Tricky. You could explain either:
- As a GM, your job is to create interesting problems. That can mean some scenarios are not balanced, but that a solution is possible anyway. Even if it takes several unbalanced encounters to get there.
or:
- There is balance, but rather than on an individual basis, the balance exists across multiple encounters. As the player, you won't know how many encounters until there's balance, you just have to trust the GM.
I favor the former.
I´m in the middle ground right now.
So far, I´m working out some campaign rules for a Hexploration type of game that uses an adapted version of the Warchest rules to surplant and enhance EXP.
Background: I´ve used the planet creation rules from AToW:Companion and Traveller to create "Kittery" as a planet. The campaign starts in the early Jihad years with the famous prison camp break-out Stone was involved in.
The basic gist of it is this: It´s old-school style hexploration, meaning randomly rolled hex map stuff, coupled with some fixed map entries that "tell a story". The basic currency for everything in this campaign are warchest points, meaning you spent those for everything. Examples would be:
- Enter a new hex with a Lance: 1 point.
- Secure a Hex: 10 points
- Own a Hex: 100 points
- Call in an air-strike by 2 VTOLs to have the OpFor enter the battle damages: 50 Points, roll 2d6, by 10+, one VTOL got shot down an needs to be replaced
and so on.
At the current state of our playtest, we opted to exchange Warchest for EXP on a 1:10 basis, forcing players to "own" a vehicle based on that. So buying a Heavy Mech via Warchest points equals the appropriate vehicle trait, upgrading it would cost an equal amount of points to own the "customized" trait, and so on.
We also opted for using warchest points to salvage situations. That means that you could spent an equal amount of points regarding your skill levels to "not die" and the appropiate points to salvage your mech should things have gone wrong in a mission. This had an interesting side effect so far, as my guys and gals seem to be loath to attain levels beyond "veteran", as those get very costly to replace.
In the next two or three sessions, we´ll work on integrating more building/structure rules (like creating own mech facilities, barracks and so on) as well as look into commander abilities.
The interesting thing, so far is, that by tying several functions in this type of campaign to certain skills, gunnery bloat so far is no problem and only two guys (yes, the Pathfinder players) have invested into SPAs so far.