My objection here isn’t just the difficulty though: it’s the process. Traits and Hope and even obtaining bonus circumstantial success dice used to all feel unique and special.
Now tasks are deliberately made more difficult apparently for characters to have a challenge over their long arc of progression, and every task that does merit a roll requires players to go nuts mining their character sheets for Useful Items, Hope dice, etc to ensure they have enough dice to comfortably succeed.
I can’t really completely explain why I don’t like this, I just don’t. I know your whole thing is to not isolate the mechanics from each other and criticize them individually, but I’m also just not really digging this new dice pool focused approach. Obviously the old game used a dice pool too, so I’m having a hard time articulating what part of this I find objectionable, I just think it’s a bit ordinary and uninspired.
The simplicity of just having the pips, knowing the relative skills of characters (specifically to each other), being able to set a variable difficulty without the players explicitly knowing that or not and feeling either discouraged or softballed - I miss it. I think I’m just not a fan of them knowing their own difficulty threshold and then gaming the shit out of all their Hope and possessions to ensure victory.
I could just be a curmudgeon about this in particular. I guess I just don’t find it especially compelling from either a mechanical or thematic perspective.
No, not a curmudgeon, but definitely in the school of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" school (at least, If I'm remembering correctly from the C7 forums)... and a lot that wasn't broken in 1E is now cracked, perhaps even broken.
The difficulty by pool adjustment has several things about it that give me pause and that may contribute to your dislike:
- The GM has to reveal the difficulty to the players
- Players now "know" their chances
- The current mechanics lead to multiple rounds of "does this work?" - 1 each for Traits and Tools
- The option to reduce difficulty by 2 to make it best 2 of 3 is absent
- The difficulty shift is now profound, instead of subtle
- There is no cap on number of dice
- There is much more to do with tengwar skill runes than just success levels
- Players need to spend hope often now
- Traits have too low an effect
THe following aren't directly a result of the skill advancement
- Task rolls no longer contribute to/drive skill advancement
- Traits no longer contribute to skill advancement
I know I preferred 1E's help mechanic: drop the TN by 2 and get 3 successes across the helpers. Or by 4 and 5 successes.