>From: "Mandacaru" <samclau_at_...>
>
>p.s. This is why I think there needs to be a clever middle ground
>rather than just the two options.
Well I, for one, am very satisfied with the RAW here. But I do fear that, given augments that are limited to a certain number, that the sort of perfunctory addition would happen. That is, somebody would try to get away with, "I'm sure I've got two augments at 17 or so, so let's call it +4." That's just not acceptable.
I think of augmenting as an art form. It's a goal of play, to me, not just a step in the process of determining the outcome. I'm actually often less interested in who wins the contest, than how the character in question plugs into the contest. So all of the "slowdown" that people say occurs is, to me, good stuff.
That's not to say that you don't want to promote people doing a good job with augmenting, and not just chucking things out there to see if they stick. But that's easily done by simply rejecting any augments that suck. And by cutting off augmenting when it becomes clear that there's nothing good that's leaping to mind (that doesn't mean that there might not be any more good augments possible - just that you can't spend all night thinking up every good one). Players soon, IME, get the idea of what's a good augment, and what's junk, and when to say that they're done augmenting. They become very conscientious about it. To the point where they often do not augment at all in a contest, because they don't want to do a bad job of it.
So I think that the mechanism exists already to make players do a good job. If one has to put in another mechanism here, I think it would be good to make it such that it promoted good thinking, and not just filling out a set figure of augments.
But, then again, that's all serving my vision of how the game plays, so...
Mike
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