so the other day we had our sesh and someone brought assorted cheeses as a snack, and puns ensued. I (the dm) jokingly said that for every new cheese pun the whole party heals 1 hp cuz I'm fun like that. Mind you this is a 5e game so a single hp isn't much but its still incentivizing when most of the party is at half health. My players really liked it. I really liked how it brought out that OSR feeling of "the players are clever so their characters benefit mechanically" which I don't get as much as I want because it's 5e and I haven't twisted their arms into the OSR yet.
so
I'm constantly fantasizing about running an osr style game and always in the process of frankensteining my perfect rules set that combines everything I like from a million osr systems... and I had the thought of replacing the resource cost of spells in a system like an into the odd hack or knave hack with creativity. so like if you would normally recover 1 fatigue per night (i know thats not how ITO or knave do) a character with a certain spell or feature could compose a haiku to heal two instead, or maybe a pun made at an enemies expense could deal 2 hp damage with the limitation that it can't damage str (be lethal) or in a world where magic comes from being crazy or sad (like adventure time) roleplaying being crazy or sad could recover a fatigue for a wizard type character.
sorry for the stream of consciousness typing
basically instead of paying with a spell slot or hp or fatigue for an in game magic effect the player has to do some clever wordplay relevant to the situation. the mechanical benefit would be solid but minimal since id want to make it an effect that is only limited in it's usefulness by a player's creativity.
so my question is: did someone already do this better? is there a wordplay/creative thing a player could do that would thematically fit giving a martial/combat mechanical benefit? how should I balance it? How can i use it in hacking a system like knave, synthetic dream machine, or cairn?
also general thoughts and ideas appreciated
How well this works is going to be very table dependent. If everyone playing are creative dynamos, they will go crazy with a system like this-- whether it goes too far or not will be on you as the GM. If only some of the players excel at this sort of thing, it will create an imbalance between a set of haves and have-nots: those who can muster up the haikus, insults, etc. and reap the benefits and those who can't. I tend to think that unless you carefully craft the effects and cap them in some way, it can get out of hand either way to the detriment of the experience as a whole.