Dunheved
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How will you sort the problem with Councils?

Wed 19 Jan 2022, 11:04

There was a lot of thread time spent a while ago analysing and debating the problem with the Difficulty of Councils.
But what solutions do people feel will work? In my first TOR2e game, I tried using the Council rules, but luckily it simply degenerated into a Meeting where the head councillor became a mini-patron instead and tasked the group with a mission.
However, I feel a genuine Council might be a more satisfying conclusion to my story: So I'm curious what people think will work if the resistance is hard.
 
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Harlath
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Re: How will you sort the problem with Councils?

Wed 19 Jan 2022, 12:23

Solutions (can mix and match a bit here) for the "harder councils/skill endeavours are actually easier at mid/high skill pools"):

- Make successes required scale up faster than attempts allowed. So instead of 6 in 6 attempts you need 6 in 5 or 4 attempts. This is how Savage Worlds fixes a similar issue with its probabilities, harder "Dramatic tasks" don't just scale up linearly.
- Keep rolling once you've hit the "successes required" threshold and have scaling rewards beyond the initial council goal. This is where 1e ended up in supplements, even if it isn't what the core 1e rulebook recommended it quickly became the standard.

The above maintain the game's framwork: cultural virtues that boost attempts allowed still work, your courtesy roll still works etc. Indeed, it boosts these but not to an outrageous degree.

Scaling successes in a council
For example, Elrond has many resources but many demands on these resources. But with the extra resources he feels this scheme merits them:

- some doses of Miruvor from the Rivendell booklet.
- a larger Treasure reward at the end.
- a temporary Useful item to use on the adventure or even a loan of a Magical Item for the adventure
- An NPC with appropriate skills accompanies the PCs, providing +1d or +2d on some checks as noted in the core rulebook.
- Wise words from Elrond provide +1 hope to each PC (lots of examples of this in the core rulebook from similar events) or temporarily grants his Patron Benefit in addition to group's normal benefit.
- Some of the Magical effects on p170-171, whether it is hiding the group from the Shadow, aiding travel etc. For Elrond, easing a journey by rendering a river that's normally a challenge to pass not b an obstacle might cut Journey rolls and is very thematic.
 
Niallism
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Re: How will you sort the problem with Councils?

Wed 19 Jan 2022, 14:39

What I've done - and we've had three or four Councils in our 2E game - is to only allow the same skill to be used twice if the narrative is very different, and to generally do a lot of adding or subtracting dice due to the narrative choices So just two people using Awe would either be disallowed or have a significant penalty - perhaps a dice penalty, or perhaps a greater penalty on failure (Woe etc) - unless they were very very different uses of Awe, e.g. One person silently impresses all the listeners with his beauty and presence (and using his Fair trait), while another, perhaps a few rolls later, tells one cowardly member of the listeners a tale of terror and pain that will befall the land if they don't help the Company/Fellowship.

I think this makes the available dice for each roll significantly smaller and have a greater variance, and therefore prevents the mathematical issue that appears with multiple large dice pools.
Last edited by Niallism on Thu 20 Jan 2022, 08:40, edited 1 time in total.
 
Dunheved
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Re: How will you sort the problem with Councils?

Wed 19 Jan 2022, 23:12

Thanks for these, guys.
(And if there are others, don't feel shy!)
 
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Pangea
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Re: How will you sort the problem with Councils?

Thu 20 Jan 2022, 07:46

Personally, as far as what I have read & DMed so far, the Council-system is the one thing where I feel 2E lost value vs. 1E.
I do not like the fact that it is mainly a goal to be reached or not (yes/no answer), and that there are no more than three outcomes (success, failure with woe*, failure)-- which is what is offered on page 231 in the Star of the Mist.
So, for my part, I have simply been adding some of the rules of 1E and doing like Harlath said just above (with his good examples):
Scaling successes in a council
I refer to the published adventures of 1E, where they scale the answer to the number of successes.
And I use the Council-system as per 2E, but add the "adding negative aspects if low successes, or giving benefits to higher successes".

Note: I have not looked into the fact that the math of the Council does not work when you have a lot of dice (the stuff published about that).

* : I am not even sure what "failure with woe" means for Councils, and I think Free League was not clear enough on that (unless I missed something).
There are so many rolls that can be made (4 to 9+), from Introduction through the Interaction, so are you a harsh GM and say that if one failure with woe is ever used then the whole Council has such a result, or do you go with a few, or with 50%...
I am fine with adjudicating this myself, but I think there should be some rule guidelines.
Playing in France, and online
 
Sebastian
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Re: How will you sort the problem with Councils?

Thu 20 Jan 2022, 11:04

Aside from the broken math I‘m okay with the Council rules. For me the outcome of a Council depends purely on what was said and discussed. I don’t need a fully fletched out outcome. In 1e the adventures often gave outcomes, that didn’t fit the story any more, cause the story moved in another direction.
 
Dunheved
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Re: How will you sort the problem with Councils?

