Hope did get wasted on a couple of attack rolls, which weren't Inspired since you can only invoke your Distinctive Feature on Skill rolls (thus Virtues that let you become Inspired on any roll, rather that only on Skill rolls, become quite interesting).
Of course, everybody should take whatever options they think are the most fun, but bear in mind that a Virtue that lets you be Inspired in more situations gives you:
- an additional +1d6 in some situations
- and only in situations where you couldn't already be Inspired
- only as often as you are able to spend Hope
If you weigh that against virtues that give you "always on" bonuses or other cool features, it's really quite weak. And if it turns out that they make Fellowship refresh every session, all that does is cheapen Hope into an even more blandly generic dice mechanic, only distinguishable from environmental modifiers, adversary traits, Useful Items, and (now absent) preliminary rolls by the name attached to them. (Never mind the fact that one of the primary complaints about 1e was "per session" mechanics.)
What about rolls that would have succeeded anyway? Well, unless you roll a Gandalf rune on the Feat die, you'll never know that. But do you really care?
Um, yes, I do care. Not necessarily because at the table, in the moment, I really want to know whether or not I would have succeeded.* But rather because the thing I care most about in games is "informed but difficult decision-making". In the example you gave above (TN 15, 3 dice) it is twice as likely that you will succeed without spending Hope than it is that Hope will turn a failure into a success. So even though those particular odds are a particularly good use of Hope (more on that below) it's still mostly gambling to throw a point at it. Which is fine: lots of games have "gambling" built into the mechanics. It saddens me that a distinguishing characteristic of TOR has become that.
*That said, I also know that in games with analogous mechanics where you CAN tell what would have happened, it's un-fun to realize you wasted the resource. E.g., spending Inspiration in D&D 5e and getting two high rolls. I find it distinctly worse than failing because of two low rolls.
In game practice, all the player has to ask himself before rolling is whether the task is worth spending Hope, and that's it - no calculations, no disappointment in finding out that your Attribute bonus is too low to turn that failure into a success.
It's interesting that in your usage example you picked one in which Hope had a very high chance of guaranteeing a success. Quick: would you have spent that point without Inspired?
Or would you spend a point on 2 dice with TN 18, if Inspired? How about 5 dice with TN 21? Decide quick, no math.
The reality is that the new system "wastes" Hope in a direct (inverse) relationship to how much thinking we do before using it.
The point is not that now Hope may fail, because it could fail also in 1ed (if your Attribute bonus was too low).
Ummm....not sure I count not being able to use it as "failing". If we're going to stretch the definition to mean that "using the other edition's rules, Hope might have resulted in success" then we have to also say that every single time you don't spend Hope in 2e, and fail by an amount equal to or less than your attribute, "Hope failed". Right? Because if you were playing 1e you could then spend a point of Hope.
What seems to cause the most dismay (especially among old players, since new players don't seem concerned at all) is actually that it can now be wasted, but as long as the internal economy of the game supports this (which I currently have some doubts about), I truly don’t see where the problem lies.
The problem lies in the cheapening of a unique, distinctive mechanic into just another way to frequently modify the dice pool. Which is exactly what I started beating the drum about when I first realized Hope was going to be spent before the roll: the only way to make the new mechanic "work" is to provide a lot more Hope points.
This is a concern I share, but I guess that as Davi wisely said, the drawback of a Magical success may lie in the Eye Awareness rules. I mean, you may use a rifle to kill a mosquito, but a swatter probably causes less collateral damage, right?
Also, a Magical success doesn't let you roll additional dice, which may instead be more useful when aiming at scoring more tengwars as possible, rather than simply succeeding.
A. This is assuming that Magical successes get added to the...explicitly optional...Eye Awareness rules. I don't think there's been anything from Francesco suggesting this, has there been? It's just conjecture on the forums.
B. My gut math feel here is that spending Hope purely for the sole purpose of fishing for Tengwars is, in all but the most extreme edge cases, an even worse expenditure than spending it to help you succeed. Let alone in place of a Magical success.