Special Effects in Action

I have a deep and abiding fondness for the HERO system.  It’s mathematically complex and not always elegant, but its core idea is one of the best ideas in roleplaying games, in my opinion.

That idea is this:  In HERO, you pay character points for the game-mechanical effect your character can achieve.  You then decide what form that mechanical effect takes within the game world.  The HERO rulebooks call this the “special effect”.

For instance, you might buy ten dice of Energy Blast for 50 character points.  You decide that this represents your hero’s ability to shoot lightning from his hands.  Your friend’s character’s 50-point Energy Blast might represent a thrown ball of fire.  Another character’s represents a Thor-style thrown hammer attack.  (Despite the name, Energy Blast doesn’t have to be energy.  It can be physical for no extra cost.)  Another is a bolt of raw force.  Another is a bad luck power, representing damage the target “does to himself” through some misfortune.

The in-game effects are, in most circumstances, the same.  But the flavor isn’t.  To use the modern jargon, HERO separates crunch and fluff.  You pay for the crunch; you define the fluff.  I don’t know whether it was the first game to do so, but it’s probably the best-known one to do so.  Surely the longest-running one.

Fourth edition D&D mentions changing the fluff of a power in order to customize it to the character.  That’s the special effect in action, right there.  Only, it doesn’t go quite as far as HERO does.  Not explicitly, at any rate.

I said that the in-game effects of the power are the same, but that isn’t quite true.  The special effects can have impacts upon the gameplay.  Some of these effects are explicit — if the Human Snowball has taken the Vulnerability to Fire-based Attacks disadvantage, then an Energy Blast defined as a fireball does extra damage to him, while an Energy Blast defined as a lightning bolt does not.

Some of the effects are implied, though.  If your Energy Blast is a fireball, you can light a cigarette with your finger.  If your Energy Blast is a burst of water, you might be able to use it to put out that building fire, even if your character didn’t pay points for Suppress Fire.  (If you start going around putting out fires on a regular basis, the GM will require you to put some experience toward purchasing that power, though — you get some leeway for interesting power stunts, but you need to pay for things you do reliably.)

I plan to apply this scheme to my 4e games.

The latter part is fairly easy to work out.  If you have a fire-based encounter power, sure, you can light a campfire.  The choice of special effects, though, is trickier.

The main problem here is that not all special effects are equal, in 4e.  A power that does radiant damage is resisted by very little, while it benefits from a large number of monsters possessing radiant vulnerability.  On the other hand, fire resistance is common.  Furthermore, while few monsters are merely resistant to poison, many are outright immune.  Allowing a character to change his fire and poison powers to do radiant damage, and making no other changes, might unbalance them.

Complicating the situation further is the presence of effects other than damage — fire often offers ongoing damage, for instance.  This may still make sense when switched to acid, but less sense when switched to psychic.  Certain feats could also be leveraged much further; Psychic Lock, for instance, has more of an impact if the character’s every power is psychic.

I’m currently leaning toward requiring a feat for keyword shifts — similar to the 3e Elemental Substitution, but perhaps not limited to a single element.  Characters who wished to define their own special effect without taking the feat could still do so, but would need to work with the existing keywords.  Ice Storm would need to be envisioned in such a way that it did cold damage and could immobilize, slow, and create difficult terrain, for instance.

Those who took the feat would be able to swap keywords around.  But the secondary effects of the power could also change.  Ice Storm might be envisioned instead as a swirling cloud of sparks.  It would lose the Cold keyword and gain the Lightning keyword.  Instead of immobilizing or slowing, it could daze or slow.  Daze is stronger than immobilize, but a cloud of sparks doesn’t create difficult terrain, somewhat balancing matters out.  To cover the Zone aspect of the power, the GM might decide that any creature starting its turn in the cloud takes a small amount of lightning damage.

An Ice Storm that instead functioned by transmuting the ground to slippery mud would lose the Cold keyword.  It would cause no damage (or perhaps a greatly reduced amount of physical damage), but a hit would knock enemies prone, and any creature within the burst area at the end of its turn would need to make a separate saving throw or fall prone.  The immobilize and slow effects would still be present.

Changing a power from an often-resisted type to a rarely-resisted type might entail a reduction in damage.  A radiant variation of Ice Storm might cause 2d6 base instead of 2d8.  Likewise, a fire version of a power that normally caused radiant damage might deal slightly more damage.  Of course, a player would need a solid concept in order to make the change in the first place; “I want to do radiant damage” doesn’t cut it.  That’s not much of a barrier to my players, creative types all, but it at least ensures that some thought has gone into the matter.

Once selected, the power remains constant unless it’s retrained.  I’m considering a feat to allow on-the-fly changing at the time of casting, but I’m pretty sure that would need to be an epic feat.  It opens up a lot of options.

I need to do a little more work with this before implementing it in my game, but I find it a very appealing notion.  Earlier editions of D&D flirted with it a little in Dragon magazine or in supplements, but now, here it is in the core rulebooks.  As a HERO player, how could I resist?

Related posts:

1. Action!
2. Fox Magic: Arcane Feats
3. Hanging in the Balance
4. Heroic Effort
5. Dramatic Timing: The Action Cache