Heroic Effort

One of the worst things that can happen to a game is a string of bad die rolls.  Through no fault of the players’, plots can be derailed, plans can go disastrously wrong, and characters can die.  One traditional means of handling this scenario is for the gamemaster to fudge — surreptitiously decide that an attack by the monster missed when the dice show a hit, or that the damage inflicted was minimal instead of a critical, or that the bad guy failed its saving throw instead of making it.

While fudging is effective, it must be used sparingly.  Players need to feel that there’s some actual danger to their characters, or they become less invested in keeping those characters alive.  Players who realize the GM has cheated in their favor generally lose interest in the game, in one way or another — why play, if they know they’re going to win?

On the other hand, it’s entirely reasonable to not want to fail just because a crucial die roll was missed.

Heroic Effort is a mechanic to help address that situation, while still retaining a chance of failure.  It’s appropriate to cinematic games, but not intended for realistic ones.  The idea behind it is that, in the clutch, the character is able to tap into an inner reserve and put forth a better performance than he otherwise might.

Some game systems already incorporate a mechanic of this sort.  In HERO, a character can “push,” spending extra endurance (END) in order to gain extra points of effect on a power — a character with Strength 20 could spend 10 END to act as though he had Strength 30 for just that one phase.  It reflects the moment in the comic books where Spiderman, pinned beneath tons of metal, focuses on poor old Aunt May and the medicine he was delivering, which she needs for her weak heart… and gathers himself and lifts the steel off of him.

In fourth edition D&D, I implement Heroic Effort in this way:  Any time a player rolls a d20, he may choose to roll a second d20 at the same time.  (The second die is a different color, so the results are easy to tell apart.)  The number on the first d20 is the result the character will use… unless he makes a Heroic Effort.

If the character makes a Heroic Effort, he uses the result on the second d20 instead.  Obviously, he does this only if the second die is better.  The player knows going in what the result of using his “real” roll would be, so he typically doesn’t make a Heroic Effort on a success, unless it’s a situation in which succeeding by a large margin would be very beneficial.

A character who makes a Heroic Effort takes an amount of damage equal to 1/4 of his hit points.  (This is equal to the character’s healing surge value, unless the character has some trait that alters that value.)  This damage occurs at the end of the character’s turn, after the Effort has been resolved.  It’s entirely possible for a character to make a Heroic Effort to strike down an enemy, only to collapse himself from the exertion.

Powers and effects that allow rerolls only affect regular dice; the Heroic Effort die is never rerolled.  A character could, however, use a power such as Elven Accuracy to reroll the regular die, and then choose to make a Heroic Effort using the (original) effort die anyway.

If you use Heroic Effort for attack rolls, you may want to rule that a Heroic Effort never causes a critical hit.

Heroic Effort makes success with a specific die roll much more likely.  If odds are already in the player’s favor, adding a potential extra die can make success a near-certainty.  If odds are slim, it gives the player a second chance to overcome them.

It is intended for dramatic and even “crucial” rolls, and it may need to be watched; players should not be using Heroic Effort to, for example, overcome a typical wilderness-pathfinding skill challenge.  Heroic Effort is intended for the non-typical case, in which they need to stay ahead of the invading yuan-ti army as they race through the jungle to warn the keep, and if they fail then the yuan-ti will probably capture them and raze it.  It’s not to make every at-will attack hit, it’s to make their daily power have a better chance of whalloping the boss.  It’s not to make every saving throw succeed, it’s to let the cleric avoid being petrified when half the party is already down and the other half needs him to avoid a Total Party Kill situation.

If players seem inclined to abuse Heroic Effort, the GM can restrict it to one use per encounter, as Action Points are.  The GM can also restrict the rolls to which it can apply — perhaps only to attack rolls, or only to skill rolls, or only when the character is bloodied, or only when the GM specifically tells the player that a Heroic Effort would be dramatically appropriate.

Related posts:

1. Narration in Combat
2. A Harvest of Men (III)
3. Zero Level
4. Fox Magic: Arcane Feats
5. Zero Level, Revisited