[UA] Charges and Chips

[Royal Minister of Stuff]

--- Patrick None <deadairis at hotmail.com> wrote:
>  Hm. I felt that the "juice" was just too noticable
> to not notice. My anal
> retentive characters - who kept careful track of
> every charge they thought
> they'd gotten - were welcome to go by their usually
> accurate IC accounts. My
> not-so-anal-retentive characters would be able to
> feel it when they got a
> charge, and feel the potential leave them when they
> cast something.  They
> could tell they had a little or a lot of "juice"
> above and beyond that.
>  Patrick

Yeah. That's pretty much how I did it.  You could tell
if you had a lot of minor charges or not and people
kept careful track of the significant charges they'd
earned.  (I didn't even mention the possibility of
major charges.  If someone ever managed to get one, I
simply explained they "felt more powerful than they
ever had before" and gave them lots of euphoric side
effects.)  Even with my dysfunctional (and I'm not
kidding, con_job spotted this early on and hit the
nail right on the head) group, this worked.  

In practice, it goes something like this:

Adepts usually have enough magical power to perform
any minor effect they want, as long as the player
makes frequent (at least once or twice an hour of play
time) efforts to "maintain" their charge level.  The
boozehound keeps swilling, the pornomancer arranges
for liaisons, what-have-you.  

When the player puts out a special effort to gather a
significant charge, they get one and keep track of it.

If someone puts so much effort into getting a
significant charge that they cross the boundaries into
Major Charge territory, I drop a few hints but let the
usual obscurity of GM-player communication do the game
balancing for me.  Here's where being a savvy player
or one who's read the rules gets rewarded.  The player
may  waste the major charge on pretty much unlimited
sigs until the end of the game or channel whatever's
left of that major charge into one whopping chunk of
mojo (which there's usually someone wanting to do,
anyway.)

I like the Chips idea, though.  I used to do that for
Essence in IN NOMINE.  I'll just use it for
significant charges, though, to show how Significant
they are.

=====
-- Rp Bowman, Royal Minister of Stuff
The Electronic Nation of Yokeltania:
http://www.geocities.com/yokeltania/

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Tax Center - online filing with TurboTax
http://taxes.yahoo.com/

_______________________________________________
UA mailing list
UA at lists.uchicago.edu
http://lists.uchicago.edu/mailman/listinfo/ua