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aramis
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Re: Balance of Distinctive Features and Useful Items

Sun 04 Jul 2021, 12:20

I find the change to hope being required for DFs as a huge problem, as the required amount isn't up to the level of recovery..
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Harlath
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Re: Balance of Distinctive Features and Useful Items

Sun 04 Jul 2021, 15:35

I did like the Cubicle 7 2e draft that had distinctive features adding +1d at all times.

It appealed to me, but perhaps it led to too much time in testing debating on whether the Distinctive Feature applied or not?

Beyond that, broadly like the new +2d when using a distinctive feature rules (more fun than automatic success) and useful items (helps make treasure relevant but keeps things simple, not tracking lots of item types). Particularly as Standard of Living can improve during play, so those with lower standard of living at the start aren't disadvantaged in the long term.
 
Dunheved
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Re: Balance of Distinctive Features and Useful Items

Sun 18 Jul 2021, 09:54

Only just got round to reading some of this. (So many great ideas and posts in such a short time - I don't envy the authors / guys at Free League who will be reading all this!)

Useful items: it does seem that the wealthy cultures get a nice little bonus, and this is unsymetrical .

As a generalisation for play balance and for player choice I propose therefore the addition

"Each useful item is brought along with an increase of one load."

'Rope, I knew it was too heavy.'
 
Dunheved
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Re: Balance of Distinctive Features and Useful Items

Sun 18 Jul 2021, 11:13

Distinctive Features / Traits:

The mechanic here is that Traits permit the doubling of the 1d die bonus when you spend hope = the idea of Inspiration. Am I right that it is also said the LM can decide other occasions when traits work to give some benefit for the party or a player?
If that is correct, it seems a little vague, and therefore not too helpful to a newbie LM with a selection of Players with varying experience. (Though I am generally not in favour of more complicated rules, if I think of them - what a surprise - my attitude changes !)


1. How about if we allocate one skill to each of the named 24 Distinctive Features, designating that feature/trait to give Inspiration for that skill?

E.g. a TALL character could automatically be considered Inspired whenever using Awe.
The description the core rule book would change from 'TALL' to "TALL (inspires Awe)"
E.g. WARY might go into WARY (inspires Stealth), and so on.

2. With 24 traits, I would also think that skills other than the Common ones might be reinforced (I know this might overlap with Virtues and some traits might become more attractive than others but, hey... )
E.g. BOLD would be an Inspiration for Valour or for Fear tests.

3. In TOR 1e we could take an extra Trait/ Specialism at the cost of having a Flaw of some sort added as well. Repeating that idea, players taking one additional trait gives extra Inspiration in one skill, but makes another skill ILL- favoured E.g. FIERCE (inspires Enhearten, misfavours Courtesy)
 
mrdabakkle
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Re: Balance of Distinctive Features and Useful Items

Sun 18 Jul 2021, 22:13

While there's a wealth gap at the start, successful adventurers can grow their wealth and increase their access to mounts/Useful Items (p72-p73 and p121).

We don't have any Rich or Poor cultures yet, so the largest starting gap is Prosperous (3 items) v Frugal (1 item).

90 Treasure in to the game, the gap narrows, as the Frugal PC goes from 0->90 = Prosperous (3 items) while the Prosperous PC is now Rich (4 items).
1) Presumably there *will* be Rich and Poor cultures.
2) It's still pretty big difference early in the game. Beginning Prosperous cultures still have the equivalent of 24 free Skill Points, relative to beginning Frugal cultures. Potentially a lot more if their items correspond to rank 3 skills.
I don't know why you would assume there would be poor cultures, there where no poor cultures in 1e. Let's take 1e we had standards of living that characters could have, frugal, martial, prosperous, and rich. Poor was listed but no culture was poor. Now in 2e we have poor, frugal, common, prosperous, and rich. So far only the middle three have any cultures in their group. The only cultures in 1e that started as rich where Dwarves of the Lonely Mountain and Bardings with a specific virtue and that is now gone. I can assume we will get Woodmen as a Frugal culture and Beornings and Elves of Mirkwood as a Common culture, Elves of Rivendell will probably remain a prosperous culture, and Dunlendings will be frugal. Men of Rohan will be a common culture, and Men of Minas Tirtih will be Prosperous or even Common.
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RichKarp
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Re: Balance of Distinctive Features and Useful Items

Mon 19 Jul 2021, 05:03

Useful items are a cool idea, but I don’t really know about them in practice. It seems like they will end up being applied to every single possible roll, certainly if the player deems it important. It also seems like a poor corrective to dealing with the consequences of high starting TNs for certain character builds. The unbalanced aspect of Rich vs Less well off cultures is OK to me - now there is a tangible benefit to being from a prosperous group, and to grow personal wealth, when that wasn’t the case before.

Rather than +1d6, I’d rather see two “flavors” of useful items: those which add a fixed bonus (dependable) and those which allow a Re-roll of the lowest d6 rolled (prized) which allow players to generate an additional Tengwar.

I like the idea they could be picked up by anyone - or even lost in the course an adventure (unlike magical stuff, which really couldn’t be permanently lost because it was part of the character’s intrinsic Valour). Rich characters have an edge, but nothing that can’t be taken away temporarily. Plus, trust mattocks and reliable lanterns would be the norm, while truly personalized stuff (limited to just one of your possessions perhaps) would offer the big bonus of a Re-roll. It wouldn’t necessarily make challenges much easier, but it would raise the odds of success a little and of hitting Tengwars which is almost the definition of “useful” to me.

