Something I've been thinking of, after playing Jay's Gallant and reading Mongoose Publishing's Conan, are Fate Points. I remember them first appearing in Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay with the sole purpose of keeping a character who has just died from actually dying.

As what they are, I see it as a resource which allows the player to exert narrative control beyond her playable character: To introduce an event/element into the game otherwise not allowed via the rest of the system. This is usually a way to avoid death, arbitrarily increase the chance of success, or introduce material goods or events beyond the GM's planning.

What I'm interested in this thread is solely to compile a history of this style of mechanic. Please reply with the game, what the mechanic is called and how it is usable in-game.

Thanks, in advance, for your help with this. When I get home I'll also go through my game books and contribute.

Earliest use I can think of is in Victory Games' James Bond RPG, which is from, I think, 1983.

In that game, PCs have "hero points," which can be used to improve die rolls and avoid taking damage.

NPCs have "survival points," which can only be used to reduce damage.

An old chestnut by a little publishing house called TSR called "Top Secret" had both Fame and Fortune points that allowed you to avoid death through their expenditure. IIRC you got Fortune points for successful missions and at DM whim and one fame point per level earned. Neither replenished.

Another idea which was already around in the seventies, if I'm not mistaken. I incorporated these into some of my D&D homebrews early on and players really liked them - but they were almost always used to avoid death, and only rarely to do anything cool. (I'm not sure if they even could be used to do things other than avoid death in Top Secret.)

Marvel Super Heroes (c) 1984 had Karma points. You spent Karma to increase (or decrease? -- I'll have to check) your die rolls (percentile system on a single Universal Table), so you could succeed, or up the level of success, even if you didn't roll well.

PCs got Karma back by doing heroic things--saving innocent victims, beating up supervillians, paying their bills on time (I kid you not), speaking at charity events, going on patrol. PCs could also lose them by doing uheroic things --running from a fight, committing a crime, missing an appointment, or, most of all, killing someone.

Karma was also used like experience points, to increase stats & buy new powers.

Karma could also be pooled by a team, so that everyone could share some of their Karma.

I don't recall if it had any ability to lessen damage, except that you could, of course, spend it to succeed at Stun/Shock/Kill resistance checks

Sean wrote: (I'm not sure if they even could be used to do things other than avoid death in Top Secret.)

Good topic, Zak! I was actually thinking of a similar thread myself.

My contribution is DC Heroes, where they were called Hero Points. Again, you could use them to fix a bad roll, or IIRC, to increase effectiveness of an action.

Something that I find interesting is that the first places I ran across them (Marvel Super Heroes and DC Heroes), they were the same currency used for improvement. So in order to use them to exert control (in these cases limited to just fixing a missed roll) you had to give up experience.

I assume this started as some sort of "balancing" effort. The trade-off for exerting choice in resolution was that your character didn't get better as quickly. Probably well-meaning, but it doesn't exactly encourage players to exert control on the story, does it?

Note: This post has been dramatically edited.

Adventure! from White Wolf has a stat called Inspiration, which can be used in many ways, including something very similar to fate points. First of all, Inspiration is used to activate the characters' super powers (called knacks) and insane inventions if you happen to be a mad scientist. Once per scene you can spend an inspiration point to double your dice pool for a single action for a feat of sheer heroism (better hope you don't botch). It can also be spent to gain a useful hint to represent some kind of intuition. It's most frequent use, however, is Dramatic Editing, which gives the player some narrative control to insert details, particularly life-saving details. The bigger the detail and the more continutity problems it causes, the more inspiration it costs, from 1 to 4 or more. Games are encouraged to end with a Cliffhanger ending (bad if the right people can't show up next time), and players spend their inspiration to figure out a way to get out of this mess, taking narrative control as dictated by Inspiration points. Players may build on details presented by other players to make more effective use of their limited Inspiration. Since Inspiration ranges from 1 to 10, with most characters having about 3 or 4, it goes pretty fast.

Hope that's more helpful now that I am home where my books are.

West End Games' Star Wars (now known as Star Wars D6) provided Character Points and Force Points. Character points were the currency of improvement, but could also be spent in game to add an extra die to your die pool on a given roll. Force points doubled all die pools for a round, and were given back to the user if used for a virtuous purpose (or even given back with interest if the purpose was both virtuous and heroic).

Scourge108 wrote: Add White Wolf's Adventure! to the list with their Inspiration points. Basically the same thing as mentioned, if your adventurer falls off a cliff or is stabed in the heart, spend some Inspiration for dramatic re-editing, and you grabbed hold of a root sticking out of the cliff, or your lucky pet rock was in your shirt pocket and deflected the knife.

coxcomb wrote:

Scourge108 wrote: Add White Wolf's Adventure! to the list with their Inspiration points. Basically the same thing as mentioned, if your adventurer falls off a cliff or is stabed in the heart, spend some Inspiration for dramatic re-editing, and you grabbed hold of a root sticking out of the cliff, or your lucky pet rock was in your shirt pocket and deflected the knife.

I don't have the book with me to check, but doesn't Inspiration let you do lots more than that? It's been a while since I read it carefully, but I thought you could edit a great many things, not just avert death.

