Fellowship points vs. Personal Hope usage

[Streicher]

Hi all,

we are playing regular game rounds with 4 characters, including a Beorning and a Hobbit. That means the fellowship point pool is 6. We have encounters every session, and battles and journeys every other session. In our ca. 3,5 hours per session with ca. 5-8 dice rolls per player (if not in a battle), people very seldomly have to use their personal Hope. The fellowship pool is almost always sufficient for critical tasks. So the whole shadow point system is far from triggering in our round ...

How do you force/encourage the players to use their personal Hope? Have them do more rolls?

Cheers,


Streicher

[Stormcrow]

Sounds like your adventures are too easy. Try making the challenges more difficult.

[Streicher]

PS: I should add: The fellowship pool is 6 because the Beorning has "Twice-baked honey cakes" with him (and of course: due to the Hobbit's culture bonus).

Making the adventures more difficult could be an option, but on average, I already tend to set difficulties at 16 ... It's a beginners' round, just starting "Darkening" after 3 easy adventures.
Do you just ask players for more rolls per session?

Cheers,


Streicher

[Falenthal]

I consider that 5-8 rolls per character/session are maybe too little, but I must admit I haven't counted how much my players roll.

For the rest, it is true that a Hobbit and Twice-Baked Cakes together in a group allow for some unbalance.
If your usual TN is already 16, I think that only in Battles can you add a few more adversaries so that the players need to spend Hope points to get out alive. Travels already have the TN set depending on the terrain, and if your using the published adventures, Encounters also have most of the TNs set.

[Falenthal]

Besides, you might try once in a while (once per session, for example) to put your players in a situation of extreme danger or importance that needs a very high TN to succeed (TN20). If they manage to roll high enough, then they'll have a story to tell during the next Fellowship Phase. If not, a Hope point should be needed.

Sometimes you could tie it to the combats, for instance:
Trying to rescue a captive from the webs of some sleeping giant spiders can be very difficult (TN20). If the stealthy character doesn't succeed (or doesn't spend Hope points), then a big group of spiders attack the company, probably needing everyone to spend a few Hope points to survive and rescue the captive.

Besides, you said you've only played 3 introductory sessions. I don't think that should be enough to begin triggering Bouts of Madness. I think that after 3 adventures my group was only 0 to 2 points below their starting Hope. Still far from their Shadow score, which was probably 0 to 2 (the Marsh Bell has lots of Corruption tests for a beginner's adventure!).

[Rich H]

Something doesn't seem right here, does it, but like others have said it's difficult to offer advice as we know we don't have all the information to hand.

A few things to consider:

1) You have starting characters here so Common Skills are going to be low and therefore with a skill of 2 on a test with TN of 14, you're going to be rolling 12 or 13 (on average) so will therefore need to spend Hope to pass such tests.

If you're setting TNs at 16 (not sure why you've decided this) then that is going to be even more the case, although by raising it too high then that may mean the test would fail whether a character spent Hope or not; the TN of 14 is deliberate in that it's very close to a character passing the test with a skill of 2 on an average set of rolls. It tempts the player into spending Hope to meet the TN as they'll just be 1 or 2 points short on average. Raising it to 16 and that becomes 3 or 4 points short which may mean with below average rolls in many cases such a TN is impossible to meet even when spending Hope so players don't bother, which means that they wouldn't be spending Hope on TN 16 tests whereas with the RAW (TN of 14) they probably would be. I'm not sure this would be the case though as Attribute bonuses do range up to quite high scores - but not sure what your PCs' ones are.

Anyway, even at just 8 rolls per character per session, players with characters in such a situation should be chewing through the Fellowship Pool and dipping into their own Hope pools.

2) The above doesn't take into account combat so when this occurs (every other session) your players are rolling even more and that's going to impact personal Hope as well as the Fellowship Pool.

3) Going back to them being starting characters, their Valour and Wisdom scores are going to be rated at 1 or 2. Either way, with a Wisdom score of 1 or 2 then Corruption tests are going to need Hope spending on them to avoid gaining Shadow as more often than not they will fail without it. That will quickly eat into the Fellowship and personal Hope pools.

Like I said though, from your initial post I'm not spotting anything that you're doing wrong* so it's strange that you're having these issues when other groups haven't.

* The only thing you've stated that doesn't seem quite right is the number of rolls being between 5 and 8 for each player in sessions of 3.5 hours in length. That does seem on the low side (even when not including combat) when taking into consideration journey tests, encounters, and general skill tests. I'd think for a 3.5 hour session it should be around 10 to 16 rolls but I admit that is pure guesswork as I've never had cause to record just how many rolls my players are making.

[Stormcrow]

* The only thing you've stated that doesn't seem quite right is the number of rolls being between 5 and 8 for each player in sessions of 3.5 hours in length. That does seem on the low side (even when not including combat) when taking into consideration journey tests, encounters, and general skill tests.

I don't like to judge how many times players should roll dice in a game. Different groups consider different actions worthy of rolls; what works for my game may not work for yours. Rather than adjust the number of rolls, it's the difficulty of the rolls that should be changed. Roll when you feel it's appropriate, but make sure you're actually challenging the players.

Also remember that the game distinguishes between tests and tasks. By far most rolls should be tasks, where the player, not the Loremaster, initiates an action. If the players aren't choosing to perform many tasks, or if all their tasks turn out to be automatic actions, that's how you can tell they're not being sufficiently challenged. Try to get them to want to risk their necks.

[Glorelendil]

You could consider some optional goals that are more likely to require Hope expenditure. Evade the rampaging troll? Doable without hope. Evade the rampaging troll and collect that artefact? Much harder.

[Streicher]

Hi all,

thanks for your feedback already!

The characters have 3 valour + 3 wisdom average, so they are not complete newbies. Our gameplay is pretty narrative, I ask for rolls only in situations where the outcome really has an impact. Some standard actions are also solved via traits only. We just had two sessions with no combat, but various encounters (the folk-moot at Rhosgobel). At the end of each session, the players still had 1-2 points left in the fellowship pool. We had some extraordinary rolls, and also situations where the characters were fine with a fail. In the latter cases, I reminded them of the chance to get more information/impact by using hope, but if they don't want to, it's fine.

I have the impression that only combat really draws a more significant amount of hope. Maybe I should also make the encounters more dramatic ... And as you suggested: Developing special challenges that can only be solved by using hope also seem to be a good idea.

Thanks again,


Streicher

[Rich H]

I don't like to judge how many times players should roll dice in a game.

It's why I was careful in stating that the number of rolls in a session didn't "seem quite right" rather than saying it was objectively wrong.

By far most rolls should be tasks, where the player, not the Loremaster, initiates an action.

That's not my experience, but game groups do vary in their style of play; I don't like to dictate how LMs and their players should run their games. The rules work for both types of play in this regard - those where players request tasks and ones by LM driven tests.