Spirit Points - What Are They?
One of the many new mechanics in The Courts of Candle'Bre is the addition of the Spirit Point. Used judiciously, Spirit Points simply make your characters better and more effective than they otherwise would be. I invented them because one of the things I always hated about "regular" D&D was that odd-numbered stats didn't "do anything." They were a statistical dead zone and honestly, there was never any reason for your characters to have an odd numbered ability score. Why bother?
That has changed. See the table at the right to understand how characters get Spirit Points.
The Angel Wing icons are Spirit Points and suddenly, odd-numbered stats matter.
Bear in mind though, that there's no such thing as "Negative Spirit Points." The fewest that any character can have is 0, so even if you have horrible stats that provide nothing but negative Spirit Points, you'll wind up with zero.
If you have a mix of high and low scores, with some adding Spirit Points and others subtracting, those low scores will drag down your total number of available Spirit Points, but they'll never drag the total below zero.
What Do They Do?
So now that Spirit Points are a "thing," what exactly can you do with them?
A lot of that is left to the discretion of the DM and the creativity of the Players, but some of the basic uses for Spirit Points include:
- Countering the effect of a reduced die roll.
- Improving the die you’re rolling with to attack or make an ability check or saving throw.
- Reducing the damage of an incoming attack by reducing the die used to roll it (especially useful if you suffer a critical – it won’t negate the damage, but it will help to mitigate it).
- Countering the effects of one level of exhaustion.
- Countering the effects of corruption or insanity.
- Allowing a character to (possibly, pending ability check) retroactively extend the duration of a spell cast by that character by one additional round.
- Allowing a spell caster to avoid corruption effects on a misfired spell (2 tokens to counter minor corruption, 4 tokens to counter major corruption and 6 to counter greater corruption).
- And so on.
Spending 1 Spirit Token will improve or reduce a die one step. Note that it is possible to spend multiple Spirit Tokens on the same die roll to improve or reduce it greatly, but there’s an added cost for doing so. The initial die improvement is relatively easy.
After that, further improvement gets more difficult very quickly, reflected by the fact that the cost of each step improvement/reduction beyond the first is doubled. Thus, improving a die roll by two steps costs 3 Spirit Tokens (1 for the first improvement, and 2 for the second). Improving a die by three steps would cost 7 Spirit Tokens (1 for the first step, 2 for the second, and 4 for the third), and so on. In practice then, most people tend to use them individually, to improve or reduce a given die roll by a single step.
The open-ended nature of how Spirit Points can be spent is meant to foster and encourage better and more creative Role Play. A DM might decide that a Spirit Point can be spent as a Plot Point, allowing the player to come up with a new element to the plot right there on the spot, or to execute a "Rule of Cool" maneuver without having to roll for it, or to roll to do the thing (whatever it is the Character is attempting) with a normal roll, rather than a penalized or Disadvantage die. The sky's the limit.
Replenishing Your Supply
Note that Spirit tokens regenerate very slowly (See
Healing In Candle'Bre for full details).
You don’t gain any of them back unless you’re at full hit points, and not recovering from temporary stat loss (i.e. – the strength draining attack of a Shadow), and even then, you only gain back one per long rest, so use them with great care. (Note: Rogues are the exception here, and gain their tokens back much more quickly than any other class. See Rogue's
Splat Books for more details).
Also note that the notion of advantage and disadvantage is used in tandem with this dice chain concept; it’s entirely possible to roll with both an improved die and with advantage!
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