Some advice on the Noble Armour

[Woodclaw]

Last week, while working on an adventure I realised the gamebreaking potential of the Noble Armor, while on paper it doesn't seem like much, all my testers noted that as RAW it's one of the most effective rewards in the game. Adding +3 to the Tollerance of an encounter makes extremely unlikely for the PC to every fail an Encounter, at least against normal TNs.

Am I the only one who noticed this?
Did anyone else tried to rebalance this reward?

[Deadmanwalking]

Eh. Everyone having a social skill at 3 and a total Encounter Tolerance of 4 or so mostly ensures that anyway, and is gonna happen pretty rapidly in the grand scheme of things.

In short, in most games it's almost entirely overkill and wasted effort pretty quickly.

[Glorelendil]

I agree it's extremely powerful for new characters. Borderline OP. For more experienced characters it is most effective in three edge cases:
1) The heroes have a bunch of minuses to Tolerance, resulting in a low unmodified score.
2) In some of the official adventures there are really great benefits to getting 7+ successes in the Encounter.
3) Plain old bad luck with the dice.

[zedturtle]

I agree it is extremely powerful, although it is somewhat balanced by the Encumbrance requirement. But given that we have regular complaints on how tough Encounters are, I'm not super worried by it.

Though Beornings are super great at Encounters (massive Insight and Noble Armour) and Journeys (TBHC, 'nuff said). And no slouches at combat, either.

But Hobbits have some great stuff, and so do Woodmen. So I think it balances out, even if it's not balanced (if that makes sense).

[Angelalex242]

High Elves can clean house in encounters too, once you stack Skill of the Eldar and Beauty of the Stars. Rack up 3 successes on every G Rune regardless of other circumstances, and it's more if actual T runes are rolled.