Core GM Philosophy

Ettes Eternal minimizes GM complexity through consistent mechanics. Your primary job is facilitating heroic fantasy while maintaining meaningful challenges. Focus on narrative flow over mechanical optimization.

Balance Guidelines

Avoid Modifier Creep

The system intentionally avoids scattered +/-5 bonuses. When players ask for situational modifiers, use Advantage/Disadvantage instead. Reserve flat bonuses for specific abilities and spells only. These are hard to keep track of and we want to avoid people having to keep track of 8 different modifiers like in some systems…

Wrong: “The rain gives you -5 to your attack”
Right: “The rain gives you Disadvantage on your attack”

Granting Advantage/Disadvantage

These mechanics provide significant bonuses (bell curve of 9-25-9% success rate changes depending on Target Number). Use them to reward clever thinking, strategic positioning, or exceptional circumstances - not routine situational factors.

Advantage: Brilliant tactical setups, exploiting major enemy weaknesses, ideal environmental conditions
Disadvantage: Poor planning consequences, significant environmental hazards, rushed critical actions

Avoid granting these for minor situational factors. The percentage impact is substantial enough to reserve for meaningful moments.

Success Level Scaling

Don’t Scale Difficulty With Character Level As characters advance, they should feel increasingly competent at their specialties. A character with 80 skill should succeed at Normal difficulty checks 80% of the time - this represents genuine expertise.

Hard Success Requirements: Reserve for genuinely esoteric knowledge or particularly challenging tasks that would stump most experts. Examples: deciphering ancient magical formulae, performing surgery without proper tools, navigating completely unmapped wilderness.

Major Success Requirements: Use only for legendary-tier accomplishments or the most forbidden knowledge. Examples: recalling details about lost civilizations, creating masterwork items without tools, surviving impossibly dangerous environments.

Don’t make routine tasks require higher success levels just because the party has grown more capable. Let experts feel expert.

Social Challenges

Reserve the Social Challenges system for significant social encounters where:

• The NPC has strong reasons to refuse (fear, loyalty, conflicting interests)
• The stakes matter to the story or character advancement
• Simple roleplay feels insufficient for the complexity involved

Use regular roleplay with simple Skill Checks or Opposed Checks (Influence/Deception/Insight) for: casual conversations, basic information gathering, shopping, everyday interactions where NPCs have no strong resistance.

Favor Management

Gaining Favor is intentionally restrictive. Frequently deny favor gain wTarget Number party is inactive or avoiding goals

• Sessions lack meaningful progress
• Players are obviously trying to “bank” favor

Favor represents divine attention - gods don’t reward lazy followers. Be strict about value adherence requirements.

Session Productivity

Sometimes your players just faff around for 3 hours at the table; sitting in a tavern gambling, or a session-long shopping trip. In these scenarios, it is recommended that you should not include these sessions in determining advancement.

• Award the players 0 XP for the session
• Session does not count toward next level

VERY IMPORTANT: Both conditions above must be applied to prevent power imbalance and gaming the system. If for example you give XP but don’t count the session, the balance between expected skill level maximums and current level get thrown off, and the game will feel less balanced as a result.

System Scaling

Important: To modify campaign length, modify the XP rewards AND level timing in equal but opposite factors:

• Faster Campaign: 2x XP per session (10 XP) + half the sessions between levels = ~32 session campaign
• Slower Campaign: 0.5x XP per session + double sessions between levels = ~128 session campaign Warning: Tweaking only one part of the system will create power level imbalances.

Flow Point Economy

Monitor FP generation carefully. Players earn 1 FP per successful attack and 3 FP per critical hit, with 1 FP decay per turn. Don’t allow players to bypass the earning mechanisms or avoid the decay - this breaks the tactical resource management the system depends on.

Common Pitfalls

Skill Inflation: Don’t let players convince you their 60 Athletics should automatically succeed at everything physical. Maintain meaningful failure chances even for specialists.

Action Economy Abuse: Players will try to gain “free” actions. Stick to the defined action costs - the escalating AP system breaks if bypassed.