I will not enter into the debate as to whether Hope should be interpreted as fate, or as a more simple inner reserve of will and spiritual strength, but I am surprised at how many of the contributions take it for granted that it is so much weaker than in the previous edition.
I've run a couple of sessions with the new system, and the impression of everyone at the table is that Hope is definitely less reliable, but also more rewarding. First myth to bust: in two sessions, it never happened that a Skill roll failed after the expenditure of Hope. In all instances, the character who rolled was Inspired, and spending Hope without being Inspired actually felt like a desperate measure, rather than its standard usage. 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).
The math actually supports these observations. Adding 2 dice to a roll means adding an average of 7 points to the result: that's the maximum Attribute bonus you could get in 1ed, and on top of that you increase your chance of scoring tengwars. Going from a dice pool of
3d6 to a dice pool of
5d6 means going from a
62% chance of success against
TN 15, to a
95% chance of success. It means that your chance of actually wasting that point is just
5%.
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? You would have spent that point anyway, since you deemed the roll important. 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. At my table that was a win, and it actually felt smoother than before. I acknowledge that in other tables, it may not.
The point is not that now
Hope may fail, because it could fail also in 1ed (if your Attribute bonus was too low). 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.
And, for exactly that reason, I would only play characters with some kind of Magical success option, and thus never take any options that grant Inspired, which has absolutely no function in the game if you spend all your Hope on Magical successes. Which means, as a corollary, that if you have Magical successes your distinctive features also serve no (mechanical) purpose.
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.
It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.