Query: I have been running Conan campaigns for a few months now and just want to see what other gamemasters do at the end of a session.
Example- at the end of the evening the party has 5 momentum in the pool and I have say 9 Doom. Do you carry this over to the next session?
So in the above example with say 3 players do you start with
A Just their Fortune points and Doom x2 of their points
B. That of A plus the leftovers from the previous session.
I can see pros and cons with both approaches as for example if there is no carryover the players are going to be pushing hard to use them before the end of a session.
All those resources are reset at the start of the next session, there is no carry-over of points to the next session.
Beginning of a new session:
Group Momentum resets to 0
Each PC’s Fortune resets to their starting value of 3 (or 2 if they permanently spent one during character creation).
The GM’s Doom pool is the sum of the PCs’ Fortune points.
If in a group with four players the PCs have 3, 3, 2, 2. Fortune points, the Doom pool will be 10 at session start.
Not “Doom x2 of their points”, but Doom x1. Just the sum of their Fortune points, not a multiple of them (which would be quite A LOT of Doom for the GM).
There are no “leftovers”, everything gets reset, no points are carried over.
As a GM, you don’t need to spend all Doom you have during a session, it is perfectly fine if you end a session with unspent Doom. Doom is a means to raise tension, if you don’t need it, or if you don’t need it all, that is fine.
You could argue that a very late in a session awarded Fortune point for a PC does not simply get dropped at the start of the next session, but RAW it resets. I usually let the player keep that single Fortune point in addition to the starting Fortune points, but that adds 1 Doom for the GM Doom Pool, too. But this is not RAW, it is my ruling how to handle it.
the only time you might keep everything is if you have to break a combat between 2 sessions. then you should keep the momentum, Fortune, and doom. but after the combat is finished everything should reset
I agree with Joker here … my table just does not fit into the episodic rhythm that Conan presupposes, so the resetting of everything every session would just be weird. Instead, we just carry everything over every session and more or less completely ignore the “reset” rules unless there’s a significant period of Upkeep/Downtime whatever you want to call it. So far the world has continued to spin on its axis.