Dramatic Timing: The Action Cache

Sometimes you might be in a situation where you want to place time pressure on your party.  Perhaps the evil high priest is beginning his ritual, and the party needs to reach him before he completes it.  Perhaps the assassin is sneaking toward the king’s bedroom right now.  Perhaps the orcish horde is on the march toward the mountain pass, and they have to be contained there before they can spread across the land.

The action point mechanic in fourth edition helps a party of adventurers push on through several encounters, making this sort of time-limited situation more feasable than it might otherwise be.  If you want to really keep the pressure on, though, action points alone might not be enough.  If the high priest is chanting and sacrificing right now, then it’s not dramatically appropriate for the players to take a five-minute short rest.  Without that rest, though, they can’t recover encounter powers or spend healing surges.  Even if you give them an action point for every encounter, it won’t be enough if there are a number of encounters between the party and their goal.

One solution is to implement an action cache.  Set a cache of markers down in the middle of the table.  Poker chips, Go stones, or glass “life stones” work well for this.  Use a fair number of markers — at least ten is a good amount.  The more markers you place, the less urgent the time pressure will be, generally speaking.

After it’s established, the cache should lose one marker at regular time intervals.  In the case of the sneaking assassin, for instance, each minute of in-game time could diminish the size of the cache by one.  In the case of the marching orcs, it might take an hour of in-game time.

Furthermore, a certain amount of out-of-game time should also diminish the cache — this keeps the players moving and prevents, in the interest of dramatic flair, long conversations and planning sessions.  After all, if the assassin is going to kill the king in just a few minutes, the characters have little time to stand around making plans!  In this case, you might decide that 10 minutes or 15 minutes out of game equals one minute in game, and diminish the cache.  This time differential gives the players time to consider their next move, but not to casually sit around the table and come up with a scheme — the characters don’t have that luxury, and with the cache in play, neither do they.

When the cache runs out of markers, the event occurs.  The assassin will attack the king; the orcs arrive at the pass; the high priest speaks the final words of the ritual.

Here’s the part that helps the players, though:  the cache isn’t just a timing device.  A player can choose to spend a marker, voluntarily diminishing the size of the cache, in exchange for a positive effect of some kind.  The effect should be more powerful if the cache starts with few markers or diminishes quickly, and less powerful if it starts with many markers or diminishes slowly — in other words, spending a marker should be more powerful when time pressure is high.

The marker represents the character pushing himself beyond his normal limits, spurred on by the race against the clock — and at the same time, it keeps the event dramatic, because diminishing the cache means there’s now less time left on that clock.  (Granted, there’s no causal reason why this should be so — but there is a dramatic reason, and that’s what we’re concerned with, for the purpose of this mechanism.)

Some possibilities (with weaker options toward the top, and stronger toward the bottom) include:

• Spend a marker to spend a healing surge.
• Spend a marker to reroll a die.  The player can choose which value to use.
• Spend a marker to gain a bonus to a roll.
• Spend a marker to recover hit points as though you’d spent a healing surge, without actually expending a surge.
• Spend a marker to recover an encounter power.
• Spend a marker to gain the benefit of spending an action point — this does not count as the character’s use of an action point for that encounter.
• Spend a marker to gain a bonus to a defense until the end of the encounter.
• Spend a marker to automatically succeed on one saving throw.
• Spend a marker to recover all of your encounter powers.

Additionally, if you want to kick things up a notch, you can offer your players “good luck” in exchange for one or more markers.  The characters really want to get past a guard?  Well, if you spend a marker, he’ll wander off to investigate a noise around the opposite corner, and you’ll be able to sneak by unnoticed…

If the markers are starting to run low and you want to give the players a bit of a break, you can also offer “bad luck” in exchange for adding markers.  Only two minutes left to stop that ritual?  You can have three more markers if the high priest spent some time beforehand creating an extra undead guardian — that’ll make the fight tougher, but it gives you a couple minutes more to reach him before he finishes.

The biggest trick with the action cache is establishing an initial size and a rate of diminishing that keeps the time pressure on without going too far overboard and presenting the players with a nigh-impossible situation.  This is something you’ll pick up naturally as you use the device.  The first couple of times, I recommend being very conservative.  Even if you think that a cache of 30 markers that diminishes slowly is three times what your players will need, the presence of the cache alone will be enough to spur them on.

Ideally, you want the party to reach their destination when there are only a couple of markers left in the cache.  They burst in at the last minute to intercept the assassin, or they reach the general just in time for him to order his own armies to intercept the orc horde.  If you use this device frequently, though, you might want to mix it up on occasion.  Let the characters reach their goal with plenty of markers to spare, and they’ll feel good about their efficiency.  Let the markers run out, and listen to the mass intake of breath around the table.

It probably goes without saying, but, as with a failed skill challenge, you shouldn’t allow an empty action cache to completely derail your campaign.  There should be real consequences for failure, but “the world ends” shouldn’t be among them.  (Unless your players like that sort of thing, I guess.)  If the ceremony is successful, maybe the high priest is a lot more powerful, but the party still has a chance to stop him before his ascension to godhood.  If the assassin attacks the king, he may be gravely injured just as the kingdom’s in peril, but the swift response of a guard outside his door could spare his life.

The action cache can be used for almost any roleplaying game.  It works most easily in games that include a spendable-point mechanic to begin with, but it takes only minor modification to adapt it to other games.  It’s appropriate for any heroic game — but it usually doesn’t fit a game like Call of Cthulhu, where the characters are “just regular folk” and are supposed to be overwhelmed by their opposition.

Tags: gamemastering, games, roleplaying, rules
Categories: roleplaying |