Fantasy Heartbreak Workshop

The Autocrat is one of the six Powers That Be whose existence widely believed (including, among others the Queen of Ravens and the Machine at the Heart of the World ).  He is known to the well educated magicians of the realms as the individual who created the Secret Regulations of Desire. In ancient times there were magical formulas which could translate any specific whim of a magician into reality at any level.  These formulas are variously known as Entelechies of the Will , Arbitrary Thought Instantiations , or more commonly "Wish spells".  In the heyday of the Wish spell's use, it was employed so freely that it changed reality on both vast and subtle scales.  As a result any attempts to determine the true nature of eras prior to it's use, based on the evidence available, is exceedingly unreliable. At one point the re-writing of reality is thought to have gotten particularly intense as various mages competed to make their vision of the universe dominant. ...

A character's base initiative modifier is determined by:  Dexterity modifier + Wisdom modifier At the beginning of combat this total is added to the roll of 1d20 to determine the order that each character's actions take place during combat, with higher initiatives going first followed by lower rolls.  Any ties are either assumed to take place at exactly the same time or, if such a simultaneous action would be impossible, then each party rolls 1d20 again as a tiebreaker. Characters with higher initiatives may hold their actions until later in the round. Option:  Round-by-Round Initiative Instead of rolling initiative once at the beginning of combat, and using the same initiative order every round, you may choose instead to re-roll each round.  This gives characters a chance to do better if they've gotten stuck with a bad initiative on the first roll. Option:  Speed Modifier This alternation is intended for use with round-by-round initiative.  With ...

Recording couple ideas I had on combat resources and other considerations for mundane combatants, culled from this thread , for future refernce: In this instance my own sense of verisi-simulat-emersio-reality would be better preserved if these sorts of things (and "sand bagging") got a special label like "tricks" and combatants got a chance to attempt each once per opponent (or per combat if all opponents are observing carefully) without penalty. Alternately (or additionally) some sort of "heroic exertion" system could be used to track how worn out a character becomes after each physically demanding attempt. And of course it's all just personal preference, but to me: Encounter/Dailies say, "You will not succeed at this task if you tried it once"; while increasing difficulty says, "Your chances are pretty slim, but if you think you can pull it off: Shoot the moon!" And Encounter/Dailies also say, "You can only ...