Glorelendil wrote:Effectively the same as what I said, with different wording.
Sorry then, I focused on the second part of your statement about the rule being counterintuitive. You actually got it right in your comment, so again sorry I didn’t notice it in the first place!
Glorelendil wrote:I believe you misunderstood what I was claiming. Under RAW, if a Hobbit and a Beorning have the same Athletics skill, both favoured, then they will have equivalent results when they do not invoke attributes with Hope, and the Beorning will do much better when they do. Under the proposed rule it is possible for the Hobbit to perform significantly better than the character who has a base Body higher than his own favoured Body, on a favoured skill, whenever Hope is not spent. That is a rather large change, which I find conceptually odd. I'm not saying it's wrong or broken, just odd.
I get your point. What I’m saying is that my rule is conceptually no different from a situation where the Hobbit has a
higher skill rank than the Beorning. In this case, the Hobbit put more AP in Athletics; with my rule, he put more Favoured points in Body. The game effects are the same (i.e. higher average results for the Hobbit), and in both cases it doesn’t mean that a more skilled Hobbit is actually more powerful than a less skilled Beorning. And by the way, it’s entirely possible by the RAW to have a Hobbit with Favoured Body 7 and a Beorning with Favoured Body 6: can you imagine that Hobbit being actually stronger in a brawl against the Beorning? In the RAW as in this home rule, I think that the Favoured score is something different from sheer power in that attribute, being instead a kind of generic, better aptitude, both in terms of innate characteristics and training.
I can't argue with you here because I don't have access to your data sets. I've only seen a couple dozen characters that were actually used by other players, which is only a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction of what I would need to make a general statement about what Min-maxers were doing. And even of those few dozen, I honestly don't remember how they were allocating favoured bonuses and skills.
But I just now went and looked at a handful of those characters, in two online games I am in, and did not see evidence of the pattern you suggest. For example, our Beorning has Body 6(2) and only two of his four favoured skills under Body.
First of all, you’re just mentioning a Beorning in your example, who doesn’t benefit from Favoured Attributes in anything else than skills: he would just need 2 other Favoured skills based on Wits to have a 50/50 choice of where to put those 3 Favoured points, and he will probably choose Wits to offset the lower basic score (as you say below), if he didn’t also choose the Favoured Great Spear weapon skill set.
But are you really telling me that you are not seeing any pattern among Woodmen and Hobbits (gravitating towards Favoured Wits), Dwarves (towards Favoured Heart, and to a lesser extent Body), and Bardings (towards Favoured Body)? Because that’s not in my experience.
Wouldn’t it be better to break those patterns thanks to an increased role of Favoured skills in a character’s performance? Because in my experience, the skills and the choice of which skill should be made Favoured are almost
never a driving factor for players. In fact, the main symptom of this is that the
Expertise and
Gifted Masteries are practically ignored during character development. Is this in your experience too, or am I wrong here?
Glorelendil wrote:I am guessing the absence of clustering is because for a variety of cultures and builds, there are other possible optimizations that compete with, or eclipse, the value of a an additional +1 or +2 when invoking Hope. In general, I don't think getting that extra +1 or +2, beyond the base attribute, is a very compelling optimization. I would much rather, for example, make my skills with low rank favoured, to maximize the benefit of AP savings, and put my highest favoured attribute bonus on my lowest attribute, which is most likely to need a boost when invoking Hope.
And, given your reason for creating this rule, i.e. "some choices made during character creation seem to have a low impact on gameplay", I suspect you agree with that assessment.
I do agree with your assessment, but we’re going away from the central point. The point is that a +1 or +2 when invoking Hope is EITHER eclipsed from other possible optimizations as you say, OR it is eclipsed by the AP saving, which is perceived as way more important when choosing which skill should be made favoured. Isn't it?
The absence of clustering is mostly seen among those cultures who don’t benefit directly from Favoured Attributes thanks to passive, permanent buffs (Elves, Beornings, Men of the Lake, Bardings who don’t specialize in archery). Do you agree with that?
You said that yourself: you’re choosing the Favoured skills principally because of the AP saving, not because you chose a higher related Favoured Attribute. When direct benefits like
Woodcrafty don’t come into play, does it really matter to have a +1, +2 or +3? Probably not or at least very marginally, and that’s why
Gifted and
Expertise are so ignored. It’s the AP saving the driving factor, NOT the Favoured Attribute score. This is my point.
