[Torg] Simpler card-play and p-points

[Phil Dack]

Guys,

I love the drama deck, it's my single favourite Torgian innovation. But my experience of running a campaign was that the whole game was surprisingly complex, with some relatively difficult player meta-game decisions around playing cards, building pools, using p-points and picking combat maneuvers. I'm keen to simplify so that the mechanics of combat more closely reflect the fast-moving drama of the battles we're trying to emulate.

My latest thought is to eliminate p-points and combat maneuvers altogether, and use the cards to replicate these entirely. The detail of this I'm not sure about, but my early conception is something like this:

Cards as ppoints
Ppoints represent your maximum card deck. To spend a ppoint, you discard any card and reduce your Deck size by one.
You have potentially 3 piles of cards making up your Deck: Hand, Pool and Potential. If you play a card, you immediately pick one up and add it face down to your Potential. That way, you always maintain the same overall Deck size, but some of the cards aren't useable until you take an action that allows you to add a card to your hand as usual.
Consequence - less written book keeping, but more cards lying around the place. Risk of confusion?

Considering: to play a ppoint, card must come from Hand, not Pool or Potential?

Cards as combat maneuvers
No more vital blows. If you want to do a vital blow, you have to build your pool up with appropriate cards.
Aim/brace maneuvers become null actions that allow a player to play into their pool.
Active Defences remain as standard.
Consequence - removes slow combat decision making (and for my group, this was a BIG issue!). However, what about NPCs? Non-prateds?

Considering: Some maneuvers have a negative penalty, usually to attack or defend. Replicate this by allowing a player to play a card straight from their hand in return for a -2 penalty?
Considering: Major NPCs still use maneuvers and ppoints? Minor NPCs cannot use combat maneuvers?
Considering: Any card can be played as a +2 Action or +2 Effect total, as well as it's written effect?

I'm convinced that this kind of route is the right way to go, but I'm not sure how to make it as clean and elegant as I want. BAsically, I want to remove 1 element of decision-making (Action, Card, Maneuver, Ppoints) and given that you can't really remove Action and I love Cards, it only leaves the manevuers! Wrapping cards and ppoints together is just a bonus!

thoughts and inevitable critiques welcome. Preferably those that say "I hate it, but this is how it could work" :-)
Phil