Wulf Corbett:
> Problems:
> 1) If a cow is worth 20 Wealth, how come average Wealth is only 15?
> You don't even own one full cow?
I think the Wealth numbers in HW are, unfortunately, seriously broken. Or at the very best, they work only in terms of "buying resistances" (i.e., wealth 15 means you may already own several cows, perhaps, but you don't have the "liquid resources" to acquire another one). But I don't think they consistently support that interpretation either.
> 2) Since Ratings are not linear, how come a cow adds as much Wealth
> to an existing Wealth 5W as it does to a 15? (but then, that's how
> Augments work...)
A variant I'm been thinking of is what one might call "differential augments". The concept is that in some situations, you get a law of diminishing returns: for example, if all of your clanmates "augment" you on a HQ, you don't get 1000 separate +1's! (Mystical Absolute, here I come...) The intuition for this is that as your score gets higher, at least in some circumstances, it ought to be harder for someone with a much lower score to be any significant benefit to you at all.
A quick hack way of doing this is to _add_ the rating of the ability you're trying to augment to the resistance. (Then subtract 20, off the top of my head, as an approximate corrective to the inflation of the TN. These numbers probably need to be tweaked vigourously, this is just to illustrate the idea.
So for example, a value 5W find "tries to" augment the wealth rating of two characters, one of weath 14, the other with wealth 1W2. Someone has to choose an attempted increase, this could be either the player or the narrator. The 14 wealth guy goes for a +3, so 5W has to beat a resistance of 15+14-20=9: an excellent chance of success. The wealth 1W2 guys tries for just a +1, and his chance is 5W vs 5+1W2-20=6W, almost a 50-50 shot.
This is still a little clunky (and I'm all in favour of "wing it!" where that's a viable option), and might need further debugging, but I'd be interested in hearing whether this sounds like a potentially useful mechanic to anyone.
Note that I'm not proposing this as a "generic" replacement for the existing (or other variant) augment rules, but just for specific situations.
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