If you roll a great success you add your damage rating. If it's a favored skill, do you add your favored body? I've assumed yes, but thought I'd check here.

-Jeff

I am pretty sure it base Body for Damage as with all secondary stats like this. If you spend Hope on the attack, you add Favoured Body if it's a Favoured Skill.

I thought it was pretty clear that your Damage rating is based on your base Body attribute. There are Virtues that allow you to use your favored rating if I remember correctly.

Body is the least useful of the three Attributes; it is also the least useful attribute to favor.

Generally speaking, a character who's the sort of person to have a Favored Body +3 is precisely the sort of person who cannot afford to spend Hope on a regular basis.

There are exceptions, of course; A Barding Archer is obvious, but there are others. We've got a Singing Hobbit in our group with a Body of 2, but favored +3 specifically so he can spend a point of Hope to turn a failed Open Stance Song roll into a success (since he's going to lose the hope point if he fails anyway).

Thanks all, I ran it per the rules.
 
Bob, I generally agree with you, but I don’t get much playtime so I’m letting the rules sink-in first before I make changes.  But let me play devil’s advocate here for a second.
 
A generic goblin soldier may have an endurance of 12.  If your weapon does 7 damage, then a body of 5 is a kill a on a great success.  With 3 dice, I think that makes 50% of your hits one-shot kills vs 2 shot kills.  That can make a big difference in combat, I think.
 
-Jeff

Yes, you are 100% correct.

What you are missing, however, is that, fundamentally, damage doesn't matter. Yes, high Body means killing a Rank 4 anything in one hit instead of two, and killing a Rank 5 in two hits instead of three. But against the actually dangerous monsters, like trolls and big Uruks and worse, damage really doesn't matter, because either

1) they've got the annoying "two wounds or wound plus zero endurance" trait that means a wound won't kill them straight up (and damage will never kill them), or

2) they don't have that trait but still have a bucketfull of endurance, meaning that a Piercing Blow will end the fight much quicker than extra damage. (Admittedly, I don't know how common this type is; I've maybe encountered one of these, and he had like 80+ endurance, a Parry over 20, and was rolling something like 4d+7 on his protection test - we decided to abort that fight)

In either case, a Piercing Blow is usually the way to win, and Body doesn't help with that. This is why most of the Culture-specific Valor rewards just aren't that good, because the generic Keen and Fell Rewards are more useful. The exceptions to this are rewards like King's Blade, which give improved odds of getting a Piercing Blow.

I guess it depends how you play. In the last game I ran the players tagged along with a group of Dwarves to knockout a group of goblins who stole some dwarven gear. The trip was ~60 miles from laketown, so one fatigue roll each, and then they fought a bunch of goblins, with one unlucky player wounded and all of them except the hobbit getting hit to some degree. After that, they ran from some spiders and sealed a cave, avoiding the spider fight altogether.

From reading your posts, you are travelling the length and breadth of the map, fighting trolls and uruks. It's a very different sort of campaign, making it hard to compare experience.

That said, I think you are mathematically undervaluing damage over time for a high-body character with a skill of 4+, but I'll wait until I experience that myself.

-Jeff

I haven't experienced the damage over time from a high Body character with a weapon skill of 4+, either. We're about ten sessions in at this point (trying to play once a week since August) and the closest anyone is to Weapon Skill 4 is 2 out of 10 XP in the bank (technically, someone could have bought it by now, but Wisdom 3 is so much more important that the possibility is almost not worth mentioning).

That's sort of my point. If Body doesn't really even start to contribute until a character has been played for, at minimum, 15 sessions or so, then there is a fundamental problem with the attribute.

Anyway, that's why there's a great big 5 page topic on exactly this. The general consensus is
1) Make Endurance be either +Heart or +Body, whichever is higher
and
2) Allow for either Travel or Athletics to be used on Fatigue tests.

Some people think this is too much, others think this is not enough, but most seem to think this more or less covers the attribute.

Have to disagree. The above statement is predicated upon your opinions surrounding The acquisition of Shadow and your view that Flaws acquired from permanent Shadow points are the worst thing that can happen to your character.

In fact, those two opinions have driven much of your analysis of the mechanical aspects of the game.

While we can argue those two opinions ad nauseum, if we remove them from consideration, then Wisdom is no more valuable than a weapon skill, the interaction skills, and the Travel skill (all corresponding to primary skills used in Combat, Journeys, and Encounters).