> > On one hand you say that folks should be slowed down adn on the
> > other you complain that heroes don't advance fast enough. This
> > is... odd to see.
>
> Well, it's like Goldilocks -- there's too fast, and there's too
slow,
> and maybe somewhere in between we can find just right; furthermore,
> where "just right" lies will depend on the gaming group, both wrt
what
> the players want to feel like and how often they can meet. Or as
> Bryan Thexton put it:
Yeah, that's quite true. But I feel that slowing down high-end skills i not the answer - we'd tried it and it becomes swiftly impossible for PC heroes to compete with those high end heroes.
> Also, I want to encourage people to have lots of moderate-quality
> skills rather than just one thing they're really, really good at,
even
> if they are creative enough to use it to do everything. This makes
> the "hobby skills" and undefined references (iow, "roleplaying
hooks")
> less obviously disadvantaged wrt powergamerism.
We found that disallowing anything that has a _high_ improv penalty (say, -20) at all seems to work the trick.
> In any case, my real problem is that since the ability scores are
> logarithmic, a constant rate of HP expenditure is really an
> exponential rate of growth in real power: each successive +1 gives
you
> a bigger boost than the last in terms of character-visible things
like
> how much he can bench-press or how fast she can run a marathon,
> because it's really +10% of your current ability, and successive
> percentage additions combine like compound interest: ten increases
of
> +50% each are not a +500% overall increase, they're a +6000% overall
> increase! This is why allowing arbitrarily many augmentations to
the
> same ability is somewhat dangerous.
Remember that you can only use one mundane augment on a skill without narrator's approval. And there's a finite limit of magical ones. (I generally won't allow an affity to augment any single ability more than once (though +edge and +augment from a single affinity are okay). And, of course, one can't augment magical abilities without rituals (though I will allow magical items to do so).
We have found that augments are not quite the botomless abyss you seem to advocate they are.
In the end, I want my player characters to be Heroes, not bean counters. I guess that's my main beef with the current threads.
Jeff
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