you have had similar notions and thought of any cool ideas, as far as overall game design and mechanics go. You're welcome to post worldbuilding facts too, I find it interesting when the rules and mechanics of a game tie in nicely to a setting.
I'll start with a couple of ideas myself here, and may add more later, but I don't want to bloat the opening script too much so here goes.

Style Points: Sometimes moves in combat are not always practical. Sometimes they can be more flashy or cause off-the-wall debuffs, not necessarily dealing optimal damage. For this reason, I have thought to experiment with this style point system. Say someone does a really awesome flip kick on an enemy, dealing like 2d6 damage and knocking them prone, but costing a bit of stamina or a maneuver point, something like that. If they successfully do it, say with an acrobatics roll vs. AC, then they would gain a certain amount of these Style points. The GM would keep track of all style points gained throughout the battle, the GM or maybe a player who is assigned the "Style Coordinator" title would keep track of these points instead. Anyways, at end of battle, if the players are indeed the victors, someone would roll a d20, then add the total number of style points to the roll. If the total result of that roll equals 20 or higher, then all players would gain 50% bonus XP for that combat. Or maybe they would get Inspiration instead. I was also thinking certain items, such as stylish clothing, would somehow boost this, though not really sure if the item should give bonuses to the Style Point gains themselves, each time, or if it should only apply to the total style roll at the end.

Action Points (AP): Inspired by the old Fallout 1&2 computer games, these Action Points (AP) would determine all that you can do in a turn during combat. Attacking with most weapons, for example, would cost 3 AP, and on average, a player character would get around 5 AP per round, though its possible to get more through perks, items, or having a High Agility Stat. This would replace the usual Standard Action/Bonus Action/Movement type of action system that D&D has going. For normal enemies, I as GM wouldn't really feel the need to keep track of enemy AP, just give them a move and an attack, but for Bosses, I would give them like 10 AP or something so they don't get outpaced and totally jacked by the Action Economy. Downsides: Might be a little more annoying to keep track of than the usual D&D action system, but opens up a lot of possibilities for combat depth. Also, I might make movement points separate from action points, though not really sure if that's a good idea yet.

Anyways, whaddya think? Open to feedback/criticism here

[Eldan]

I think you need to start at a much more basic level, or at least tell us about that basic level. What kind of RPG will this be? Since you are talking about conditions, armour class, moves and actions, I'm assuming this is going to be a D&D-derrived system, where the basic mechanics are still very D&D-like?

My follow up question would be... what games have you read and played? Not to say that you can't make your own D&D system ,but I think it's a good idea for a game designer to read a few systems that are very different from D&D, just to get an idea about all the different ways RPGs can be done.

[HumanFighter]

I think you need to start at a much more basic level, or at least tell us about that basic level. What kind of RPG will this be? Since you are talking about conditions, armour class, moves and actions, I'm assuming this is going to be a D&D-derrived system, where the basic mechanics are still very D&D-like?

My follow up question would be... what games have you read and played? Not to say that you can't make your own D&D system ,but I think it's a good idea for a game designer to read a few systems that are very different from D&D, just to get an idea about all the different ways RPGs can be done.

Vampire: The Masquerade, Call of Cthulhu, FATE, Tower Princess, Nobilis, Neverwhen. those are some other games I've played. I've played every edition of D&D and pathfinder except AD&D and older. There's other systems I would like to try and explore as well, not saying my knowledge is complete here or anything.
As for the basics, it is a d20-based system like D&D, with Levels and XP. It is a mix of fantasy and steampunk, so guns and flying machines, so on, but also plenty of magic (there are 17 schools of magic). I like the idea of having classes in the game, but classes are tricky to design and fill out properly, (not to mention balance) and I have to diverge from D&D at some point. Plus I think a more flexible system with more freedom in character creation/progression is more my style.
The game is about adventuring and exploring, doing missions for peasants as well as nobles. I try to make the combat tactical and interesting, but there is only so much I can do with that, given that it is theater of the mind. Basically the combat supports the idea of adventure and resource management. Combat is a result of the choices you make in this game, not necessarily thrust upon you at all times, and is not the ultimate point. Combat can be costly, and so should be avoided, especially if you are already low on resources. The basic question of the game is: Can these characters succeed at their goal? Can they make it and barely scrape by, or will they perish?

