I was thinking of how to reward what I truly consider HiBRiD action. At conventions, I usually plant either myself or my second unit director within the players to demostrate how to push rules to the maximum effect during the first action scene. While writing game rules, however, I lack a cohort, so I must resort to less effective tactics. Also, during play, I award bonuses to task rolls or eliminate penalties for actions exceptionally "HiBRiD", and while it works in play, once again on the page, the description falls flat and seems to get missed.
To this end, I have decided to award experience points for HiBRiD actions. First, here are the rules for actions from the Principle Photography chapter:
<BEGIN EXCERPT>
Time
Time is normally only tracked during action scene. When the director announces the beginning of an action scene, she will begin keeping track of time in roughly ten-second increments called action rounds.
Action
For purposes of simplicity, all character actions can be classified into one of three types:
Throwaway Actions
Throwaway actions are actions requiring little if any concentration to perform and require no task roll to complete. Your character may perform one throwaway action in addition to an involved or standard action without having it affect the task roll. If your character performs two or more throwaway actions, each additional throwaway action is transformed into a standard action, akin to rubbing your stomach and tapping your head at the same time.
Examples of common throwaway actions include carelessly tossing something aside, yelling something to someone without turning your attention away from a task, or moving less than ten meters in an action round on land.
Standard Actions
Standard actions require a significant amount of attention to perform and require a task roll to complete. Your character may perform as many standard actions as you wish during an action round, however, the more actions your character attempts, the more difficult the task rolls will be to complete. To determine how much the difficulty of your tasks will be affected, the director will total the number of actions, multiply the total by two, and add the result to all task rolls your character makes during that round.
Examples of some common standard actions include attacking a single opponent, making an area attack, treading water, exploring an area, hanging from a limb or cliff, or moving any distance between ten meters and your character's movement distance on land.
Involved Actions
Involved actions require enough concentration and attention to perform so as to preclude your character from performing any other actions other than a single throwaway action, and may or may not require a task roll to complete. If your character attempts to perform any other standard or involved actions, all actions will fail, regardless of the task roll result.
Examples of common involved actions using or girding activated aspects, swimming, actively climbing, or making a called shot.
<END EXCERPT>
Just in the simple design, I seem to have already build in a mechanism for rewarding heroic activity. By quickly totaling the number of standard tasks, the director can simply multiply the difficulty rating penalty by ten and award that number of experience points to the character.
The director has the option of not awarding this bonus, awarding it at the end of the round, at the end of the action scene, or during the next post-production session. The director can also choose to award it regardless of success/failure to reinforce any and all risky behavior, or only for successful actions only to reinforce characters evaluating risk more carefully.
All in all, a very simple and flexible mechanic to once again allow groups to create the game they want with minimal mechanics.
What do you all think?
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