Mike Mearls Games
patreon
Resolve and Resources
🕑 Added 2025-06-05 12:00:16 +0000 UTCPlaytesting with a hack of an existing rules set gives you a big advantage in playtesting. It allows you to change one piece and focus you attention on it, knowing the rest of the game works.
In playtesting over the past few months, I've not been happy with rolling to cast. It has worked great for me in convention scenarios, but in campaign play I've found it frustrating. It feels like a caster either blows their first roll of an adventure and is hobbled the rest of the way or they nail every roll and become a walking artillery battery (or a limitless healing dispenser).
I considered pivoting back to spell points, but at the same time I ran into a dilemma with the talent system.
Talents are like feats on steroids. They are meant to give your character a radical new dimension, one that combines with the customization within a class to give you a unique character. For that reason, they have to be utility rich but power neutral. I want them to be optional, so a group running a one shot or wanting to dive into a game can ignore them.
Utility rich means that they feel useful. Power neutral means that they don't change the game's math. As an example, a talent that gives you a climb speed is very useful but is power neutral. It only makes you better at clobbering monsters if you find a way to apply it tactically. On its own, it doesn't increase your damage.
This approach generated two issues.
First, it made designing fun talents a real pain in the neck. It was hard to make talents that felt impactful but didn't make a character strictly more powerful.
Second, the thief and fighter were feeling off. The fighter has limited use features that let them take an extra action and regain hit points. Meanwhile, the thief had nothing but at-will options. Both annoyed me. Why was I forcing the fighter to track several different resource pools? The thief needed something that would let them pull out the stops. (It still drives me batty that the 5e rogue doesn't have any long rest abilities. It's a huge miss in the design.)
I remembered a lesson I learned the hard way while working on 5e: Giving a character more ways to spend a resource doesn't feel like a power up. Playtesters always complained that a subclass or class feature that did that wasn't making their character more powerful. It was just one more outlet for a thing they already had.
Hey! Maybe I could use that approach to fuel talents. I just needed to give every character a pool of resources to spend. It had to be the same pool across for each character class, even if the classes would spend their points to do very different things.
I decided to take the work I did on spell points but recast it as resolve. Resolve represents the energy and focus you can call upon to achieve mighty deeds. It lets you push yourself beyond your normal limits.
This approach does a few things I like:
It simplifies the game, as you no longer have to track the uses of multiple class features. Everything just costs resolve.
It means that talents remain power neutral if they can give you new ways to spend focus.
It unifies every class's resting structure.
It makes teaching the game easier. Once you explain focus to someone, they know the resource scheme for all of the characters.
The potential drawback is that it puts more pressure on each class to have distinct mechanics. However, I think this is an area where each class's distinct action economy helps. A thief uses resolve to power up their schemes. Wizards cast spells. Clerics invoke prayers while smashing enemies with their mace. Fighters pick their maneuvers and augment them as necessary with resolve. The key is that each character class must use resolve in a way that doubles down on their unique action economy and play style. Otherwise, the classes risk feeling too similar.
Take a look at the attached rules document for resolve, along with a fighter revised to use it, and let me know what you think.
Comments
Michael Sixel
Couldn't disagree more! But that's why there are so many games. So we can find what we like.
Robert Erik Blank
I get worried about per encounter actions for the Fighter. Flashbacks of the worst parts of 4e. Either you get Leg Sweep (well neat, except now nobody else in the whole game is allowed to leg sweep a foe unless you can homebrew a less effective version that doesn't punish the fighter for having taken a power that lets him do a more rulesy version of what anyone can do for free or just disallow ANYONE else to leg sweep, making the game that much less dynamic for everyone. Also what happens if a person who has leg swept a badguy already this fight tries to do it again? Does it just fail? Is their leg red now, having been used, and doesn't go back until the next fight?) or you get something that doesn't really make sense what you're doing with a vague name like Crescent Moon Slice: draw on the vitality of the ancient moon spirit to attack your foe, and you're left wondering what it even is. I feel like roleplaying games should be about what your character does and the more like 4e powers your special abilities get, the further it seems the game gets from that. Where you stop roleplaying, stop immersing, and just look at the list of cool sounding words strung together into ability names and just point at one and go: I guess I do this one?
Mike Mearls
Great point about optimization. I think if points become an outlet for a narrow set of features, the design isn't working.
SummonToast
I like the simplification of resources and like that it gives players a more natural way of visualizing when their characters are are getting exhausted. One thing that concerns me about a single resource pool is giving players a feeling that they need to optimize their use of it - always use their points on the "best" maneuver/talent instead of being forced to get creative with the talents they have at their disposal. On the other hand as long as scenarious are dynamic enough they will push players into using different approaches to solve different problems.