[NichG]

I've written homebrew using an AP system and generally liked it. From a design point of view, it gives you lots of opportunities for elaboration. I balanced around characters generally being expected to have around two 'attacks' worth of AP in a round, with mechanisms to hold some AP over, and lots of within-round-only buff/debuff side-effect stuff so you could make combo sequences, combo breakers, lots of bonus action things, etc while still getting your attacks. If, say, an attack is 5 AP and characters would generally have around 12 AP, then something that gives +1 AP isn't as big of a deal as an extra attack (it'd be an extra attack every 5 rounds) but it might mean being able to squeeze in a 3AP boosting action or a bit of extra movement or just give a bit more leeway for reserving AP to spend on off-round reactions.

Spellcasters generally fell into the niche of having big abilities that cost more than a round's worth of AP and had mechanics to carry AP from round to round, whereas fighter-types varied based on their ability to either generate AP mid-round (like a dynamic Cleave thing for example, where if your attack fells a foe you might get +5 AP, so you have to decide your buff/attack balance on the fly) or to sustain combos across rounds or to be very reaction-heavy with lots of cheaper-than-base-attack off-round counterattack abilities or ...

As far as the style points thing goes, I personally wouldn't. It's a lot of bookkeeping and it turns the GM into a bit of a judge of the other players' aesthetic preferences - maybe the player thinks something is cool but the GM disagrees, etc - which just seems like unnecessary drama. You could preserve some of the intent behind that by instead doing something where as the GM you specifically put down cards describing environmental opportunities like 'Hanging Ropes: you can use Acrobatics instead of Melee to attack, but the attack costs 1AP less'. You could even make a deck of them and draw from it randomly, so players can get some idea of what environmental opportunities are likely to be possible and which ones would be worth actually building for. Also that would give you the design space to create character archetypes which actually manipulate those environmental cards directly, adding them or removing them from a given encounter.

For broader ideas, I'm currently trying to figure out a good way to make a system where you 'roll to see how much it costs' rather than 'roll to see if you succeed' - both to avoid 'nothing happens' sorts of outcomes of a player trying things, and to allow players to have resource pools that can absorb and smear out the moment-to-moment randomness of dice and thereby enable better planning for things like heist scenarios and the like - sort of the same way that having more HP means combat gets less swingy, something like stealth or diplomacy or whatever would also implicitly have that kind of buffer where your ultimate success or failure is the collective result of smaller atomic moves rather than hinging on a single roll.

One idea was to have a kind of 'roll for hazards' system where you would roll dice based on the difficulty of the task, and all dice that were below some (skill-based) threshold would count as hazards that you would either have to somehow address, buy off, or take as negative consequences of the attempt. The problem there was that it goes against the expectation that 'big dice pools are good' and kind of makes the act of rolling a negative thing rather than a positive thing. The current idea I'm going with is more like roll and keep where you roll Trait+Skill and keep Skill, but you can spend down your Trait temporarily to increase the number of kept dice up to the full pool even after you've seen the roll and heard the TN. So it still ends up being kind of pass/fail at the extremes, but in the mid-range of results the higher your traits are the more you can probably guarantee success if you need to but at the cost of making future rolls in that session (or day or whatever the recovery interval ends up being) more difficult. I haven't finalized the exact mapping between resources, rolls, TNs, etc yet, but this is the direction I'm looking at currently.

