Great White Games/Pinnacle Entertainment Group

[manifold]

I was reading over some Trail of C'thulhu stuff, and there's this kind of interesting idea of rewarding certain kinds of success with an increased chance of success in that same area at a later time. In other words, if you use your Library Use skill to figure out that there are no obituaries in the newspaper on any night after a full moon in 1926, you get a bonus to your next Library Use skill if the success depends on newspapers.

Fiddly, and very specific; not very FFF.

However, I like the idea of a dedicated reward; something more focused than a benny. I want to run a Day After Ragnarok game, and I'm thinking of giving "dedicated bennies" as rewards for some in-game actions. For instance, if you figure out that the librarian is actually a snake cultist, you get a dedicated benny, that you can use to either get a +2 or re-roll on your next attempt to identify a snake cultist, or discern snake-cult activity.

I guess these are sort of meta-potions.

I like the idea of rewarding some success with more success in the same area, and of rewards being specific to the characters. I like the mechanical aspect of this. I guess the benny would be recorded on the chr. sheet, under posessions. (Hm.)

I'll be using steel washers for bennies, to accentuate the deisel punk aspect of DAR. the deidcated bennies would be rusty washers, bolts, and other stuff to differentiate them physically from regular bennies.

Thoughts?
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[BluSponge]

Actually, I don't have a problem at all with the idea of dedicated bennies. I think they would work especially well in gritter settings like Cthulhu. The trick would be having enough distinctive tokens.

Tom
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[Chezzo]

My GM gives us all sorts of bennies. He uses happy face yellow bennies. We also get green kinda drunk face healing bennies. We get some other color happy faced ones for super bennies, bennies that last more than one session.

I am all about different kinds of bennies. I think it's an underused aspect of the game. Deadlands does it, beautifully! Why can't we?
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[The Angle]

It's a great idea. An option that would limit the amount of memory involved would be to just write the bonus bennie's instructions and conditions on a 3x5 card or the back of a business card and make that the bennie. For example, "This bennie can be used on an Investigation roll, a Streetwise roll, or any roll involving journalistic research." You could expand that to cover virtual 'get out of jail free' cards of any sort. For example, if characters do a favor for the cops and you don't want to forget that, write them a literal 'Get Out of Jail Free' card. You could even include a memory jogger such as "LAPD owes us a favor for diverting a formless spawn away from police headquarters." From then on, it's the players' responsibility to remember that they have it (and bring it to the game), saving you a bit of hard drive space.

Steve
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[shadd4d]

The Hellfrost Runic Bennies are sort of geared toward this use.
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[islan]

I've inserted Dedicated Bennies (thanks, now I have a name for this!) into my own games, with a good player response. I pretty much use them as a reward for a player doing something that was not quite good enough for a full benny. I use poker chips for bennies, and the different colors work out well for this.

I don't get highly specific for the benny use; I just say "this benny is for any Fighting roll, this benny is for Soaking," etc. It also works like a normal benny, so no +2 bonus. It does lead to something where players want the dedicated benny to roll-over between games if they don't get a chance to use them; I'm still not sure if I should let them or not.

[Chezzo]

Wait Islan, you give players Dedicated Bennies for "not quite good enough for a full benny", but they "works like a normal benny"?

We always carry over our Dedicated Bennies from game to game. It was always just assumed, I think. But having them for only one session makes the characters use them. Hmmmn.

Ye gods, those Runic Bennies rules are awesome. I'm gonna retool them for the Norse gods and stick 'em in my Day After Ragnarok game.
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