The Gaming Den

So in the course of my recent move, I dug up a bunch of old game stuffs.

Here's one worth sharing:

These were a pack of index cards, and at the start of each session a couple were distributed to each player. (it's 14 years back so I fergit just how many or how this worked) Each card had an in-game, in-character action for PCs to perform to reinforce genre emulation and each had a mechanical bonus that the PC gained immediately or held until the end of the session. There were a couple duplicate cards and a few have likely been lost, but here're the ones I just found:

Action	Reward
Give an opponent a weapon before attacking them	+3 AV to that attack
Start and finish a fight with the same tag line	Heal all but 5 of the wound points you suffered in that fight
Explain to another character why you are walking into a trap.	+3 to your next initiative roll
Answer another character's question using the phrase "We have to kill them all."	+3 to your Dodge value the next time you are attacked
Say "No one could have possibly survived that" in a way that lets the audience know how wrong you are.	Recover half your spent fortune dice *or* heal one half of your wounds
Dispatch a mook in a bizarre manner just so you can make a bad pun about it.	Draw 2 new cue cards
Say, "There are just three rules I live by: First: ____, Second ____, and most importantly ________" Fill in the blanks yourself, and you gotta mean it.	Gain one temporary extra fortune die.
Use a quote from Shakespeare to threaten someone.	Get another character to tell you something they shouldn't.
Attempt a stunt that involves product placement for one of the movie's commercial sponsors.	+3 to that stunt attempt
Explain just how vile a particular villain is.	Get one free action the next time you see that villain.
Staying in character, explain to the audience why an apparent continuity error or scientific inaccuracy is not really a mistake	You may reroll any one roll at any later point this session.
Say, "When you _____, you made the biggest mistake of your life. Because now I'm gonna have to _____" Fill in the blanks yourself, and you gotta mean it.	Recover one spent fortune die *or* heal 10 wound points.
Explain how you weapon is superior to someone else's.	+3 to your AV the next time you use that weapon
Explain what makes a particular group of mooks so dangerous in a way that makes the audience wonder why they go down so easily.	+1 to your AV against that group
Explain how much a love interest (or other potential hostage) means to you.	The next time you see that character you may recover half your spend fortune dice *or* heal one half of your wounds
Within game context, mock a Hollywood action movie star.	Take only half damage the next time you are injured

In practice, this worked really well to help establish genre emulation, as each player got a couple suggestions for in-genre types of actions and an immediate ( rather than deferred ) mechanical bonus for having their character perform such actions. And as such it's a great method for communicating genre and idioms within to your players.

Now it is a straight powerup to PC capacities and it is an additional complication for players to hold cards and track "until end of session" rewards - so it was a good fit for Feng Shui's rules-lite system and the genre assumption that the PCs are supposed to mop the floor with most enemies. It's probably not something you'd want to adapt to games with an already high rules complexity nor where fights are supposed to be difficult tactical challenges.

That looks pretty cool actually. I wonder what genres it would work for?

On one hand, Horror does involve a lot of "the characters are doing something that the audience is shouting at them not to", which can be tricky in RPGs and would benefit from this kind of incentive. OTOH, getting extra bonuses doesn't fit as well, and horror that's actually supposed to be scary needs immersion. But for "classic monster movie" horror, I think it could definitely work.

Golden/silver age superheroes - very much so.

Anything pulp, I think, although the scale of the bonuses might need to be calibrated.

For a Horror Movie type feel, you'd probably be better off splitting things into two decks, one for in-genre "why did she just run upstairs when the only door is downstairs?", sort of actions, and a separate central deck for the bonuses. When a Player Character completes one of the action cards, they replace it with the top card from the bonus deck. But while the bonus deck is mostly good, it should incorporate a handful of "no benefit" cards and a few cards with results outright harmful to the characters. That way players will still want to perform the in-genre actions (since most rewards are beneficial), but will occasionally have unforeseen moments of horrific backfiring.