Morpheus Unbound  |  House Rules

Karma for dramatic Game Mechanics

This is a general set of rules that could be applied to any "experience point" based system like (A)D&D, V&V or the Palladium Megaverse games (which is why it now has so many links from the house rules page, even though this piece was originally written "for AD&D").

Back in the early 1990s, I adapted the experience point system from the Palladium Books games to my AD&D, 2d. ed. campaign.  I liked the idea of handing out x.p. for good idea, accomplishing tough goals, thinking clearly and generally doing things besides activities directly related to hacking apart monsters or stealing treasure.

That worked extremely well, and most of the players enjoyed having the extra experience points.  However, I'm a superhero gamer at heart, and I wanted to add a little larger-than-life drama to my games.  Thus, it occurred to me to adapt the rules for spending karma from Marvel Superheroes to AD&D.  The game mechanic is simple.  At any time, a player may declare that s/he "burns" experience points in order to get a die modifier.  100 experience points gained one of the following:

• A + or - 5% modifier to one of the character's die rolls, in the characters favor,
• A + or - 5% modifier to one of the character's opponent's die rolls, in the characters favor,
• A +1 on any "to hit" or saving throw made by the character,
• A -1 on any "to hit" or saving throw made against the character (this could be used to lower a target's defenses against spells, for example),
• A +1 on any damage die roll made by the character, although the damage could not exceed the normal maximum for the weapon,
• A -1 on any damage die roll made against the character, although the damage could not be reduced below 1 point per die.

Only "heroic characters" could "spend" their experience points in this way.  "Heroic characters" were defined as NPCs of 4th level or greater or any Player Character of any level.

Characters could lose experience levels if they spent too many experience points.  This represented trading favors with the gods or some equally ambiguous justification ;-)

On a tangential thread, we replaced the "levels drained" power of various undead AD&D creatures with an experience point drain.  One "level" equaled 1d6 × 1000 experience points drained. This worked out really nicely, especially at higher levels, where the XP treadmill of recovering two lost class levels through experience points sucked a lot more than at lower levels.