Quote Originally Posted by obryn View Post
This is why I prefer things more like 4e or Bo9S for martial resource management. It's simple, direct, and puts the results first. I know that's not everyone's favorite, though, so I'm open to other options.
Base Possiblity: You can go "off-ballance" (or lose focus if you don't like ballance as a term). This costs you one expertise die till you expend an action on "recover" (recover restores one expertise die). Going off-ballance lets you do something roughly equivalent to an encounter power in 4e.

Advantages: Uses expertise dice which you are already tracking. You don't need to build up prior to doing something cool. Since you are losing a per round resource you're encouraged to save your cool stuff for the end of the battle rather than going nova on the first round.

Disadvantages: If there is a "best" move (stunning say), then there's no reason not to use it every time you use your move. If you have two fighters and such a "best" move they can tag team someone by alternating stun and recover. (Basically, it's a bit too easy to use with this method).

Modification to "solve" the disadvantage. Use the "to hit" die roll (unmodified) to also give what status you can impose by expending one or more expertise dice worth of balance or focus or whatevery you call it. So maybe a 19 allows you to spend one expertise dice to cost the target one action. An 18 allows you to blind the foe for a number of rounds equal to the roll of your expertise die roll. A 17 allows you to push the foe. A 16 allows you to trip the foe. A 15 allows you to slow the foe for some number of rounds. A 14 allows you to expend an expertise die to do extra damage equal to the die's maximum value plus a roll of the die. Ext.... The problem with this is that it may be too complicated for some people, but those people can just ignore this system.

I might tend to make some monsters "resistant" to such manuevers. They subtract some amount from the expertise die roll for the manuever, and if this results in a 0 or negative value the manuever fails. (So a "solo" low level monster might be resistant 2, while a "solo" at level 8 might be resistant 4, in both cases making the manuever fail about half the time for a level appropriate foe.)