Another thing to consider is the general vertical vs horizontal advancement of the system, the degree to which you want there to a connection between advancement and in-character action (vs inevitable advancement through XP/session or XP/milestone sorts of things), and whether or not you want there to be multiple parallel directions of advancement (like wealth vs XP). Those things tie very strongly to the scope of campaigns, with lots of vertical inevitable advancement pushing escalation-type campaigns while vertical action-dependent advancement creates more of an in-character motive to scheme for power, and lots of parallel directions of advancement can lead to much more organic growth and changes of direction mid-campaign (but doesn't work well when there's going to be a series of 'you must be this strong' bottleneck encounters, because one player might go all-in on combat while another player becomes the world's best gardener or something). So that comes down to what kind of things you want to run and what you want the course of play to feel like - how sandboxy, how tiered, cosmic or local scope, etc.

[HumanFighter]

I've written homebrew using an AP system and generally liked it. From a design point of view, it gives you lots of opportunities for elaboration. I balanced around characters generally being expected to have around two 'attacks' worth of AP in a round, with mechanisms to hold some AP over, and lots of within-round-only buff/debuff side-effect stuff so you could make combo sequences, combo breakers, lots of bonus action things, etc while still getting your attacks. If, say, an attack is 5 AP and characters would generally have around 12 AP, then something that gives +1 AP isn't as big of a deal as an extra attack (it'd be an extra attack every 5 rounds) but it might mean being able to squeeze in a 3AP boosting action or a bit of extra movement or just give a bit more leeway for reserving AP to spend on off-round reactions.

Spellcasters generally fell into the niche of having big abilities that cost more than a round's worth of AP and had mechanics to carry AP from round to round, whereas fighter-types varied based on their ability to either generate AP mid-round (like a dynamic Cleave thing for example, where if your attack fells a foe you might get +5 AP, so you have to decide your buff/attack balance on the fly) or to sustain combos across rounds or to be very reaction-heavy with lots of cheaper-than-base-attack off-round counterattack abilities or ...

As far as the style points thing goes, I personally wouldn't. It's a lot of bookkeeping and it turns the GM into a bit of a judge of the other players' aesthetic preferences - maybe the player thinks something is cool but the GM disagrees, etc - which just seems like unnecessary drama. You could preserve some of the intent behind that by instead doing something where as the GM you specifically put down cards describing environmental opportunities like 'Hanging Ropes: you can use Acrobatics instead of Melee to attack, but the attack costs 1AP less'. You could even make a deck of them and draw from it randomly, so players can get some idea of what environmental opportunities are likely to be possible and which ones would be worth actually building for. Also that would give you the design space to create character archetypes which actually manipulate those environmental cards directly, adding them or removing them from a given encounter.

For broader ideas, I'm currently trying to figure out a good way to make a system where you 'roll to see how much it costs' rather than 'roll to see if you succeed' - both to avoid 'nothing happens' sorts of outcomes of a player trying things, and to allow players to have resource pools that can absorb and smear out the moment-to-moment randomness of dice and thereby enable better planning for things like heist scenarios and the like - sort of the same way that having more HP means combat gets less swingy, something like stealth or diplomacy or whatever would also implicitly have that kind of buffer where your ultimate success or failure is the collective result of smaller atomic moves rather than hinging on a single roll.

One idea was to have a kind of 'roll for hazards' system where you would roll dice based on the difficulty of the task, and all dice that were below some (skill-based) threshold would count as hazards that you would either have to somehow address, buy off, or take as negative consequences of the attempt. The problem there was that it goes against the expectation that 'big dice pools are good' and kind of makes the act of rolling a negative thing rather than a positive thing. The current idea I'm going with is more like roll and keep where you roll Trait+Skill and keep Skill, but you can spend down your Trait temporarily to increase the number of kept dice up to the full pool even after you've seen the roll and heard the TN. So it still ends up being kind of pass/fail at the extremes, but in the mid-range of results the higher your traits are the more you can probably guarantee success if you need to but at the cost of making future rolls in that session (or day or whatever the recovery interval ends up being) more difficult. I haven't finalized the exact mapping between resources, rolls, TNs, etc yet, but this is the direction I'm looking at currently.

