Tracking big, abstract goals can be difficult in tabletop RPGs like D&D, but one rule from Pathfinder can make the process less of a hassle.
Tabletop roleplaying games offer support for a wide selection of playstyles and narratives, with the most popular games like Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder allowing players to embody anyone from an educated scholar to a smooth-talking con artist to a hulking berserker. Mechanical support for all these playstyles, however, tends to be more limited. While combat receives a heavy focus in most RPGs as an easy source of stakes and conflict, other types of confrontation tend to get the short end of the stick. Entire arguments or days of research, are often boiled down to a single dice roll, with success or failure acting as a means to propel the party towards the next life-or-death brawl.
This is a fine approach for many. However, for Game Masters looking for a way to broaden the mechanical scope of their narratives without bogging down their groups with entirely new rulesets, Pathfinder's Game Mastery Guide offers a simple, flexible subsystem that can be easily inserted into any of the more abstract conflicts that a group of players might crave: Victory Points.
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At its core, the Victory Point subsystem is quite simple. A basic expanding of the usual single-roll resolutions, players are expected to approach the problem by describing a course of action they would like to take, roll a check against a set DC, and compare numbers to see if they succeed or fail. Unlike normal resolutions for such checks, however, a success using these rules gives the players at least one Victory Point, with larger degrees of success earning more. This point is added to the player's total and acts as an abstract representation of progress made towards their goal. The GM, having set a number of required points beforehand as a target number, can easily see how much progress the players are making and describe that progress accordingly.
This basic form of the rules allows players to run longer investigations, command armies in battle, attempt to sabotage an enemy war camp or any number of other goals would otherwise dominate multiple sessions playing out the minutia of resolving those acts. This alone makes for a valuable tool in any GM's toolbox, but the book expands on the possibilities, such as using them as a representation of the party's influence in a city, their reputation or even how to run a chase scene where both sides try to accrue enough victory points to achieve opposing goals.
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While this bears some similarities to the oft-praised Skill Challenges from Dungeons & Dragons Fourth Edition, Paizo has created a structure that can be easily modified to fit any abstract goal, as well as offering dozens of pages of guidance and examples on how to modify the subsystem to evoke various themes and drive players to action. While a game like Blades in the Dark might be an overall better choice for a completely heist-focused adventure, the example modification to Infiltration Points shows a way for GMs to mechanically represent actions outside of the normal scope of gameplay in a satisfying way and without making the entire playgroup sit down and learn a new game.
While Victory Points as written are obviously intended for Pathfinder, the rules can be effortlessly ported to other d20 systems such as D&D, and can even work as a starting point for a GM to design a similar system for nearly any game they might choose to play. Though the core idea may not be something that only Pathfinder can do, thanks to Paizo's work putting it to paper and providing examples of how to tweak it -- and its willingness to post all of its rules text online for free -- any GM can stand on the shoulders of talented, hardworking designers and use these rules to step up their own games.
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Nicholas Potter is a writer based out of Hampton, Virginia. He's worked in customer service, but is now a student and has published reviews of tabletop RPGs on EN World. He is an avid fan of anime, video games, and most of all, tabletop RPGs - which he plays online with friends he's made all over the world.
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