The Whispering Vault - some rules tweaks?

[sim_james]

   The Whispering Vault is among my old favourite roleplaying games. TWV was my first campaign when I started to run games at UNSW Gameplayers eight or nine years ago, and while we only played about six times or so, I have fond memories of those cold autumn Friday nights. This was some of the first gaming that I did with Lucy, Rachel, and Doug;

Comments

[sim_james]

I can see what you're getting at. Many, many gamers have been conditioned into the reward/punishment use of experience points... especially in games where experience serves to "unlock" new powers and abilities.

(Experience points as a reward/conditioning mechanism are more powerful in D&D and Storyteller, but less powerful in Unknown Armies or just about any supers game I've played.)

Maybe as an alternative, the karma points spent on a roll are indeed transformed into experience points - to be used on either the attribute or skill that was relevant to that roll. You'd need a box next to each stat in which to tally up any points spent on rerolls, and you'd need to rethink the experience point costs of increasing any given skill.

One advantage of doing this is that you can more easily convert to "flat" experience costs, as the higher a stat gets, the less often you'll need to re-roll it. This is good because it prevents PCs escalating to ridiculous high skills in everything, whilst still allowing for the same flat costs at character creation -and- during play.