Another thing to consider is the general vertical vs horizontal advancement of the system, the degree to which you want there to a connection between advancement and in-character action (vs inevitable advancement through XP/session or XP/milestone sorts of things), and whether or not you want there to be multiple parallel directions of advancement (like wealth vs XP). Those things tie very strongly to the scope of campaigns, with lots of vertical inevitable advancement pushing escalation-type campaigns while vertical action-dependent advancement creates more of an in-character motive to scheme for power, and lots of parallel directions of advancement can lead to much more organic growth and changes of direction mid-campaign (but doesn't work well when there's going to be a series of 'you must be this strong' bottleneck encounters, because one player might go all-in on combat while another player becomes the world's best gardener or something). So that comes down to what kind of things you want to run and what you want the course of play to feel like - how sandboxy, how tiered, cosmic or local scope, etc.

Apologies, I wasn't clear enough on the style points thing. You don't gain style points arbitrarily or whenever "someone thinks this is cool." Rather, there are specific abilities, moves, conditions, maneuvers, etc. that are baked into the system, each one giving you a specific amount of style points.

As for the vertical vs horizontal advancement concept, I have no intention of player characters becoming god-like beings by the end of the campaign, unless that is the specific intention or goal of that campaign. Certain editions of D&D turn into a game of Dragon Ball Z by the time you get to the higher levels, and I kind of want to avoid that. I would like to have a character be, say Level 17 but could still be taken down by a well-prepared or well-equipped group of Level 1's. This is to keep things engaging and to mitigate the "power creep" problem that often pops up in rpgs. I may just scrap the Levelling system entirely and go pure xp-point-buy instead, but Levelling Systems do have their advantages too.

Also I am glad someone else out there found an Action Point system that they enjoy. Sounds dope :smallwink:

[NichG]

As for the vertical vs horizontal advancement concept, I have no intention of player characters becoming god-like beings by the end of the campaign, unless that is the specific intention or goal of that campaign. Certain editions of D&D turn into a game of Dragon Ball Z by the time you get to the higher levels, and I kind of want to avoid that. I would like to have a character be, say Level 17 but could still be taken down by a well-prepared or well-equipped group of Level 1's. This is to keep things engaging and to mitigate the "power creep" problem that often pops up in rpgs. I may just scrap the Levelling system entirely and go pure xp-point-buy instead, but Levelling Systems do have their advantages too.


I'd suggest not using a leveling system in that case. Additionally, you'll want to make sure the non-combat parts of the game are sufficiently rich and detailed in order to support a horizontal design space feeling rewarding rather than just going all-in on combat and trying to force it vertical. Good questions to ask are:

- What different kinds of information can different characters receive and how - and what different scales of information are there? Things like detecting secret doors, traps, hostility, inhabitants, layouts of spaces, culpability ('I can find out from an underling who their boss is', 'I can determine if someone is guilty of a crime', etc), determining the past or future, knowing motivations, knowing about the organization of entire countries or organizations (including 'what if?' type knowledge like where you would need to act to sabotage an organization's needs best), supernatural perception (detect magic, detect spirits, detect karma, etc).

- What sorts of extended considerations exist that can be nudged by character actions - like how long travel takes, supply availability, what sorts of physical obstacles can be passed (and whether its only an individual who can get past, or if you want ways for one person to enable entire groups to get past). Are there things like economic prosperity or political standing that can be roughly quantified and given nuanced mechanical meanings tied to different directions of advancement?

- Are some forms of advancement going to be very local in their applicability (like, if we're going to be on a ship, it becomes important to know how to sail, pilot, etc; or, this character advancement direction is literally just reputation and standing within a particular guild that exists in a particular city?).

- What sorts of atomic actions can you come up with that would be relevant and interesting, to tie to base uses of different horizontal advancements - like 'I can use this ability to get permission to enter a building' or 'I can use this ability to acquire an item I need' or 'I can use this ability to pass a local law'.

