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.