Totally random thought that struck me as I was discussing Supernatural with my wife (as often happens, because it’s a geeky thing I think she is actually more obsessed with than I am).
This is probably a terrible idea, but it struck me that you could almost have two Luck tracks–the character’s Luck track, and the Season Luck track.
Whenever someone pulls from the Season Luck track, something major for a recurring threat comes to pass. That may not be the only way the long term big bad advances their cause, but when Luck is used in this manner, they get a big win, full stop, no hunter intervention to stop their goals.
When the last Season Luck is triggered, the next mystery is all about the big bad essentially winning if the hunters don’t stop them, and everything is heavily stacked in the big bad’s favor.
As an example of how this might model the show, any time the seasons ends with one of those kind of “no win” situations, that’s an example of a season where the Season Luck track ran out before the big bad could be confronted about their long term plan.
As a comparison, this would be your Season Two or Season Four finales, with the heroes making things worse and getting one step closer to full on Apocalypse. Season Five and Seven might be examples where the end wasn’t triggered by Luck, so the Hunters have a little more time to end the threat on their own terms (even if they have to make some sacrifices).
Terrible idea? Need some work? Just wondering what others think.
Seems like it would work fine to me. Reminds me a little of how Hope works in The One Ring… each character has their own, but there’s also a small pool that anyone can use (it gets refreshed at the start of each session in that case).
I think it really depends on how long-running a campaign you want. As written, the hunters have a career with a very finite end, one way or the other… they can skirt this by only ever dealing with weak monsters, or being REALLY smart with strong monsters, but eventually they will likely run out of luck, which usually leads quickly to retiring (or ‘being retired’, depending on how literally/figuratively you want to take that)
If you want a long-running campaign with characters that feel fragile but not always a session away from a re-roll, you’d probably need to home-brew some luck rules to help out (without feeling too much like the safety net they actually are). The approach you describe sounds like one route, though you’d probably need to play test live with it to see how it felt and tweak as you went.
To your point, I have a hard time imagining reliving all the seasons of Supernatural in MotW with only 2 hunters and a 7 point luck track. or a VERY generous keeper coddling you. 🙂 There are a LOT of episodes!
James Meyer When the bulk of the writing was being done, Supernatural was only in series four and five… I didn’t imagine it would still be going this long!
Michael Sands yeah, they DEFINITELY house-ruled the luck track. 🙂