[playswithfire]

Action Points (AP): Inspired by the old Fallout 1&2 computer games, these Action Points (AP) would determine all that you can do in a turn during combat. Attacking with most weapons, for example, would cost 3 AP, and on average, a player character would get around 5 AP per round, though its possible to get more through perks, items, or having a High Agility Stat. This would replace the usual Standard Action/Bonus Action/Movement type of action system that D&D has going. For normal enemies, I as GM wouldn't really feel the need to keep track of enemy AP, just give them a move and an attack, but for Bosses, I would give them like 10 AP or something so they don't get outpaced and totally jacked by the Action Economy. Downsides: Might be a little more annoying to keep track of than the usual D&D action system, but opens up a lot of possibilities for combat depth. Also, I might make movement points separate from action points, though not really sure if that's a good idea yet.

Personally, I think that movement and attack should come from the same pool; you're moving either way, just depends if it's your legs or your arms.

One question(which I might not need to ask had I played the fallout games): are you completely passive on other players' turns (i.e. no reactions) or can you save some action points to use when it's not your turn?

Or possibly to save for your next turn? In that case, I think it would be something like half of any unspent AP can carry over to avoid "do nothing, do nothing, massive flurry of stuff", though, in the right genre, that could also work.

[HumanFighter]

I'd suggest not using a leveling system in that case. Additionally, you'll want to make sure the non-combat parts of the game are sufficiently rich and detailed in order to support a horizontal design space feeling rewarding rather than just going all-in on combat and trying to force it vertical. Good questions to ask are:

- What different kinds of information can different characters receive and how - and what different scales of information are there? Things like detecting secret doors, traps, hostility, inhabitants, layouts of spaces, culpability ('I can find out from an underling who their boss is', 'I can determine if someone is guilty of a crime', etc), determining the past or future, knowing motivations, knowing about the organization of entire countries or organizations (including 'what if?' type knowledge like where you would need to act to sabotage an organization's needs best), supernatural perception (detect magic, detect spirits, detect karma, etc).

- What sorts of extended considerations exist that can be nudged by character actions - like how long travel takes, supply availability, what sorts of physical obstacles can be passed (and whether its only an individual who can get past, or if you want ways for one person to enable entire groups to get past). Are there things like economic prosperity or political standing that can be roughly quantified and given nuanced mechanical meanings tied to different directions of advancement?

- Are some forms of advancement going to be very local in their applicability (like, if we're going to be on a ship, it becomes important to know how to sail, pilot, etc; or, this character advancement direction is literally just reputation and standing within a particular guild that exists in a particular city?).

- What sorts of atomic actions can you come up with that would be relevant and interesting, to tie to base uses of different horizontal advancements - like 'I can use this ability to get permission to enter a building' or 'I can use this ability to acquire an item I need' or 'I can use this ability to pass a local law'.

This here is fascinating stuff. I hadn't considered that before. Thank you. This is food for thought. I mean, so far I have a rough fame, morality score, and reputation system, but it is still fairly rough and I haven't exactly refined it yet, and should also expand the available abilities on offer for the characters.


Personally, I think that movement and attack should come from the same pool; you're moving either way, just depends if it's your legs or your arms.

One question(which I might not need to ask had I played the fallout games): are you completely passive on other players' turns (i.e. no reactions) or can you save some action points to use when it's not your turn?

Or possibly to save for your next turn? In that case, I think it would be something like half of any unspent AP can carry over to avoid "do nothing, do nothing, massive flurry of stuff", though, in the right genre, that could also work.

