There are three possible scenarios when spending Hope in the new rules:
1. You would have succeeded anyway, without spending Hope
2. You fail by an amount that is within reach of Hope
3. You fail, by a margin large enough that Hope can’t make up the difference.
In two of the three scenarios you’ve “wasted” your Hope, in that there wasn’t even a possibility that it could have changed the outcome. Running some numbers on this (which I posted previously, and will post a more user-friendly version soon) we can see that the probability that a point of Hope turns a failure into a success varies with TN and skill, ranging from effectively zero to as high as about 28%, and as high as 52% if you are doing so while Inspired (and thus get 2 dice). These numbers also change if you are favoured or ill-favoured.
(Note: the current Hope mechanic can also give you extra Tengwars, which is awesome but its benefit is hard to quantify and not included in this analysis.)
Since it’s hard to optimize Hope expenditure for when you have the best odds (unless you keep large tables of values handy, and who wants to do that?) we can assume that on average it will provide a benefit somewhat less than those maximum %’s.
So right off the bat Hope is significantly weaker than it used to be. Maybe a fourth as good. To quantify it another way, the benefit is pretty similar to the benefit that you gain, on every single roll, for a favoured skill. Given that Hope and Shadow are kind of THE two big themes in the game, I think that dilution is unfortunate.
Furthermore, because you are just adding dice to the pool, there is less narrative impact, in several ways:
- There is no moment where you’re about to fail, but you decide to spend Hope and turn things around.
- Even if Hope does turn a failure into a success, it’s not obvious whether or not it mattered. You succeeded, but which dice were the Hope dice? (You could, of course, always use differently colored dice, and then count them up separately, but then when you wasted your Hope point (which will happen more often than not) that will be staring you in the face, too.)
- The general mechanic in the game for increasing/decreasing difficulty is to add or subtract dice from the dice pool. So Hope is now just yet another mechanic that does the same thing.
Of course, as expected, because Hope now has a greatly reduced effect, it is also dramatically easier to restore your Hope points, so that you can spend it much more frequently. Basically you can spend as many points as your Heart rating per adventure, and never start an adventure with less than a full Hope tank. (Plus a little more slack due to Fellowship pool.)
I’m actually ok with this. While I always liked the scarcity of Hope, I’ll agree that maybe it went too far.
However, there’s collateral damage. My prediction a few months ago was that because of this change, savvy players would rarely spend Hope on dice pools, and instead would save them for the cool, powerful effects that some Virtues and Rewards have. Scanning through the 2.0 PDF, it seems that the designers have countered this by removing those alternate uses of Hope. I found only two cultures that each have a Virtue that let you turn certain successes into a “magical result”. (Which, I will point out, is an “after the fact” expenditure of Hope that some posters seem to think is “immersion-breaking”.) Instead, there are lots of virtues that increase your Hope pool, further cheapening it.
That’s too bad. I liked that there were multiple, flavorful ways to spend Hope, other than just turning failed dice rolls into successes.
I did find one other use for Hope: if you want to assist a companion in a skill test, you can spend Hope to give them a bonus die. Not only is this the same uninspiring small-increase-to-odds as the base use, but it further reinforces the idea that Hope is just a generic mechanic. Why do you need to invoke “Hope”, one of the great themes of Middle Earth, in order to give a companion some advice, or lend a hand?
So Hope has gone from being a unique(ish), highly differentiating game mechanic to yet another relatively flavorless, expendable, easily-replenished resource, similar to what many RPGs have. Sort of like 5e's Inspiration.
D&D 5e’s “Inspiration” mechanic works, per RAW, similar to Hope: before rolling your d20, you can declare that you are going to spend Inspiration, and roll with advantage. Replenishment works a little differently, but if you put your mind to it it’s fairly easy to get. Easier than Hope via the new rules, anyway.
But my experience is that even though Inspiration is cheap, most players keep saving it for something more important than the current roll, and they eventually forget they have it. A frequent criticism of 5e is that nobody uses Inspiration, and I think this is a large part of the reason why.
(Not that Advantage itself is highly popular in D&D, but only when you don’t have to spend a resource to use it. Players love getting advantage situationally, and will go to great lengths to get it as often as possible….as long as it’s free.)
When Inspiration starts to get used is when you houserule that you can spend it after the roll. People start suddenly remembering...right after a failed roll...that they have the Inspiration box checked on their sheet. And when they realize that, they start using the rules (playing on your Flaws, Bonds, etc.) in order to get it.
It’s the same with abilities such as the Lucky feat, Bardic inspiration dice, and the ever-wonderful Portent: all of them are finite resources, but all get used after the roll, and all are highly popular and rarely forgotten.
It's worth observing that there's a trend in 3rd party 5e products to create additional uses for Inspiration. E.g., spend your Inspiration not to gain Advantage, but to trigger a class ability. The exact opposite direction 2.0 is headed. (And, ironically, in one case I know of those exact mechanics were designed by somebody now at Free League.)
So my takeaway is that when you have a mechanic that:
1. Can improve the odds of a dice roll
2. Is declared before the dice roll
3. Costs a resource
...players don’t use it.
But, when it's used after the roll, or it can be spent on other cool abilities, they do use it.
Anyway, that’s the end of my rant. I’m assuming I’m just beating my head against a wall, and nothing will change for release, so I’ll probably just have to houserule it. I’ll either just change it to after-the-roll, but otherwise leave it un-changed, or maybe change it so that instead of adding one or two dice you re-roll them. Some things I like about that option are:
1. You can still fail, even if you only missed by one
2. It's a different mechanic, not used anywhere else in TOR
3. It's evocative of "changing fate", moreso than adding dice.
However, while I will likely houserule away the Hope cost for assisting companions, I will probably not houserule alternate uses for Hope in Virtues and Rewards (and Enchantment Rewards on famous arms and armor)...doing so would require more changes than I want to make...and that absence makes me a bit of a sad panda.