The Delta Theory of Meaningfulness

[NichG]

Like Portent, it has both offensive and defensive uses. Also like Portent, there's a potential for players to never use it offensively because they're saving it in case they need it defensively. (There's some potentially-unintended interactions where a high roll is good offensively for attacks and defensively for saves, unless you also rework saves to get rid of the defender-rolls aspect.)

That was actually intentional to make cards lower than the average of the roll still be useful. So all your low cards are defensive and all your high cards are offensive (or 'proactive') and you wouldn't ever be trading offense for defense, it'd all be about timing - which roll do you want to force?

It'd be nice to have low cards work defensively for saves rather than needing high cards for that. But if you make the attacker roll against 10+save, AoEs and save or dies are just so much more efficient of a card use that its kind of too obvious (and casters end up getting much more mileage out of cards than non-casters in that case as well, due to being able to synergize two limited resources together). It's a kludge but you could just say 'when using cards on saves, take 11-value as the value of the card'.

Anyhow, the point of something like this for me wouldn't be to make death less likely, it'd be to remove 'non-actions' from the game - e.g. things where you try to do something but then afterwards find out 'oh that failed', so your action may as well have not happened. Personally I much prefer a case where when you fail its because you decided that success was not worth the cost. Or you just know in advance that you can't afford to succeed at a particular thing, so you don't initiate the action that will end up getting nulled out in the first place.

I still prefer the thing I described up-thread where you roll and pay off complications, because with that I could say 'you can't try again - your roll establishes the complications that are now just things about the situation, so if you ever want to succeed on e.g. picking this particular lock, you'll need to pay off those particular complications'. That really makes it so that trying to do something always leaves the game in a new state - either you do it (and pay off the cost/accept the consequences) or you see the price and say no, but now the price is known and fixed whereas before it was not. So it cleans up a lot of the 'I keep trying until I succeed' or 'I roll, fail, okay fine when play returns to me in 20 minutes I'll just do the exact same thing again' kinds of dynamics that can sometimes crop up in D&D.