In my system that uses Action Points, yeah I had considered the "saving up AP and carrying it over to next turn" option. I have decided to keep things simpler and less confusing, that you can't really do that (at least, not by default). Any unused AP at end of turn is essentially wasted. However, you still get your reactions, such as rolling a check to Dodge an attack. There is penalties on those checks for multiple dodges in the same round. You can attempt to dodge an unlimited number of attacks per round. Your first dodge in a combat round uses the regular modifier. But, each time you dodge beyond the first time, you get a -2 penalty to your d20 roll, and this penalty stacks. For example, the third time you attempt to dodge, you get a -4 penalty, fourth dodge would be -6 penalty, and so on.
You can also "prepare" an action, like in D&D.
And, lastly, if you are good enough at the Tactics skill, you can save up a limited number of AP for your next turn, or even supply it to other party members, though this option is only available to players who have really invested in that skill.

[Vogie]

Style points - I don't mind the idea of metacurrency, but making it a bear to track means that it'll likely be flubbed or ignored. What I would do is make it either much more specific or much more general. For example:

General - The escalation die from 13th age. An asymmetric mechanic (it only applies to the PCs, not the monsters/bosses), as long as the party is engaged, they gain a scaling bonus each round shown by a rotating d6. It starts as a +1 and can go up to a +6 as long as the engagement continues. If the PCs start avoiding combat for any reason, the die doesn't advance. Full 13th age combat rules are here (https://www.13thagesrd.com/combat-rules/)
Specific - XP generating abilities in Gloomhaven. Classes have certain things that they love to do, and the card-based action system of the game uses personal XP gain as a carrot for this. A support class may gain bonus XP by healing, summoning robots and setting or disarming traps, an assassin class may gain XP by attacking in the darkness or while invisible, a tank class might gain XP by just standing there taking damage or charging across the room to bring the fight to the enemy. Some effects are extra strong, so using that ability causes it to be 'lost' for the remainder of that encounter. The XP gained is just XP, where that character's generated XP is added to the total amount of XP gained for that encounter.


The Action point system seems odd without a more defined idea of what a turn is - I could see it working alongside a turn setup similar to Pathfinder 2e, where each turn is 3 actions and a reaction across the board. This allows you to not only get rid of the "Wasted Action Points" problem - as each creature could have a stamina-like pool of action points that aren't moving back and forth - but also gives you another knob that various effects and conditions can manipulate - Instead of conditions like "stunned" essentially meaning "you lose a turn", there can be some shades of grey there. Even if your ally gets hit with "Stunned 3", casting haste (https://2e.aonprd.com/Spells.aspx?ID=147)on them to give them a 4th action allows them to still stumble out of the way. One thing of note that PF2e does poorly is the implementation of magic in that system - almost all spells are 2 actions, so it still feels like they have the option of just casting & moving, which ends up being worse than the old move/action/bonus paradigm. Adding that action point system into that general skeleton could allow you enough knobs to more easily balance different abilities and spells.

An idea that came to mind when I was reading your post and responses was a system I had toyed with in the past I called "Momentum". This acted in a similar manner, but was tracked only within a specific player character. As a PC did things, they would generate momentum and then their class/loadout could use that as a resource - a tank character might turn their momentum into Damage reduction, a berserker might turn it into additional damage, a rogue could use them as a sort of Combo point/Finisher setup, particularly agile characters might turn momentum into speed and accuracy, and so on. Rather than trying to make it symmetrical so that the boss & monsters worked the same way, I flipped it on its head and had their setup be the opposite - Their abilities would instead rob the PCs of their momentum in varying degrees. Some effects could be just poise-breakers, doing little damage but distracting/knocking the wind out of the PCs; others might use the PC's momentum against them, or be weak to high-momentum attacks.

