D&D Geekitude: Extreme Vengeance

[kent_allard_jr]

It became a cliché in 80s action movies: The bad guys came and murdered your wife, kidnapped your kids, shot your dog, killed your partner the day before his retirement ... NOW THEY'RE GOING TO PAY! Despite its overuse, the trope had a nice cathartic logic to it. It made the hero sympathetic (despite the vast numbers of people he kills) and the resolution emotionally satisfying. It was also often used to explain the hero's success. The hero's righteous fury gives him the strength to endure hardship, and his blows against the villain are powered by his insatiable rage.

I always wanted to simulate this dynamic in an RPG (without switching completely to narrativist mechanics, which I view with suspicion). Hero is Wronged, Hero is Enraged, Hero Goes Medieval on Villain's Ass. Yet most RPGs are realistic in this regard: It doesn't matter how much you hate the guy you're fighting, you have the same chance to hit and you do the same damage.

You could say some D&D classes -- the raging barbarian and the cursing warlock -- are powered by their righteous fury, but unfortunately these powers used routinely against anyone that stands between them and the treasure. What I'd like to see if some game benefit you get only when you've been grievously wronged, and one that can be given to any class.

So what benefits would make sense, in D&D terms? Free criticals? Free healing surges? Extra action points? Or simple bonuses to attack rolls? I'd be interested in what people could come up with.

Comments

[jlc.livejournal.com]

In the case of D&D 4e, I would encourage extra action points and loosening of the AP rules. This leads to very cinematic battles, after all: where the Hero(es) are just going ballistic, unloading their big flashy powers with a speed and fury unmet even by the big bads.

White Wolf's frenzies often lead to this kind of thing in the games that feature them (notably Vampire & Werewolf), with characters that have been pushed too far flipping their shit and ripping apart everything between them and the people who fucked them up. Of course, due to the thematic focus of those games, this usually ends up with PCs having hurt people they didn't mean to, or waking up from frenzy in front of loved ones who are more than a bit traumatized by seeing a room full of bad guys getting ripped to shreds.

[bigscary.livejournal.com]

I was going to post exactly this solution: RIGHTEOUS BURNING FURY yields an AP usable once without any restriction.

Thematically/Narratively it works perfectly. The normal AP is tapping into your reserve of will and heroism, the extra AP is that blow delivered screaming out your dead wife's name.

[jlc.livejournal.com]

But clearly it's more than just one... maybe more like one or two for each indignity suffered.

Really, I just imagine RIGHTEOUS BURNING FURY in 4e should translate into something like V:tM Celerity

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

It seems like this type of dramatic structure is best recreated with "hero points". You give a lot of hero points to the wronged protagonist and then he cashes them in to get a dramatically satisfying critical hit or whatever.

Of course, combat in most RPGs is not dramatically structured--in early D&D in particular, which is the model for most RPG combat systems, combat is a war of attrition. The card game Wrasslin' tried to create a combat system built around drama, including "The Champ" (Hulk Hogan), whose sole combat power was the ability to rally heroically and discard all damage twice per game.

[kent-allard-jr.livejournal.com]

Yeah, action points (or hero points) seem to be the consensus choice. Now in D&D4 action points just get you an extra action; this action can be healing, rerolling an attack, or whatever, but that depends a lot on class, race, paragon path and so forth. So it simulates some effects of Righteous Burning Fury, but not all of them; in particular, it doesn't change the war-of-attrition dynamic that you rightly emphasize.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

If I recall correctly, the James Bond game was a pioneer in the type of "hero points" I'm thinking of. They could be used to dramatically (in both senses) alter the players' fortunes--turn a crucial miss into a hit, a hit into a critical, that type of thing--and you got a certain number of them per "episode".

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

Following up... I think that the first-generation HeroQuest rules used "dueling masteries" to automatically move any roll up a level--if you were one Master level higher than your opponent, then a fumble becomes a mere failure, a failure becomes a success, a success becomes a major success, a major success becomes a critical success. Combining the two ideas is a pretty obvious "here's the big finish!" mechanic--if you can save up your hero points through the adventure, you can spend them all at the end for a critical success even against the Swack-Iron Dragon-Golem.

Alternately, for dramatic structure, the player and the game master could agree to game events & situations which automatically generate hero points which could not be saved. If the protagonist is really beaten down, then getting three hero points from coming face-to-face with the man who killed her husband won't be enough--but then when she's confident and healed, those three points will allow her to roundhouse-kick him so hard he doesn't get up for three more sequels.

[robheinsoo.livejournal.com]

Speaking for 4e, another approach that might complement action points would be to let the PC use the action point for a daily power that was above their level, utterly unavailable to them by the normal rules, but when you're fighting THE villain who did those terrible things, you access power you ordinarily just don't have.

That seems to fit the schtick.

[bigscary.livejournal.com]

The idea could be expanded into something beyond Daily powers, into "lifetime" (or "until you spend another month training on the mountaintop") powers.

[(Anonymous)]

See, if this were AD&D 1e (or OSRIC) instead of 4e, I would suggest an "Avenger" tweak to the abilities a given PC: Regardless of class, and only when facing the Villain What Done Hir Wrong (and maybe the villain's known henchmen), the character gets multiple attacks per round--perhaps as much as two additional attacks per level of the PC. In combat with anyone else, the PC gets only hir normal attacks; and once hir revenge is achieved, the tweak no longer applies. Unless the villain is resurrected, of course.

[barking-iguana.livejournal.com]

Note: I've played some 3rd ed. but mostly 1st, so this may be off:

When a character is wronged (from the perspective of the character) the DM and player may agree that the character has a major grudge, or even a defining grudge.

Such grudges allow the character to tap her/his very essence to gain ability in a situation that may give vengeance. A major grudge allows the character to permanently sacrifice a constitution point to, for the duration of an encounter, make all rolls twice and keep the better. A defining grudge allows the character to sacrifice 2 constitution points and a wisdom point to make all (or almost all) rolls without actually rolling at all, simply taking the best possible result.

The idea is that the character is actually expending her/himself.