But like most groups, we've come up with a few tweaks to the system to make it better fit with what we want out of our game.  The biggest is that we've decided to try a slight re-working to how strain is handled.

The concept of strain is that it is a key balancing feature to the game - there are a vast number of talents, skills, and maneuvers which include a strain cost to use them.  The disconnect for many members of my group is that this is basically taking hit point damage any time they want to do something.

Two of my fellow players and I sat down one night after our gaming session to discuss the strain mechanic and it's effect on game play.  We tossed around a few ideas before finally settling on a proposed solution that we've decided to adopt on a trial basis: adding wind to each character and creature, as defined below:

Wind

• Wind Threshold is a character's Toughness Step plus Durability Rank (if any).
• Any time a character suffers Strain, they may instead take an equal amount of Wind.
• Any Wind taken over a character's Wind Threshold is converted back to Strain.
• Once per combat, a character may spend an action to make a Toughness Test.  Reduce their accumulated Wind by the amount rolled.
• All Wind points are removed when a character has a chance to catch their breath.  This usually takes place at the end of any given scene and outside of any strenuous activity (such as combat).  The Gamemaster has final say on when Wind is renewed.

This definitely increases a character's all around power, especially adepts.  But after discussion its impact with my group, we believe that the effect of the increased power on the game is actually beneficial.

In essence, Wind lets players do more cool things. In my opinion this is one of the top priorities in a game - make the players feel like they're being heroic.  Wind makes that easier to do awesome physical things without hampering anyone's ability to do interesting social things -- win-win.

One of the biggest concerns a player has when considering a strain-causing talent is that there are a number of feats in Earthdawn you can do if only if you're free of damage - like increase talents or heal wounds.  Since Wind is easy to refresh, it helps alleviate this concern.  You don't have to forgo using an ability like Tracking just because you're out of recovery tests or are planning on raising a talent later.

We were worried at first about intolerably drawing out combat, but so far it seems that Wind has actually sped combat up.  It gives martial disciplines like the Warrior the opportunity to unleash their bigger combat talents more freely, magicians the freedom to be more liberal with Willforce, and other characters the ability to use Avoid Blow and other combat options more often.  More fancy maneuvers means more offensive output, which means quicker and more deadly combat on both sides since npcs and creatures have Wind as well.

On top of this freedom, Wind helps Strain make sense for many of our players.  Some of our group has had problems with the idea of basically hurting yourself to do even mundane things.  The example usually brought up was the Evidence Analysis talent/skill, which required a character to take damage to get to ask Sherlock Holmes-style questions about a scene.  From a balance standpoint it makes sense - there's a cost necessary to balance the ability, but "cutting yourself" just didn't feel right.

So far Wind has had the desired effect on our game, and we've been happy with its introduction.  We'll be keeping an eye on its impact on the game and tweaking the rules as needed, but for now it appears we've found a solution that improves our game.

The group as a whole has had very little experience with the Earthdawn system, and given the intent to have a short term game to begin with, I didn't want to spend a lot of time on system explanation. In addition after talking to one of the players I learned that while he didn't have a problem with the system, looking up what dice to roll for a given test was a little annoying.

Personally Earthdawn is probably my favorite RPG to run and play and I enjoy the varied dice of the Step System. That said I want to be sympathetic to my players' complaints and I want to make the game run as fast as possible for this mini-campaign. In addition I love tinkering with rule systems; making little tweaks to the mechanics to make certain aspects of a game run more like my preferences. As a result I've decided to make a few slight modifications to the Earthdawn ruleset for this campaign.

To understand my changes, your first have to understand how the existing system works. Instead of having a unified dice mechanic, Earthdawn features a Step chart. This chart lists what die or dice the player rolls for each Step from one to fifty. The dice are assigned to each step in such a way that the average roll for any given Step is that Step value. Dice in Earthdawn are also open-ended, meaning if you roll the maximum value on a die your roll it again and add the new value to the previous result.

Take Step 8 for example. Because of the open-ended dice, a d6 averages to roughly 4. So Step 8 is 2d6. Therefore the average result a player will roll on Step 8 is 4 + 4 = 8. I particularly like this system because as a player you can judge your chance of success fairly well. Knowing you have Step 8 in Climbing and that a tree with many branches may be a difficulty of 5 translates directly into the character knowledge that you're pretty good a climbing a tree.

To determine what Step you roll for a test, you add the Step of the corresponding Attribute with the Rank of a Skill or Talent (if relevant). So the person in the above example may get his Climbing Step of 8 from a Dexterity of 5 and Climbing of 3. However even if he didn't have the Climbing Skill, the character could still roll his Dexterity alone, but the Step (and thus the result) will typically be lower.

Another facet of this system I like is the lack of a linear distribution on die rolls. Although there are some scattered Steps which are exceptions, most Steps have some sort of bell curve to their distribution graphs. In other words, they're weighted towards the middle results that Step can generate. For example you're more likely to roll a 8 on Step 8 then you are a 3. This is another aspect of the system that lends itself to estimating your character's skills.

In OneStep I'm going to be removing the Step system from the game completely replace it with a unified dice mechanic. There will be no consulting charts to determine what die you roll. Instead all rolls will be made by rolling 3d6 and adding the Step of your Skill or Talent to the roll. These dice are not open-ended and average out to 10. However if this is the only change made, OneStep is no longer statistically similar to the Step System. Before Step 8 produced an average result of 8. Now it will produce an average roll of 10 (the average of 3d6) + 8 = 18. To accommodate this change, all difficulties in Earthdawn will be raised by 10. This includes derived statistics like Defenses and Armor Values.

