Hero Points
When players are clutching big handfuls of dice they feel invincible. Nothing can stop them wining the challenge and looking really cool. Watch the face drop as they behold a sea of 1,2,3 results smeared over the table! Meanwhile their challenge opponent looks down at a huge pile of sixes and starts the process of counting up all those challenge winning successes. Glee.
Here’s an optional rule:
Hero Points give player and Guide a chance to come back from the brink or stack the odds yet further in their favour. PCs get 2 HPs at start of play.Further HPs are granted for fun and imaginative play as rewards
Here are some ideas as to how they might work When you spend a HP you can:
- Gain 4d into your hand if it is spent before a challenge roll OR
- Reroll your dice if you don’t like the result (you can’t do this if you’ve taken the +4d)
- Improve a Victory Level by one
- Turn any sort of defeat into a tie
I’ll come up with more. How about you?! 
Not 100% sure about this, as a long suffering HeroQuest GM I was looking forward to the players tipping the odds in their favour using other methods (such as invoking goals).
Didn’t ‘Pools’ in the game we played at Newt Con kinda cover this?
Indeed - Goals can tip the baalnce if they are invoked. You get to invoke Goals up to three times in a game session and you get half your foundation trait rounded up in extra dice. One of the players that suddenly got trounced wasn’t using his goals and they would certaily have helped him.
You are right - Pools were there to do the same job, giving players an edge, and to alleviate things when you are using big dice pools and suddenly make a poor roll. The Pools were clunky in play and served to make the challenge process unneccesarily complex.
Hero Points would not be the same in Wordplay as HeroQuest. They are much closer to SW Bennies. In HQ they were the sole PC currency and were mixed and matched with improvements. Wasn’t convinced by that.
Hero Points would also be optional. Some Themes might use them, others wouldn’t. Some GMs will need them, others will be happy with the dice occasionaly ruling the roost and dictating the outcome with no ’save’.
Clearly the HP concenpt was built in early via the Pools, but with those thankfully removed from the game I wonder if there is a mechanical need other than through Goals to force a result? You raise an interesting question. As outlind Goals can be invoked and HPs spent together. This would give you a huge stack of dice or opportunity to reroll.
Needs more head room and thinking.
Perhaps Goals invoked in multi-roll challenges give he bonus throughout the challenge rather than just for one roll?
While a great fan of HP in HQ/MR, I feel some sympathy for Newt’s view. Certainly I think having Goals is a good way round this (and yes, maybe it should affect more than one stage in a multi-roll challenge). Following philosophically from the Goals angle — if it really matters to you, you’ll strain every sinew — perhaps a roll allowing a player to trade converting a fail to a success in a single roll for an appropriate automatic 1d Hurt applying after the contest (with the usual cumulation). So, if Our Hero is crossing swords with his Evil Nemesis to save the Distressed Damsel and rolls really badly, he could change three fails to successes. This is enough to win, but means he’ll take a 3d Incapacitation! “The villain’s rapier punches into my body, but I lurch forward, trapping the blade within me. As he tries feverishly to pull out his weapon, I gather my final energies and bury my knife in his throat. He falls and I collapse, bleeding, atop his cooling corpse..”
Just a back-of-the-envelope thought
All the best
Mark
Thanks to both.
I’ll look again at the Hero Point text I have and remove (but store in my handy drawer of stuff that didn’t quite make it). What I will do is keep the Goals as the centre of this and see how I can vary the effect that they have to cover the need for Hero Points.
Good stuff. Cheers.