Understanding Advancement Points and Traits

[Glorelendil]

It occurred to me the other day that I struggled for a while to understand how traits interact with advancement points, but that somewhere along the line the mystery disappeared and now it feels obvious. Since this question seems to come up over and over again, I thought I'd try to write yet-another-explanation for anybody...new players or old...who still wonders if they have it right. (Of course I'm was horrendously embarrassed for getting this wrong...)

So, traits....

"Invoking" a trait means "narrate how your trait influenced the outcome of the test." Tell a story that includes your trait. Your LM may allow you to just say, "I invoke Anduin-lore" but you're missing an opportunity to make the game richer if you do that. Tell a story. Really.

Traits interact with AP in two ways:

BEFORE ROLLING: You can auto-succeed at the test/task if you narrate it using your trait, but you can't get any AP when you do this. Also note that LMs have the final say on whether auto-success is possible. E.g., somebody with Elusive might not be allowed to sneak up on a Nazgul, and somebody with Hardy can't simply skip every Fatigue check. Elusive doesn't mean invisible, and Hardy doesn't mean superhuman.

AFTER ROLLING: If you succeed with your roll, you can potentially invoke a trait to upgrade a success for a higher AP. That is, you can invoke a trait on a normal (no tengwars) success to describe how you succeeded in an "out of the ordinary way" to get a 2nd AP, or if you did get a great/extraordinary success you can narrate your "exceptional" success due to a trait in order to get a 3rd AP. (In other words, second AP is tengwar or trait, third AP is tengwar and trait.)

Finally, some of us houserule that the first AP can be earned for invoking a trait on a failure with an Eye. The rationale is that you learn from your mistakes, but it also helps new characters that might have low skills in some categories. And it's fun to narrate epic failure.

P.S. As Roc points out below:

It's just my opinion but I think Loremasters should take the focus off of rolling Tengwars for AP generation and tie it more to narrative and trait usage. If a normal success greatly affects a scene and a player is able to tie it back to his character well, I see no harm in granting him a 3rd ap for it.

I also completely agree with this, and although not perfectly RAW it is very much in the spirit of the prose. A normal success that saves the day against long odds should count as "exceptional".

[Rocmistro]

Elf, not to mince, but that AP award progression is actually not entirely correct (I'm assuming we are talking about RAW, here, right?)

1st AP: any common skill success in the category.
2nd AP: "something out of the ordinary*" OR player can reinforce success by pertinent Trait.
3rd AP: "something exceptional was accomplished**" AND the player can reinforce the success by pertinent Trait.

* "Out of the ordinary". I think the the trap we all fall into (especially those of us who are playing over Post or remotely) is that "out of the ordinary" is defined as Great Success. That's certainly one way to interpret it (and the accompanying text in the rulebook certainly supports it, but I don't think it has to be the only way to interpret it. In general though, rather than engage in extensive debate about what constitutes "out of the ordinary", most people read that as shorthand for "achieve a great or extraordinary success". This is too bad as it reduces the narrative possibility to a simple die roll. For those of us who do a lot of play by post I think this is a necessary evil, as I would prefer not to waste precious time on discussing that.

** "Something exceptional was accomplished". As above, with the added requirements of the trait invocation, and with the added constraint that this means ONLY an extraordinary success.

Elf, your breakdown of how the AP's are generated seems to be a common shorthand that is developing as to how AP's are awarded. I'm not criticizing you for it, as the paradigm seems to easily take root in the brain (I know it did for me, too; 1st ap = common, 2nd ap = great, 3rd ap = extraordinary.) But, fortunately or unfortuantely, that is wrong, and in fact it has as much to do with invoking traits as it does with rolling Tengwars.

It's just my opinion but I think Loremasters should take the focus off of rolling Tengwars for AP generation and tie it more to narrative and trait usage. If a normal success greatly affects a scene and a player is able to tie it back to his character well, I see no harm in granting him a 3rd ap for it.

It's just a guess but I imagine the {# of tengwars = # of AP} formula has as much to do with making the claims defensible so that arguments don't erupt at the table "Why did Mike get a 3rd AP on his personality category with a single success and i didn't!??!?!" I won't pretend that's always an easy conversation, hopefully each group can just roll with LM decision and not resort to that kind of thing, but I suspect it's a big part of why the simpler, more mechanical, easily definable method of AP generation has started to take root.