Another setup you can use as inspiration is the pools from the Cypher System. That system is unique in that instead of having things like "hit points" and "action points", they just have 3 pools as their stats - might, speed and intellect. These pools are used for both the action currency AND as a representation of the state of the character. Regular Damage typically goes through the Might pool first, followed by Speed and Intellect in that order, but it also allows for, say, a psychic attack to target the mental pool of a character or a poison to start draining the speed pool. There are are other abilities that mitigate all of the issues you might think of with such an setup, such as "Edge" which decreases the point cost of using your own abilities and armor providing damage reduction. It also has the benefit of having a certain mechanical representation of normally flavor-based actions. If you are using speed Effort to avoid an attack, it essentially shows this is a dodge without writing out the rules for a "dodge action"; conversely, a magical character using an Intellect effort to avoid the same attack represents using a spells to shield themselves without having to say "I cast shield"... because a psychic flavored character doing the same thing might be using telekinesis to avoid the attack and a completely mundane but brilliant character might just be predicting the precise trajectory of the blow and performing a counter. The SRD for that system is available here (http://cyphersrd.com/). It's also an asymmetrical system, in that only the players roll the d20s - instead of the GM rolling to hit, the PCs are rolling to evade those hits.

[Catullus64]

If the goal of the Style Points is to incentivize improvisation and roleplay-motivated moves in combat, I don't think the current paradigm as you present is the way to accomplish that. If the actions which generate SP are specifically defined in-game, you haven't promoted spontaneity, you've just shifted what the optimal set of pre-defined actions is.

In my experience, the biggest bar to improvisation and creativity in combat is not a lack of formal rewards for doing them, it's GMs imposing a high barrier to actions that aren't narrowly defined by the rules. "You want to trick the Ogre into charging you so he crashes into a wall? Ok, it'll take your full turn, you'll need to make an exceedingly difficult check, you'll get hit harder if you fail, and the benefit if you succeed will be minimal compared to if you had just attacked him. Go ahead!" I used to be really guilty of this, possibly out of the belief that allowing inventive actions to be effective would somehow break the game.

Rather than having Style Points be something you earn from doing Approved Maneuvers, I would have each player have a certain number which can be spent in order to make flashy or cool moves just work without any additional dice rolls or resources. For most players who care about creativity in combat, just doing it and having it work is its own reward. An XP reward for doing X number of style points turns it into a checklist.

[HumanFighter]

Style points - I don't mind the idea of metacurrency, but making it a bear to track means that it'll likely be flubbed or ignored. What I would do is make it either much more specific or much more general. For example:

General - The escalation die from 13th age. An asymmetric mechanic (it only applies to the PCs, not the monsters/bosses), as long as the party is engaged, they gain a scaling bonus each round shown by a rotating d6. It starts as a +1 and can go up to a +6 as long as the engagement continues. If the PCs start avoiding combat for any reason, the die doesn't advance. Full 13th age combat rules are here (https://www.13thagesrd.com/combat-rules/)
Specific - XP generating abilities in Gloomhaven. Classes have certain things that they love to do, and the card-based action system of the game uses personal XP gain as a carrot for this. A support class may gain bonus XP by healing, summoning robots and setting or disarming traps, an assassin class may gain XP by attacking in the darkness or while invisible, a tank class might gain XP by just standing there taking damage or charging across the room to bring the fight to the enemy. Some effects are extra strong, so using that ability causes it to be 'lost' for the remainder of that encounter. The XP gained is just XP, where that character's generated XP is added to the total amount of XP gained for that encounter.


The Action point system seems odd without a more defined idea of what a turn is - I could see it working alongside a turn setup similar to Pathfinder 2e, where each turn is 3 actions and a reaction across the board. This allows you to not only get rid of the "Wasted Action Points" problem - as each creature could have a stamina-like pool of action points that aren't moving back and forth - but also gives you another knob that various effects and conditions can manipulate - Instead of conditions like "stunned" essentially meaning "you lose a turn", there can be some shades of grey there. Even if your ally gets hit with "Stunned 3", casting haste (https://2e.aonprd.com/Spells.aspx?ID=147)on them to give them a 4th action allows them to still stumble out of the way. One thing of note that PF2e does poorly is the implementation of magic in that system - almost all spells are 2 actions, so it still feels like they have the option of just casting & moving, which ends up being worse than the old move/action/bonus paradigm. Adding that action point system into that general skeleton could allow you enough knobs to more easily balance different abilities and spells.