Thu 20 Jan 2022, 18:38

On the subject of the Broken Maths I think that is is quite possible to tweak the rules as they are to make the Hard Councils more difficult. The issue with the system as it is written seems to me because the time limit is nine (or more) rolls to achieve the Hard goals and because they are totalled collectively any early Failures can be compensated by later rolls with tengwars.


A. Scaling the difficulty in the Council as suggested upthread should work

but what do people think about either of the following ?

B. Why not just set the same time limit for all Councils at 6 (plus any bonus time due to introductory Successes)? Easy needs 3 Success; Standard needs 6 Success; Hard needs 9 Success. This is very close to the RAW, but Easy is easiest to achieve, and Hard is hardest to achieve.

C. Or organise every Council into Stages. A stage is completed with three Successes. Easy Councils are only 1 Stage; Standard Councils take two Stages; and Hard Councils are three Stages. Tengwars in one stage cannot be transferred into any other stage. No broken maths here.

EDIT: I think that the maths for OPTION C here is not so hard.
If the percentage probability of a Company passing an Easy Council (i.e. 3 Success in 3 Time) is P%, then each Stage is the same difficulty (because it is also 3 Success in 3 Time, it will be the same) P%.
So an Easy Council is P%; one stage
A Medium/Open Council is P% multiplied by P% for overall success; two stages - you multiply probabilities if both events are to succeed
A Hard Council is P% multiplied by P% multiplied by P%; three stages - you multiply all three probabilities together if all events are to succeed

e.g. 3S has 65% or 0.65 chance of Success with Easy - thanks hsi379 in post #10 below
which means that the same group has 0.65 x 0.65 = 0.42 or 42% chance with a medium Council overall, and 0.65 x 0.65 x 0.65 = 0.27 or 27% chance of success with hard Councils overall.
Last edited by Dunheved on Mon 21 Mar 2022, 13:48, edited 1 time in total.
 
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Harlath
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Re: How will you sort the problem with Councils?

Thu 20 Jan 2022, 19:53

Dunheved - those are good ideas to explore too alongside my potential solution!

One thing to consider for your Option C is how things that change attempts allowed would fit in (introduction, some cultural virtues too): perhaps they could be "spent" in a particular group of 3 to add another attempt? But perhaps adds complexity and goes against the broader 2e design philosophy, so A/B might fit both philosophy and some existing rules (introduction, various virtues) better?
 
Dunheved
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Re: How will you sort the problem with Councils?

Fri 21 Jan 2022, 00:37

Thanks. Very positive feedback and appreciated.

I had option C in my head when I started the thread, but couldn't phrase the idea to cover the bonus time earnt by Introductions or Virtues. Maybe such bonus time should be free to the LM to allocate or maybe the players decide which Stage gets the extra time (That is what I would offer). But then the rule gets bigger, and longer to apply.

Option B came into my head as I read through the responses. The more I think about it, the more I prefer it to Option C! Purely to fix the "Broken Maths" of course.
 
hsi379
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Re: How will you sort the problem with Councils?

Mon 24 Jan 2022, 21:18

Thanks. Very positive feedback and appreciated.

I had option C in my head when I started the thread, but couldn't phrase the idea to cover the bonus time earnt by Introductions or Virtues. Maybe such bonus time should be free to the LM to allocate or maybe the players decide which Stage gets the extra time (That is what I would offer). But then the rule gets bigger, and longer to apply.

Option B came into my head as I read through the responses. The more I think about it, the more I prefer it to Option C! Purely to fix the "Broken Maths" of course.
Interesting ideas! Have you done the math yet?

You may fix the ouright "broken math" issue, but it may or may not be a good solution and hard to tell without doing the math.

There are 2 issues with Councils and Skill Endeavors. 1st is the outright broken math that means that at high dice pools, longer "harder" challenges are sometimes easier. The 2nd issue is that "easy", "medium" and "hard" aren't really defined well. Compared to what? What kind of party do you expect to do well at a easy or medium challenge? RAW councils are pretty easy to succeed at with 3S skills and using resources unless you play the game of penalizing the same amount to bring this back down.

I think if you are going to house rule, it's an opportunity to fix both. Ideally you'd have something like this:

"Easy" = a party with average 3S skills has a good chance of succeeding (~65%?), going up to very good chance if using resources like hope on every role, etc. or has advantageous circumstances through game -- e.g., questing for the right gift (85%?)
"Medium" = a party with average 4S skills has a good chance of succeeding (~65%?), going up to very good chance if using resources like hope on every role, etc. or has advantageous circumstances through game -- e.g., questing for the right gift (85%?)
"Hard" = a party with average 5S skills has a good chance of succeeding (~65%?), going up to very good chance if using resources like hope on every role, etc. or has advantageous circumstances through game -- e.g., questing for the right gift (85%?)

A party that uses resources could punch 1 level above their weight. So a 3S party can still do a medium challenge by using resources to get to the 65% success rate mark. Hard challenges are mostly out of reach for a 3S party but perhaps if they use resources AND gain a game circumstantial advantage (e.g., X vouches for them) they might be able to pull off the 65% range.

I'm not sure these are the right baselines. But you get the idea. And then have a structure that mathematically supports this. It's not easy in 2e with the d6 modifiers being so swingy though.

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