Victory Point Subsystem Structures

The most common structure is to accumulate Victory Points toward a total, either stopping after reaching a success threshold or collecting as many Victory Points as possible in a given time frame and then measuring the results against various thresholds. The influence subsystem is a great example of this structure in action: each PC has a certain number of chances to influence various NPCs, and after reaching a particular threshold of Victory Points with an NPC, the PCs have convinced that NPC.

In a variation of this structure, the PCs' adversaries can also accumulate Victory Points, giving the PCs a moving target—either to reach the goal before the adversary or to have more Victory Points than the adversary at the end of a given time frame. This is a great structure for you to use in a situation where the PCs face opposition rather than having the PCs accumulate Victory Points while adversaries decrease the total since it's dynamic and less at risk of resulting in a stalemate.

You can track a subsystem at a larger scale, like over the course of an adventure or campaign, by granting the PCs Victory Points for achieving difficult goals or making particular decisions. Such subsystems usually ask the PCs to compare their accumulated Victory Points against several ranked tiers that each have varying results on the story. Typically these results become more positive for the PCs as they acquire more Victory Points, but sometimes succeeding too fully could have unintended consequences, like convincing a mining colony to support work reforms only for it to escalate to an armed revolution. If you're making your own subsystem, you might not define these ranks in full, but just use your best guess at the end.

Using this method, the PCs start with a certain number of Victory Points, and rather than accumulating them, they attempt to avoid losing them. Perhaps the PCs are trying to prevent a hacker from getting into a database, keep an evacuation center safe during a hurricane, preserve a celebrity's untarnished reputation despite their troublemaking behavior, or are otherwise attempting to minimize damage, loss, or danger. This variant is less common, but it's great at conveying the urgency of a situation as the PCs lose points. Sometimes it's necessary to add that sense of tension with this subsystem! Typically, when the PCs lose all their Victory Points, a negative event occurs. If they're on a timer, the final results might be better the more points they manage to keep before the time runs out.

In a multiple point subsystem, you have more than one point system, each measuring something different. For example, in a virtual racing vidgame, the PCs and their opponents both try to gain their own Lap Points, and whoever gets to 10 points first wins!

Infiltration offers a different example of a Victory Point subsystem with multiple types of points. PCs try to get a certain number of Infiltration Points to successfully infiltrate a location while avoiding giving Awareness Points to their enemies through failure.

Consider combining the multiple points with a time factor, like in infiltrations, where the PCs automatically accrue Awareness Points over time at a slow rate.