A celebration of action management

The single best 'innovation' of Stalwart is the idea of action management. Here it is in a nutshell; you have a number of potential actions each round based on half your tier die, and half that many (rounded down) are available to you at full power.

So, if you are a D8 paragon, you can attempt up to 4 actions per round, but only 2 are at full strength. You can attack twice at d8, or 4 times at d6 (in the simplest application). If a foe is hard to hit, you might want the bigger die. Against large numbers of weak foes, you might take the bonus actions.

The awesomeness of the system comes when you are doing multiple things. Want to travel your full movement? That's one action. You either have one or three left - up to you. You have genuine decisions to make with resource management every round that change how your character operates, and which gives a lot of variety to combat without any additional rules.

Even better, it gets rid of all of the rules for how long things last for; how long is that foe under your mind control? How long does invisibility last? How long can you hold that car up with your telekinesis? Hey, if you want to dedicate an action to it every round, you go right ahead. You can stay invisible for hours if you feel like you want to dedicate one action every round to doing it. There's a genuine cost to maintaining powers over time, and decisions to be made - I now have three enemies under mind control, but I cannot do anything else... do I drop the mind control on one, or just accept I'm taking the -1 shift on anything else I do? Decisions... decisions... decisions. It makes the game a LOT more tactical without ANY additional rules to memorize or numbers to crunch. It's all hard-wired into that one mechanic.

And by the way, hyperspeed just eliminates all of the penalties and gives you the full assortment of actions every round. The flash gets to act 6 times per round, and doesn't take a penalty - and he can travel a mile with one of those actions (or six miles in the full round). He can run a mile to the store, grab something off the shelf, run to the counter, drop $10 on the counter, and run a mile back home in six seconds. It's easy to solve in game within the existing framework.

This eliminates the action creep that made its way into Stalwart Age... characters were getting insane numbers of actions just so I could keep things cinematic and moving. Now, just this minor shift in the application of the rule makes hyperspeed feel like hyperspeed without the numbers increasing at all.