Thanks for the replies, all! I'm trying for a strict "only the facts" thread, so please list the exact rules as they are stated in the game. For example, for the Adventure! game I am not only looking for their use as "dramatic rewrites" but exactly how the rules are applied during play.

I'm trying to decide whether Legend of Alyria's Inspiration/Corruption points are of this sort or not.

You can be awarded these during play for exceptional character choices for good or evil; it's not a scale, but points positive and negative.

A player can spend these to override the resolution system, but it takes a unique form. An inspiration point causes the situation to be resolved in favor of good and a corruption point in favor of evil, but from something of a divine perspective--it does not necessarily mean that the good guys or bad guys will accomplish what they're attempting to do here, but rather that whatever happens will be a victory for universal good or evil.

They can also be spent to alter character traits. Traits are part of the resolution system, and so you can make your good traits stronger and your bad traits weaker with inspiration points, the reverse with corruption points. My recollection is that the cost of changing character traits is related to how many "phases" different they are from your virtue, but I can't put a precise correlation on it off the top of my head.

You can give inspiration and corruption points to other characters, but you have to roleplay some means by which these are done (e.g., encouraging the character in character, such that he is strengthened).

If you collect seven of either sort of point, your virtue automatically shifts one "phase" in that direction and you spend all the points immediately.

That's all I remember at the moment.

--M. J. Young

Zak Arntson wrote: Thanks for the replies, all! I'm trying for a strict "only the facts" thread, so please list the exact rules as they are stated in the game. For example, for the Adventure! game I am not only looking for their use as "dramatic rewrites" but exactly how the rules are applied during play.

Zak Arntson wrote: What I'm interested in this thread is solely to compile a history of this style of mechanic. Please reply with the game, what the mechanic is called and how it is usable in-game.

Mike, you're right. This is embarrassing to admit, but I didn't realize how many games had such a fate mechanic! But now that we have a history, and as it turns out, an explosion of fate mechanics in the 90's.

So, John's compiled and added for a list of pre-90's games (anyone, feel free to add to it). Any exemplars from the 90's and beyond? And yeah, I mean fate points for any kind of Author/Director Stance. To narrow it down, how about sticking to games where Author/Directory Stance isn't allowed except when fate points are used?

as a sort of counterpoint to the purely metagame Fate Points, here's an early quasi-metagame example: wishes in The Fantasy Trip: Advanced Wizard (Metagaming, 1980):

Advanced Wizard, page 9 wrote:
A magic wish is a way of influencing probability. There are specific things that a wish is good for:

(1) A wish can add 1 to any attribute of any character, as long as it does not raise that attribute over 16.

(2) A wish can control any one die-roll if the wish is used BEFORE the dice are rolled. The player tells the GM that he is making a wish. He then dictates the die-roll result. For instance, a player wearing a wish-ring strikes at a dragon. Before he swings, he makes a wish for triple damage. He does not have to make his "to hit" roll; he is automatically granted a roll of 3 and gets his triple damage, A wish can be used to affect ANY die roll made by any player or by the GM . . . it can insure a saving roll, make a weapon break, guarantee good reaction, etc.

(3) A wish can also ERASE any one die roll that has just been made. If an unfavorable roll is made, a player can use his wish to set time back a second so that the roll may be made over again. This can also apply to any roll made by another player or the GM -- but it must be a roll that has JUST been made. Example: A figure wearing a wish-ring is attacked by a swordsman. The swordsman makes his "to hit" roll and rolls again for damage. The ring-bearer does not use his wish. The swordsman rolls a 10 -- enough to kill the ring-bearer. Immediately (with his dying breath?) the ring-bearer uses his wish. The swordsman's roll of 10 is erased; he must make his damage roll over again. Since the wish was used AFTER the roll, the figure who made the wish cannot dictate what the new roll will be -- he only gets to erase the old one.

(4) A wish can bring one figure back to life if that figure was killed with the last hour of game time, and if the body is reasonably intact (see DEATH) and available to the wisher. The figure brought back to life will have ST 1 (that is, he will be unconscious). In addition, he/she must lose a total of 5 from his/her attributes, they may be taken off ST, DX, IQ, or any combination thereof.

(5) A wish will grant its user one true answer to any yes-or-no question, from the GM.

(6) A wish will heal all of a LIVING character's wounds, diseases, etc., bringing him back to full ST and health.

(7) A wish will counteract another wish that has just been made.

A referee may, at his option, allow wishes to be used for other things. However, wishes should not be too powerful. Wishes should NEVER be allowed to grant treasure or magic items, to grant more wishes, to bring back a long-dead character, to magically kill some other character, or perform other such super-powered feats.

A more recent example -

The Riddle of Steel (Driftwood Publishing, 2001) has a Spiritual Attributes system that permits massive infusions of dice to rolls that are aligned with player-authored criteria (Passions, Drives, Destiny, Conscience, Faith). These dice infusions often are sufficient to completely overpower the non-metagame mechanics.

There's also a sixth Spiritual Attribute, Luck, which is used differently from the other five:
"These dice may be added to any of your rolls - all at once or bit by bit - over the course of the game session. ... A point may be spent permanently to afford an instant success in any matter normally out of your hands - like a hay cart at the bottom of the castle tower you just fell out of (no matter the [target number]!)."