Wyverns & Warrens Preview: Heroic Moments (Patreon)

(This article is not covered under the OGL 1.0a.)

Wyverns & Warrens (or "WyvWar") is my current ongoing attempt to design a short, easy, fantasy ttRPG that still had a depth of options. I'm doing previews of concepts for my Patrons, and open to your feedback.

This one is short. My recovery from being hospitalized with a pulmonary embolism currently leaves me the energy for at most an hour or two of work a day. But as I am able, I'll try to spend some of that time giving you, my patrons, something new.

So, let's talk about Heroic Moments in WyvWar.

("I summon the Strength of the Tides," Art by иколай Акатов)

Adventure fiction often offers up the Heroic Moment as the climax of a scene, if not an entire story. The wizard taps the Old Power, which is forbidden and hard to control. The shieldbearer stands alone on the bridge, holding it against the field of archers. The priest calls upon her goddess to unleash the sea itself. The berserker grabs the titan's greave and begins climbing the towering foe, refusing to be shaken free while slashing at any exposed joint.

Done right, they're awesome. Done wrong, they're cringe. Done in a ttRPG, they're tricky.

If a character CAN do such things on-demand, why wouldn't they? If they can TRY such things but are unlikely to succeed, what are the odds it'll happen at the hell-yeah moment it's needed? And, if failing means doing nothing, how frustrating is that?!) If they happen as critical successes, why can't the player try for them when the chips are down, rather than "enjoy" pulling off something awesome against a swarm of rats they were handing just find before the crit showed up?

Now, to be sure, these are not the *only* ttRPG solutions to this problem, but they are common ones, and I don't find any of them satisfying. So, since WyvWar is *my* game, I'm going to try my solution.

Every character can perform one Heroic Moment at each character level.

There are provisos of course. There will be 2-3 universal Heroic Moments everyone can access, and at each level a character picks an additional Heroic Possibility, which they can choose to use as a Heroic Moment. You can't save-up Heroic Moments -- if you got from 2nd to 3rd level without using one, you can still take just one Heroic Moment sometimes between 3rd and 4th level. And, Heroic Moments aren't designed to retroactively to save you from an enemy attack, since if they could you might save it for that forever, and never use one.

As your character gains level, the number of Heroic Possibilities you have access to grow, but you can still just use one per level.

The devil is in the details, of course. But that's the plan.