Project Out Of Time – Energy

I like the idea of resource management in my skirmish games – be it Soulstones, Momentum, Fury, whatever. I also like the idea of having a pool of action tokens that you can dish out to your crew, allowing them to do a differing number of actions each turn when their individual skill sets are most required.

So, how do I approach this aspect of a game without obviously lifting the process from somewhere else? As much as I'm wise enough to know the pitfalls of trying to reinvent the wheel just for the sake of it, I have been looking for a different angle.

My entire idea for Project Out Of Time revolves around the concept of the Nandrocite Energy. It's the lightbulb moment that occurred whilst sitting in my bath all those months ago and boils down to the fact that a character's  action token pool is also their wound count. With this system any character can take as many actions as you like each turn but you're using up wounds to do it and you could leave yourself very vulnerable in the process.

In-game this translates to each character starting the game with a number of Energy tokens. This is their Energy reserves that allows the character to remain in the time period they have jumped to – if they run out of Energy the character is removed from the game, snapped back through time to the present.

When a character is activated they may take a single Walk action for free. That seems like a fair trade. Any additional actions will cost 1 or more of their Energy tokens. They may spend as many Energy tokens as they wish to, as long as at least 1 Energy token remains. Because the Energy is used before an action is executed, using the last token will cause the character to be removed from the game immediately without performing that final action (so you can't sacrifice yourself to achieve a game winning objective).

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Raw Energy deposits will be randomly dotted around the battlefield and can be claimed by individual characters. They can be used to either top up their own personal Energy reserves, pass on the raw deposit to a teammate so they can top up, or the raw deposit can be stored to claim Victory Points at the end of the game (cashed in with their employers). Any character choosing to top up Energy rolls a dice to determine how much Energy has been claimed from the raw deposit. If a raw Energy deposit has been rolled, and the amount of Energy determined, it cannot be subsequently passed on to a teammate.

Characters may never have more Energy in their reserves than they started the game with, unless they have equipment that allows them to do this in some way. Any excess Energy is lost.

If a character can get into base contact with a prone enemy character, they may attempt to harvest energy from the enemy character's reserves, if they have the appropriate equipment. In addition, when a character is removed from play they leave behind an Energy token that can be claimed by others.

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The idea with this whole concept is that, by every action costing Energy, characters need to pick up a refill to achieve anything in-game and not 'die from exhaustion' – sitting at the back of the board and shooting is not an option as you'll just waste away. One twist I've considered is at the end of every turn all characters lose a single Energy token – the cost of staying in this time period for another turn. This would force characters out into the gaming arena to claim raw deposits quickly in order to stay alive which would inevitably lead to more conflict (or the employment of very sneaky tactics to avoid conflict). Would this be too harsh or maybe restrict players strategic options? It should keep things fast paced for sure.

At this point in time the actual amount of Energy that characters start a game with is undetermined – playtesting should help with that particular challenge. However, it's unlikely that a character would have enough starting Energy to survive a game without a refill – players have to be proactive from the start (that's the thinking at least)!

Next time it's all about Melee!