[Rocmistro]

Oh also, I wanted to comment, traits can be invoked in 3 ways:

1. As an autosuccess. To succeed on a common skill roll.
2. As an interrupt. To allow your character to attempt something (usually adjudicated by a common skill roll), when the Loremaster would have normally not even allowed it, or has already skipped past a narrative event.*
3. To claim a 2nd or 3rd Advancement Point (other conditions having been met).

I'm not sure what you mean below about "upgrading the AP by one slot"

* This is an important trait use method to discuss because i don't think it gets used enough (at least not in the games that I have seen).

[Glorelendil]

Hrmmm....see it's a good thing I posted this because I'm still getting it wrong. I just re-read the rules AGAIN and zed is right: it's not RAW. (Although I see "out of the ordinary" to be more explicitly connected to the tengwars than I think zed does.) The 2nd point is supposed to be great/extraordinary success OR trait invocation, and the 3rd point is great/extraordinary success AND trait invocation.

I think every game I'm involved in is doing things slightly differently.

(And Roc is also right that there's a third reason to invoke traits, although that shouldn't effect how AP are rewarded.)

Updating my post.

EDIT: I think the only error I made was thinking that an extraordinary success counted as "exceptional" by itself in terms of earning a 3rd AP. I fixed it. And some other bits of language.

[Rocmistro]

The more I think about it, though, Elf, the more I like the failure as a way of generating AP's.

AP 1: Any successful common skill usage.
AP 2: A common skill failure that was not because of an Eye of Sauron (I would rule that EoS represents a failure to learn from one's mistake, whether because of frustration, anger, or self-doubt).
AP 3: A great or extraordinary sucess and where one can tag a trait to reinforce it.

Reasons for it are thus:

AP 1: Encourages a player to use any skill that he has at least a single rank in, as he can always hit TN: 14 with a little luck and a hope point for a boost if necessary.
AP 2: Actually encourages a player to look for ways to use skills that he has 0-1 ranks.
AP 3: Encourages players to use their "signature skills" (ie, 3+ ranks in it) at dramatically important moments. (These are the "form blazing sword" moments).

Also, just wondering if anyone thinks that standard Travel rolls during the journey phase should be off the table for generating AP? It seems kind of a hack to do that, but it also seems like the Travel skill gets a LOT of action due to the nature of the game.

[Glorelendil]

(I would rule that EoS represents a failure to learn from one's mistake, whether because of frustration, anger, or self-doubt).

Hrmm...I see the logic, but my worry is that it then makes AP too cheap because you can potentially get them on any success or any failure. By restricting it to Eyes ("out-of-the-ordinary failure") it becomes possible but uncommon.

[zedturtle]

Yeah, but Rocco's suggestion makes it only one of three AP in a category earned that way and encourages "off competency" skill use... I think it's worth consideration.

[Rocmistro]

Well to be fair, I would only allow the 2nd AP a non-Sauron failure.

You're saying that ONLY on Sauron failures would the 2nd AP get awarded? That makes them pretty tough to come by...

[Majestic]

Elf, not a big deal, but hat was Rocmistro, rather than zedturtle.

Also, just wondering if anyone thinks that standard Travel rolls during the journey phase should be off the table for generating AP? It seems kind of a hack to do that, but it also seems like the Travel skill gets a LOT of action due to the nature of the game.

As far as this go, I most definitely plan on incorporating Travel rolls. In fact, just last session, one of my players pointed out the possibility of gaining APs as a counter to a complaint a couple of my other players had: that they didn't care much for the Journey rules, as there wasn't really anything positive that could be gained during that part of the game. I tried to point out that there was rarely a 'positive' from combat, either, but I suppose one could argue that one can accomplish goals (say, rescuing somebody), earn APs, gain notoriety, and find treasure all as a result of battle. Travel, on the other hand, just ends up being something you try to survive. But one of my players pointed out - with our renewed focus on Advancement Points last session - that travelling now had something positive that could be gained: the earning of APs.

[Glorelendil]

I like getting AP for Travel checks. If it's an Adventure Phase that's light on AP opportunities then at least the Travel rolls provide some AP, and if it's a long Adventure Phase with tons of AP then it doesn't have much impact.

In other words, players need at least one high-probability source of AP, and even in the most extreme case Travel can provide at most 3 out of 18.