High level play: Karma Points
Every once in a blue moon, I have the urge to doomscroll The Vaults of Pandius.
A bit like with Greyhawk and its online community, the Vaults of Pandius were at one point the primary way for me to explore the world of Mystara at a time when what I had of published materials were Mentzer's Expert Set, the In Search of Adventure module anthology, loaning the The Grand Duchy of Karameikos Gazetteer when I could from the library and prodigious access to Dragon Magazine at the local library, where I was seemingly the only loaner ever interested in the older issues.
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| The original adventure path. I have an irrational amount of love for this book. I will need to review it at one point. |
When I discovered the Vaults, it was like a world opening up to me, of a swathe of gamer archeologists who have studied the setting in depth and extracted a bunch of nuggets for me to take in, in the absence of a cohesive setting book to help make sense of it all. I spent many hours as a teenager perusing its archives.
Anyway, this isn't actually a post about Mystara, but rather about what I stumbled across today when the nostalgic urge to doomscrool the archives hit me. A capsule idea by Bruce Heard about Karmic Past.
tl;dr - whenever you kill someone higher than 1 HD, roll 1d100. If it's lower than the HD, gain one karma points. Roll 1d100 for every multiple of 7 karma points accumulated. If the roll is lower than your total, something bad happens (catastrophically auto-failing one's next save or similar).
Now the idea as presented is, I think, quite bad and will basically just cause premature PC death because they did great things.
But the seed of the idea, of great deeds causing ripples in the cosmic fabric and balance, that is an inspired idea. And honestly, a 1d100 roll below HD doesn't sound like a bad baseline to me either.
It plays into the theme that as characters grow into Big Damn Heroes (or whatever variation of high level play you campaign theme might present it) they inevitably catch the attention of higher powers, whether it be deities, fate, cosmic forces or all of it.
The question is then, what to do with the accumulation of such points. I am unsure right now, but I imagine they could swing in both positive and negative directions, with ever increasing stakes.
I am thinking rolls on a table depending on certain triggers, with the roll influenced by the amount of karma points. There might be multiple tables, some Chaos or Law flavored, one Fate flavored, another deity flavored, etc.
Ie defeating a host of cyclopses might catch the attention of a vengeful deity who now pursues a vendetta against you. Or attract the attention of a guardian deity. Or both. The Odyssey could basically be interpreted as a series of fateful rolls on the Karma Point tables for Odysseus.
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| "I am not sure I actually want the karma points of pulling this off." |
Quantifying this with an actual mechanic based on deeds seems like a good approach. One reason I like this is that it provides a framework for high-level characters to play with the consequences of becoming high-level characters.
Shit will happen around them whether they like it or not, and part of the challenge of high-level play becomes navigating all the shenanigans that begin to happen around them as a result. The rolls on these tables can basically become campaign drivers in their own right.
Those who want less of them might want to undertake certain quests to purge them and be allowed to fade from cosmic attention. Others might want to pursue paths to channel it in certain directions.
In a world where metaphysics like Law and Chaos are real and tangible and gods watch over mortals for their own reasons, this seems a mechanic that could actually help bring those themes into play.
I'll need to think more on the actual implementation, but the seed of it I think could work really well as a frame for high level play.
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