At this point I'm confident I've identified all of the issues this change could cause, such as Armor and Armor defeating hits. Adding 10 to an individual's Armor Rating is fine in general but if an attacker scores an Armor-Defeating hit, the system breaks again. Where an AD hit is made in the Step System, the target's armor is bypassed completely. So an Armor Value of 6 would be treated as an Armor Value of 0, for a net of +6 damage to the target. This Armor Value of 6 is increased to 16 in OneStep, and if an AD hit completely bypassed that, it would reduce Armor to 0 for a net of +16 damage; far more deadly. Instead in OneStep an AD hit will reduce the target's armor for 10, causing the net effect of an Armor Defeating hit in both the Step System and OneStep to be the same again.

If an unexpected hiccup does show itself during game play, adding or subtracting 10 from a given roll or difficulty will be a minor task. This is actually the specific reason I chose 3d6 as the unifying mechanic as opposed to 2d6; adding or subtracting 10 is faster than adding or subtracting 7. So I'm not expecting any slowdowns if we find an issue that needs resolving.

The other aspect of the Step System I decided to revisit was the Karma system. In Earthdawn, a character pays a number of Legend Points (the Earthdawn equivalent of Experience Points) to purchase Karma points, which he can store. The cost of these points and the amount which he can store is dependent on the race of the character. A character can spend a Karma Point under certain conditions to roll an additional die and add it to his result. In the Step System this die varied depending from a d4 to a d10 on the character's race. In OneStep I've decided to make all Karma dice a d6 to preserve the unified d6-based mechanic. However in the Step System the various Karma Dice helped balance the attribute bonuses and penalties associated with each race. In order to keep this balance I've decided to increase or decrease the amount of Legend Points a race has to spend to purchase a Karma Point accordingly.

This does leave one outstanding anomaly: creature Karma. In Earthdawn, some highly magical creatures also have Karma they can spend to increase their rolls. However some of them have Karma Dice that are much higher than those of the player races. The Windling, the highest Karma Die race, rolls a d10, which is the equivalent of Step 6. Some Horrors have a Karma Step of 15 or higher. Unfortunately for the players, having a Horror with a Karma Step of 15 rolling a single d6 when he spend a Karma die is just too statistically dissimilar.

Here are the possible solutions I've identified:

1. Choose some value X. For each multiple of X (or fraction thereof) the creature's Karma Step is, have them roll a d6. So if I set X at 5, a creature with a Karma Step of 15 (average of 15 in the Step System) would roll 3d6 (average +10). Unfortunately it's impossible to choose a value of X for One Step that results in a perfect match to the Step System.
2. Have spending a Karma Point result in d6, always. Boost the number of Karma Points a creature has based on it's old Karma Step. This will let a creature spend Karma even more freely, but it won't have near the impact it did before. In addition some creatures like Horrors or Dragons have abilities that require the expenditure of a Karma Point to activate. Many of these abilities are very powerful, and increasing the number of Karma Points a creature has allow these abilities to be activated much more frequently.
3. Keep character Karma as above. When a creature spends a Karma Point simply add its Karma Step to the result of the test instead of rolling additional dice. This maintains statistical consistency between the Step System and OneStep, but you loose some of the randomness of the Karma Die.
4. Scrap Karma Dice for player characters. Assign each race a Karma Step that corresponds to their old Karma Dice (eg 6 for the Windling). Whenever anyone, character or creature, spends a Karma Point they simply add their Karma Step to the result. Personally I like the idea of Karma resulting in more dice being rolled, but this is an option to maintain consistency between characters and creatures.

At this point I'm still undecided as to which solution is the best. I like 4 the least, but it does make the most mathematical sense. So I'm throwing these options out to the readers. Of the above creature Karma changes, which do you prefer and why?

The original T20 version of the Conviction rules allowed Conviction to be accumulated and built up from day to day. In our game in an effort to encourage players to do things to earn Conviction instead of hording it each character's Conviction pool resets to 1 at the beginning of each Standard day. In addition, Conviction are awarded for the following:

1. A Conviction Point can be awarded by the GM when a character performs an act of dramatic heroism.
2. A Conviction Point can be awarded by another player when a character performs an action that is particularly cool, awesome, or funny and at the same time promotes the story or character development.

Once gained, Conviction points can be spent as follows:

1. Re-roll any d20 roll. This is done after the initial roll is made. If the result of the re-roll is 1-10, add 10 to that roll (e.g. you spend a Conviction Point and roll a 4 which is promoted to a 14). You must use the second roll as your result.
2. Automatically stabilize when dying.
3. Reduce your Wounds to -9 immediately after having taken enough damage to die.

From my standpoint, I think that the Conviction awards really helped reward interesting actions and allowed more difficult but cinematic actions to succeed. It was basically a license to try those dangerous yet dramatic actions we may have been reluctant to do in other less cinematic games. Since Conviction resets every day, players are encouraged to spend it and spend it freely. Players can become more daring with their characters since they know they have the safety net the Conviction points provide.

I definitely think the Conviction system was a success for me, and I'm sure that as the game continues, the players will begin utilizing it more and more.