[Song of Ethera] Fun Tokens System

[Selene Tan]

I just got my hands on Universalis, and it's great stuff. (Hats off to Ralph and Mike on that.) Anyway, it's given me an idea for a system for my game. In [Song of Ethera]Managing input to the SIS, I mentioned that I wanted people to be able to indicate good or bad ideas. I also suggested something similar to Universalis' Coins. I've since fleshed out the idea, which inspired a couple of other fun ideas.

Every person playing the game starts out with two tokens per person playing. When a player tries to do something that another player doesn't agree with, s/he can challenge the original player. People can throw in tokens on either side of the challenge, and it's over when nobody wants to spend any more tokens. If the defender won, their input gets accepted. If the challenger won, the input isn't accepted. Whoever bid on the winning side gets their tokens back, plus one. Those on the losing side lose their tokens.

At any point during the game, a player can choose to award another player (including the GM) a token for a particularly good idea or move. (Yay PtA fan-mail!)

Fun ideas!

1) At certain intervals (players call for a break? characters get to a town and rest?), play stops. Every player awards one token to the player they think has done the best so far (not including themselves). Players can then convert as many tokens as they want into experience points and spend them on improving characters. I like this because it directly awards players for coming up with cool, interesting ideas.

2) The GM gets three tokens per person instead of two. These tokens are used to create Challenges/obstacles. Each token buys one level of difficulty, starting from Very Easy.

3) If the GM runs out of tokens, players can choose to award the GM tokens (from their personal stashes?) in order to continue the adventure. Otherwise, players have to choose a new GM and, if necessary, award him/her tokens.

I think that the pool from which new tokens are drawn needs to be limited in some way. Maybe have it start at four tokens per person, and have the losers of token bidding put their tokens back into the pool? And refresh the pool by one token per person whenever play stops for an experience break.

I'd probably need to tweak the numbers; it'll depend on what I choose as the experience costs for different kinds of character advancement.

[TonyLB]

Whoever bid on the winning side gets their tokens back, plus one. Those on the losing side lose their tokens.

This is the Dollar Auction, right?