An idea that came to mind when I was reading your post and responses was a system I had toyed with in the past I called "Momentum". This acted in a similar manner, but was tracked only within a specific player character. As a PC did things, they would generate momentum and then their class/loadout could use that as a resource - a tank character might turn their momentum into Damage reduction, a berserker might turn it into additional damage, a rogue could use them as a sort of Combo point/Finisher setup, particularly agile characters might turn momentum into speed and accuracy, and so on. Rather than trying to make it symmetrical so that the boss & monsters worked the same way, I flipped it on its head and had their setup be the opposite - Their abilities would instead rob the PCs of their momentum in varying degrees. Some effects could be just poise-breakers, doing little damage but distracting/knocking the wind out of the PCs; others might use the PC's momentum against them, or be weak to high-momentum attacks.

Another setup you can use as inspiration is the pools from the Cypher System. That system is unique in that instead of having things like "hit points" and "action points", they just have 3 pools as their stats - might, speed and intellect. These pools are used for both the action currency AND as a representation of the state of the character. Regular Damage typically goes through the Might pool first, followed by Speed and Intellect in that order, but it also allows for, say, a psychic attack to target the mental pool of a character or a poison to start draining the speed pool. There are are other abilities that mitigate all of the issues you might think of with such an setup, such as "Edge" which decreases the point cost of using your own abilities and armor providing damage reduction. It also has the benefit of having a certain mechanical representation of normally flavor-based actions. If you are using speed Effort to avoid an attack, it essentially shows this is a dodge without writing out the rules for a "dodge action"; conversely, a magical character using an Intellect effort to avoid the same attack represents using a spells to shield themselves without having to say "I cast shield"... because a psychic flavored character doing the same thing might be using telekinesis to avoid the attack and a completely mundane but brilliant character might just be predicting the precise trajectory of the blow and performing a counter. The SRD for that system is available here (http://cyphersrd.com/). It's also an asymmetrical system, in that only the players roll the d20s - instead of the GM rolling to hit, the PCs are rolling to evade those hits.

I like that.


If the goal of the Style Points is to incentivize improvisation and roleplay-motivated moves in combat, I don't think the current paradigm as you present is the way to accomplish that. If the actions which generate SP are specifically defined in-game, you haven't promoted spontaneity, you've just shifted what the optimal set of pre-defined actions is.

In my experience, the biggest bar to improvisation and creativity in combat is not a lack of formal rewards for doing them, it's GMs imposing a high barrier to actions that aren't narrowly defined by the rules. "You want to trick the Ogre into charging you so he crashes into a wall? Ok, it'll take your full turn, you'll need to make an exceedingly difficult check, you'll get hit harder if you fail, and the benefit if you succeed will be minimal compared to if you had just attacked him. Go ahead!" I used to be really guilty of this, possibly out of the belief that allowing inventive actions to be effective would somehow break the game.

Rather than having Style Points be something you earn from doing Approved Maneuvers, I would have each player have a certain number which can be spent in order to make flashy or cool moves just work without any additional dice rolls or resources. For most players who care about creativity in combat, just doing it and having it work is its own reward. An XP reward for doing X number of style points turns it into a checklist.

Yeah, you make an excellent point, there. The Style Points thing was an idea, but it has proved to be more annoying than it is worth, so I may modify it a bit, or perhaps drop it entirely. I do like the idea of having a pool of points and flashy moves that you get per combat, tho perhaps only certain classes, like Bard or Swashbuckler, would have them. Idk.
When it comes to combat, I like to have a mix of pre-defined abilities, while still leaving some room for a more "on the fly" type of maneuver here and there, to keep things interesting and a little less monotonous.
For example, I was once playing a Bullet Witch character and we had went to the Infernal Realm to close a portal. At the time, she was out of mana points and didn't have her gun, so she was forced to fight a fairly powerful demon by herself, with nothing but a +1 spear. She absolutely mangled him, tho it was a close fight. Thanks to maneuvers, this was possible (and also some really lucky rolls).