Maybe if there were a limit such that each useful item could only be used once during an adventure, or if for example they could only be used in particular circumstances (on a journey, in a Sanctuary, underground, etc).
 
gyrovague
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Re: Balance of Distinctive Features and Useful Items

Mon 19 Jul 2021, 05:38

Useful items are a cool idea, but I don’t really know about them in practice. It seems like they will end up being applied to every single possible roll, certainly if the player deems it important. It also seems like a poor corrective to dealing with the consequences of high starting TNs for certain character builds. The unbalanced aspect of Rich vs Less well off cultures is OK to me - now there is a tangible benefit to being from a prosperous group, and to grow personal wealth, when that wasn’t the case before.

Rather than +1d6, I’d rather see two “flavors” of useful items: those which add a fixed bonus (dependable) and those which allow a Re-roll of the lowest d6 rolled (prized) which allow players to generate an additional Tengwar.

I like the idea they could be picked up by anyone - or even lost in the course an adventure (unlike magical stuff, which really couldn’t be permanently lost because it was part of the character’s intrinsic Valour). Rich characters have an edge, but nothing that can’t be taken away temporarily. Plus, trust mattocks and reliable lanterns would be the norm, while truly personalized stuff (limited to just one of your possessions perhaps) would offer the big bonus of a Re-roll. It wouldn’t necessarily make challenges much easier, but it would raise the odds of success a little and of hitting Tengwars which is almost the definition of “useful” to me.

Maybe if there were a limit such that each useful item could only be used once during an adventure, or if for example they could only be used in particular circumstances (on a journey, in a Sanctuary, underground, etc).
A well-chosen and cleverly implemented Useful Item could prove to be more beneficial to a character (as measured by the number of d6's added to rolls) over the course of their career than the entire Hope subsystem.
 
RichKarp
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Re: Balance of Distinctive Features and Useful Items

Mon 19 Jul 2021, 18:58

It is kind of strange that “Useful” items are either taking the place of Cultural Rewards or of some enchanted items; I think useful should mean just that, but not “magical.” And probably not on par with Hope.

Like obviously the Elvish rope and the phial of Galadriel would be magical items, not Useful Items right? But it’s not at all clear that Useful Items as written wouldn’t do exactly the kinds of things those super rare magical gifts accomplish in the narrative. So there probably needs to be some weakening of Useful Items so that they add a little value, but aren’t invoked constantly to the point where the aroma of pipe weed wafts into every scene so that the player can collect his bonus d6.
 
Mythicos
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Re: Balance of Distinctive Features and Useful Items

Mon 19 Jul 2021, 20:18

It is kind of strange that “Useful” items are either taking the place of Cultural Rewards or of some enchanted items; I think useful should mean just that, but not “magical.” And probably not on par with Hope.

Like obviously the Elvish rope and the phial of Galadriel would be magical items, not Useful Items right? But it’s not at all clear that Useful Items as written wouldn’t do exactly the kinds of things those super rare magical gifts accomplish in the narrative. So there probably needs to be some weakening of Useful Items so that they add a little value, but aren’t invoked constantly to the point where the aroma of pipe weed wafts into every scene so that the player can collect his bonus d6.

A quote from you in the "TNs for starting chracters" thread:


There are plenty of ways to reward creativity on the part of the players without forcing them to scrounge for dice with stunt-like descriptions of how awesomely they track the Warg, curtsy at court, flip through books of lore, etc. We’re talking about the central mechanic of the game - a Skill test - and some of you guys are acting like it should be normal to make players go around collecting dice from all sorts of situational bonuses in order to have average chances of success.

Look I love the narrative open-ended nature of the game, I like circumstance bonuses and Favoured/ill-Favoured and I see no problem at all with those being viable options. But the basic fact is some characters are going to have to hit TN 20 with a solid third of all their skills. That doesn’t just encourage specialization, it more or less prohibits wise investment in those areas.

Of course we don’t expect all characters to be equally good at all Skills… that is silly. However, certain character builds are now less viable than they were before. Given that skill diversity was a good thing and possible for anyone before, this is not an improvement to me. While equally good at all things is boring, so is “let the Elf roll Lore because he’s the best at it” ad infinitum.

More importantly though to me, some character types are simply less capable now - those combining skills, professions, or inclinations which crossed between two or more Attributes weighted against them. The wise and insightful craftsman, the traveling scholar who knows many rhymes and lore, the itinerant huntsman; those archetypes will be harder to play in practice. I don’t see why certain concepts should be inherently more difficult to realize because of the game mechanics.

I’m also really struggling to see how the mechanics encourage characters’ diversity when really what they incentivize is getting really good at the things you’re already better at by default. It seems to run totally contrary to the spirit of Tolkien’s literature where unlikely people do incredible things that would seem beyond their original capacity and where natural inclinations like song, gardening, healing are actually deemed more powerful than force of arms.

You know, YMMV and all that...

But why say on one hand that beginning characters are too weak, and on the other that useful items should be weakened?!?

Seems to me that Useful Items are a great way to customize your character AND reinforce some weaker skills; both being things you've been saying are errors/weaknesses of the new edition of the game.
 
Asgo
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Re: Balance of Distinctive Features and Useful Items

Mon 19 Jul 2021, 20:44

...
But why say on one hand that beginning characters are too weak, and on the other that useful items should be weakened?!?
...
while I don't necessarily agree on "the starting character being too weak", both points can be valid if both have separate issues. ;)
you don't want to fix one issue by breaking the another part of the system. ("a round of rings of power for every starting char, that should help them along (potentially towards the shadow)" :)

on the usefulness of useful items, I think this falls back to almost always trying too hard to press any bonus or malus in a +/-1d dice with the almost inevitable loss of resolution to make sharper distinctions.
I think the solution to this is for the LM to be very picky about the choice of useful items and about when they can be used. That should work for most cases.

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