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.