Impulse Control

"Impulse Control (Christopher R. Rice) extends Power-Ups 5: Impulse Buys, particularly looking at "impulse points" (a separate pool of points for doing Impressive Stuff, so that players aren't faced with the choice of doing something neat now or building up their character later). Here there are both Impulse Points and Villainous Points (IP and VP), which cost five points each and regenerate at one per game session… but VP are a disadvantage for player characters to take, which grant benefits to the antagonists instead. I've seen this sort of mechanism in indie games (most obviously with fan-mail in Prime Time Adventures) and recent Call of Cthulhu (where luck points spent by the players add to the GM's luck pool for NPCs); clearly it's a popular approach, though I'm rather burned out on it after running Madness Dossier and Torg with purchasable successes; I really prefer rules mechanisms to be as diegetic as possible, i.e. they should be tied to something the character is doing rather than an action that only makes sense to the player. Still, this would work well in a game where such purchases were a regular thing."
==References==
*Pyramid 3/100: Pyramid Secrets
*Pyramid 100: Pyramid Secrets; 23 March 2017; RogerBW's Blog
Category:Christopher R. Rice
Category:Pyramid Vol 3 Articles