After sharing my blog post for my idea for my funnel jam project on the NSR Discord Server, sagedamage suggested that I should come up with a more novel resolution mechanic to go along with this otherwise fairly novel game. After thinking about it for a bit, I've come up with this rough idea I'm calling an "Action Chain".

Blog post here

At its core, it's still a fairly standard roll-under Ability Score mechanic, so perhaps I'm sidestepping the core issue, but my hope is that this framing will make an otherwise well-understood mechanic operate in a way that's fun and thematic for this kind of setting, so like the best of both worlds. It is meant to reflect the dynamism of superheroic action, as another means of balancing out the various power levels and kinds of powers, and to represent one of what I believe to be the core attributes of superhero conflicts, that being managing tradeoffs.

When a superhero faces some obstacle or opposition, and it would not be a sure success or failure, and where failure would be interesting, they roll-under the appropriate Ability Score to determine success. However, instead of treating these as singular Save Rolls in isolation of each other, or having a separate Conflict mechanic system, instead, where it would make sense to have a series of challenges rather than a single challenge, an Action Chain is initiated.

So if a superhero is trying to stop a bank robbery, rescue the hostages, and defuse the bombs, this could all be one Action Chain. They decide which challenge to confront first; let's say rescue the hostages is their top priority. If they fail the Save, then they fail the entire Action Chain. However, if they succeed at the Save, they can choose whether to end the Action Chain, failing the subsequent challenges to guarantee their current successes, or they can confront the next challenge. On the second challenge, they take a +2 penalty to their roll on the roll-under Save, and on each subsequent challenge they take an additional cumulative +1 penalty to their roll, meaning the further down the Action Chain, the less likely they are to succeed.

1st Challenge: No Penalty -> 2nd Challenge: +2 to roll-under Save -> 3rd Challenge: +3 to roll-under Save -> etc.

If the superhero fails at a challenge, they retroactively fail the entire Action Chain. So even if the superhero succeeded at rescuing the hostages if the superhero then fails to defuse the bombs, then perhaps some of the hostages didn't get away fast enough before the bombs went off, or the superhero in fact missed one of the hostages who is still being held by the bank robbers who have successfully fled the scene. In some contexts, it may be ok to treat it more as a partial success or failure, just so long as the magnitude of the failure is treated as effectively greater in the case where they failed a challenge in the Action Chain, vs. if they had chosen to end the Action Chain before facing all challenges.

While sometimes the superhero knows all the challenges in the Action Chain and can choose the order to confront them, as in the example above, other times there may be surprise challenges or circumstantial challenges that they did not know about, or there may be circumstantial reasons why they don't get to choose which challenge to confront next. For instance, from the example above, perhaps after rescuing the civilians and defusing the bombs, a supervillain arrives and surprise attacks the superhero, so the superhero has no choice but to confront the supervillain before stopping the bank robbery. Or, maybe after rescuing the hostages, this gave one of the robbers time to trigger one of the bombs early, so now the superhero has to deal with the collateral damage before going after the fleeing bank robbers.

However, if the player was not aware of a surprise challenge, it should generally not count against them if they choose to resolve an Action Chain early, and instead should initiate a new Action Chain.

The scale of an Action Chain can vary, as in the example above where it is several very different tasks, to something more focused-in, like a skirmish with an opponent. Each action in the chain could reflect an attack and counter-attack between a superhero and supervillain, or the two opponents trying to surpass each other in a race, or fighting over control of an object, etc.

In some cases, it may make sense to have one Action Chain where multiple characters are involved (although the incrementing penalty is still cumulative, not per participant), and in other cases, it may be more interesting to have multiple chains, where each turn involves each PC moving one step along their Action Chain, and where actions in one chain can lead to circumstantial challenges in another Action Chain. The latter case may be a bit more involved and harder to keep track of, but could also be more dynamic. In either of the cases above, Action Chains can reflect the dynamic action scenes between superhero teams (or a superhero and supervillain team) facing off against each other, or a team against a single monolithic threat.