I've been getting a bit hacked off with augments recently. They're too damned fiddly. You've got the never-ending arithmetic as the players narrate what they do, adds all the bits up and come up with a number. I don't want to stop them using augments - if it's on your character sheet you want to use the damned thing as a player. You've extracted those 13 abilities from your narrative, you want to see them make a difference.
I'm having three problems:
What to do? I had no idea until a weekend or two back when "Spirit of the Century" flopped onto my hard disk. This is a pulp game and uses the FATE system (do a search for "Evil Hat" and FATE and you'll find the publishers).
SoTC uses a concept of Aspects. Aspects represent any facet of a character or the environments that is important enough to mention. (Not quite, but that description is useful enough in this context.) There are a variety of ways you can use aspects, but essentially you spend a FATE point, narrate how the aspect affects the situation and get a whopping bonus (again, simplified) to your conflict resolution roll. Repeat on both sides of the conflict until both sides run out of FATE points and are ready to roll the dice.
Suddenly it dawned on me... Could this work with HQ? Bin our current augmentathon and only use a single ability in a contest. If the player wants to augment their character's chance, he or she narrates what other ability they're using, spends a Hero Point and, wait for it, adds the entire score in the augmenting ability to their ability score for that roll/the rest of the conflict (delete where applicable - I don't know which yet).
This means equipment becomes really useful. Instead of a piddly +3 you're sword is worth +30 - if you want to narrate why it's worth +30 and blow the Hero Point.
Likewise we could adapt the rules for "compelling" other characters abilities. You give them a Hero Point and they give you a bonus for the ability you're exploiting. You reckon that Golden Tongue merchant is a bit of a tightwad? Well, spend a Hero Point and get a (big) bonus based on him being a miser.
It also means that if you're using something like Mike's currency based system and you've "inflicted" a new ability on someone, you know about it and can "compel" it straight away in a new contest/next roll, exploiting the opening.
There's also "tagging" - where you can use environmental effects along the same lines, but I'll see how well the other ideas float before going too bonkers.
Anyway, is this a complete non-starter or is there some milage in this?
We'd have to consider "the Hero Point economy" - spending them suddenly gets a lot more frequent. Also is adding the full oomph of the ability the right thing to do?
I could witter on for hours but I'll stop now to go and have a cogitate.
Cheers,
Ash
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