Anyone know if Councils were changed for the final?
Also, does the math work for the Alpha version for Councils and Skill Endeavours? I'm not sure how it's exactly suppose to work. The Skill Endeavour section says "sets a time limit for the endeavour — that is, the total number of attempts that the Player-heroes are granted as a group to achieve their goal." This can be Resistance to Resistance +2. Concil time limit could be more depending on Tengwars I guess. So you might have to get 6 successes in 6 or 7 checks, meaning you have to hit Tengwars pretty regularly to make up for failures? How often will parties with average of 2 rank skills succeed? 3 rank skills? 5?
I like the move to X success in Y rounds instead of X success before Y failure. This was the Stalker0 Obsidian version (can google) of D&D4e skill challenges and worked better for many situations. However, the Obsidian system
1) assumed the entire party was involved or you should use a different resolution system -- everyone in the party was incentivized to roll even if bad at a situation, since any chance of success was better than not rolling.
2) Assumed characters using appropriate skills for the challenge (e.g., social for social challenge, physical for physical challege) with limited uses of other skills with creative explainations
3) had degrees of success depending on the # in the party and final success vs. failures
4) was always 3 rounds (so 12 checks for a party of 4)
5) the math was calculated well so you knew the TNs/DCs that would produce the results you wanted. The default for an average party facing an "on level" challange was 20-30% failure, 30-35% partial victory, and 40-45% total victory. It was easy to adjust this if needed.
The math needs to be pretty well worked out or these extended skill check systems tend to fall apart.