This is true also in your example below:
Glorelendil wrote:I'm not 100% certain what you mean by "suit", but I believe there is at least a conflict, and maybe a contradiction, between mechanics and narrative. Let me give you an illustration of my concern:
Let's say I'm designing a character, and I want him to be "good" at Awe, Travel, Athletics, and Stealth. Just because that's the concept I have. So I make those my favoured skills.
Now it comes time to allocate the +1, +2, and +3 attribute bonuses. The little min-maxing demon inside of me is going to say, "Give +3 to Body so that you get the biggest bonus on two skills!"
Then, once I do that, the little demon is going to say, "Why is Stealth favoured? You only get a passive +1. You should make another Body skill favoured! Or at least a Heart skill, which gets +2..."
So as far as I can tell, this rule...precisely because it achieves your goal of making this detail of character creation so much more mechanically important...actually makes it harder to focus on the narrative elements of character creation.
So you’re basically saying that by the RAW you’re more free to choose Stealth because the +1 when invoking Hope doesn’t really matter during gameplay, which is something we agree on.
I’ll tell you more: you’ll choose favoured Stealth also because of the AP saving, but does this affect the distribution of your Favoured Attribute scores? No, it doesn’t!
To make things clear, let’s analyse your example both with the RAW and with my rule:
1)
RAW: you’ll probably still choose Stealth as favoured, because that’s your character concept AND because you’ll save AP when you’ll raise it. What about the favoured Attributes? Well, let’s say that no other advantages are involved. The optimized solution would be having Body at +3, especially if you also have a Favoured weapon. Any other solution is less than optimal, you have to agree on that. So what prevents your min-max demon from suggesting you to make another Body skill favoured, then? But the point is another. You might be driven by a mechanical advantage, but if you WANT to be good in Stealth besides the AP saving, your choices will gravitate towards Favoured Stealth and a high favoured Wits, regardless if it is convenient or not.
2)
HOUSE RULE: is it really harder to focus on narrative elements? What if I prefer to have a passive +2 to two Body-related skills, and a passive +3 to Stealth
just because I want to be damn good in Stealth? Am I really driven away from my original character concept just because now my Favoured scores matter more? It’s difficult to say if anything changes, from the RAW. It’s definitely less than optimal to have a passive +3 to Stealth and +2 to both Awe and Athletics instead of the vice-versa,
just as in the RAW… but do you care? More specifically, do you care more than how much you care in the RAW? I don’t think so. What DOES actually change, is how you
perceive your choice in the gameplay. You choice matters because it comes up in every roll, exactly like when you decide to put an extra point in a skill and from now on you throw one extra dice in that skill.
This is true also in response to what the
Rocmistro says:
Rocmistro wrote:I do think there is also an interesting point to be made about current favored skills; basically that it makes sense to select favored skills that are low starting values in order to optimize your 10 previous XP and make good use of the favored spending schema for future APs. As someone noted, selecting a favored skill (or selecting a background package with a high-set favored skill) is very wasteful. You generally don't need to invoke favored bonuses for skills with 3 ranks, and they are often the lowest priority in terms of AP expenditures. I'm not yet quite sure how this house rule would affect that.
I can give you a preliminary answer on that. I think that we very much agree on the fact that by the RAW a favoured skill with 3 or more ranks is highly wasted: you missed 3 steps of AP savings, and you'll generally miss by lesser values the roll TN, so those +1 to +3 bonus is way less relevant.
What about the house rule? Well, except from the AP saving (given that you'll remove the cheaper cost using the house rule), the same considerations can be made BUT to a much lower extent. Do we agree on the fact that a
3D+3 roll (house-rule) is still something worth consideration, if compared to a
3D roll (RAW) that only benefits from that +3 on a Hope expenditure and that didn't benefit from three steps of cheaper upgrade costs?
From this perspective, the house rule would actually let players focus MORE on the narrative elements of character creation than the RAW! Because by the RAW you'll have almost no doubt about choosing that rank 0 skill over the other 3 ranks skill as favoured. With the house rule, favoured means an outright +3 bonus to the chosen skill: would it be better on the 0 ranks skill or on the 3 ranks skill? I don't think the answer is as obvious as in the RAW.
And finally, do we agree on the fact that
Gifted and
Expertise can be now an interesting character development choice? If yes, that would be a system improvement, in my opinion.
