Hero and Villain Points - Some Thoughts

In working on the World of Stalwart, I am going through and figuring out not only how gifts (powers) work, but also how these are used in the context of larger comic book narratives. I was thinking specifically about hero points and how Augury (Doc's wife) was able to maintain a mind block in Doc's mind to blind him to two truths - first, that he had a twin brother, and second that she was pregnant with his daughter. She had to do something to make these last beyond the normal limits of mind control; the idea that she gives up an action in perpetuity seemed unreasonable... but then I thought about hero points.

One option for hero points can (and should probably) be that they can be used to maintain the effects of a gift over very long periods of time. You basically give up a hero point from your pool for as long as you want to maintain this effect; in essence, by the time she was pregnant with Skye, Augury had only 3 of her 5 hero points when at full capacity; 2 of these were allocated to maintaining ongoing effects.

I really like this because she could, theoretically, have 5 ongoing long-term effects, but would then have 0 points in her hero pool. Since it is presumed that she probably already gave 2 of those to the shared pool to be a member of the Victory Legion, she only had 1 hero points left of her own when not working with the Legion. 

This kind of makes me want to revisit hero points, and maybe upgrade their effectiveness while downgrading how many you get. For instance, instead of a hero point being a +1 on a roll, a hero point gives you your tier die to add to any exising result... you could use a hero point to add to evade against a certain attack, or to increase damage on a successful strike by your tier die. This is a bit more powerful, but you'd only get your pool each day instead of each minute. This makes hero points more valuable, but also more precious. 

In reviewing the rules for Stalwart Age, I also liked the villain mechanism of Tenacity - as a villain, you get to use a villain point to check tier; if you get a 4 or better, you can just completely ignore something that just happened (snatch the arrow out of the air and break it in half; step aside of the sonic blast because you have been preparing to face this foe). I like this as a general mechanism that makes battles about resource management as much as they are about just hitting each other as hard as possible as many times as possible; if you spend a hero point to strike Vyperion with a huge ion blast, and he spend a villain point to just leap out of the way because he anticipated this, it feels more comic accurate. You're trying to get your foes to use up their hero or villain points early in the fight while holding off on your best options until later so that you maximize the opportunities to be successful.

Just some thoughts. And here's a drawing I did of Boom-R-Ang and Boondock because they are next to each other alphabetically... plus, Boom and Boon sounds like a great tag team, even though they have nothing to do with each other...