birthright virtues

[Stormcrow]

Hands up all those who've played a 70-year campaign!

[Rich H]

Aim high, darling, aim high!

It's an intent in the design of the game for it to be multi-generational and I certainly plan to play it as such like I have in Pendragon (which TOR shares many ideas and elements with) provided the system holds up.

Just because it hasn't played out fully yet doesn't mean it won't happen and therefore things like this part of the Birthright virtue are likely to be an issue for such campaigns. It's always worth looking at mechanical elements of a game with an eye on how they will play out over the course of said game's play life and not just immediate/short term play.

[zedturtle]

I wonder if forgetting about the Standing loss and just playing by the 'wrong' reading (i.e. you get one "get out of death" card; you can pass the card along to your heir, but if you play the card you have to give up and therefore can't pass it on to your heir) is sufficiently balanced to stand on its own.

That, or a penalty to Standing. As Rich highlights, in my games at least, Standing is pretty much a theoretical score, it's too hard to raise it by the way I run the game. Handing out more Treasure does not seem like a good solution to me... I like doctheweasel's suggestion from my 'XP for Standing' thread*:

Standing could work off of a different economy than Treasure, but throwing it into the XP economy isn't the answer.

I'd suggest using "Renown Points." You get them when you earn XP, and spend them exclusively to raise Standing (Treasure can be converted to Renown Points at 1:1). Maybe have the baseline earned equal to XP, then adjust up or down say 2–5 points based if the character's deeds.

The math works out here, since it takes 252 points to get to Standing 6, which is a lot of adventuring.

*(which incidentally has the analysis of the Treasure available in Tales, run-as-written)

[Beran]

Hands up all those who've played a 70-year campaign!

I'm in the process of running a 30 year campaign.

[Rich H]

Hands up all those who've played a 70-year campaign!

I'm in the process of running a 30 year campaign.

... I really want to be able to run a campaign all the way to the War of the Ring.

[Glorelendil]

... I really want to be able to run a campaign all the way to the War of the Ring.

What a coincidence...I want to play in a campaign like that.

Honestly, though, even if a Barding character passed Birthright on to his son, his grandson, and his great-grandson during that campaign, and all four of them used a Get Out of Death free card...big deal? Like I said before, it's highly probable that each of them would die to a lucky Eye roll by an opponent, not to dragon fire or morgul blades, so it's hardly narrative-breaking to let them press their iWin buttons once each.

By parade of horribles I was referring to the rhetorical device. Sure, I guess it's possible that the circumstances would result in something "contrived, silly, and at odds with the themes of the campaign", but hardly (I think) likely.

I could be wrong. There's a first time for everything.

[Beran]

I'm assuming that C7 will be releasing something that tail ends DoM that advances the story up to the War of the Ring some where in the near future.

[Rich H]

Honestly, though, even if a Barding character passed Birthright on to his son, his grandson, and his great-grandson during that campaign, and all four of them used a Get Out of Death free card...big deal? Like I said before, it's highly probable that each of them would die to a lucky Eye roll by an opponent, not to dragon fire or morgul blades, so it's hardly narrative-breaking to let them press their iWin buttons once each

The 'I win' button isn't really the issue for me - it's what happens to their Standing and their Homeland presuming they're dead and that being repeated each time it happens. The conversation has evolved since that first post I made and I've talked about the Standing issue a lot more.

It's been interesting to think about it as my players haven't looked at this Virtue yet so I've never really theorised as to how it'd work in practise until now.

[Rich H]

I'm assuming that C7 will be releasing something that tail ends DoM that advances the story up to the War of the Ring some where in the near future.

One big epic journey of supplements leading up to the War of the Ring - a massive campaign boxed set with numerous books within it, each describing a certain region and the impact of the war in those regions.

[Rich H]

I wonder if forgetting about the Standing loss and just playing by the 'wrong' reading (i.e. you get one "get out of death" card; you can pass the card along to your heir, but if you play the card you have to give up and therefore can't pass it on to your heir) is sufficiently balanced to stand on its own.

Yeah, that's where I got to a few posts ago. Just drop the Standing loss and the 'whiff factor' goes away.