i.e. Augments do not scale linearly as they are decisive at high levels and largely ineffective at low levels even between otherwise balanced opponents. Even the unwritten guideline of 3 augments for an ambush can be crippling at high level yet is no big deal for starting characters. Perhaps this is broken but I tend towards the opinion that it is a deliberate design decision.
A simple fix for it would be to bump down the augmenting ability by the masteries of whatever it was they were augmenting, if that's what you want. We are a long way off this sort of thing being relevant to our group!
>
> HW isn't always a straight clash of arms. The rules need to
> work for all situations.
>
Agreed, which is why I think any hard-and-fast limiting rule is likely to come unstuck. Ok I should make my position clearer here, I can see some merit in many of the limiting suggestions that have been made here but I would always want to check that they made sense within the story before actually applying them. I agree that 8 augments is an enormous amount of magic working and should normally be treated as a seperate scene in its own right, yet there are circumstances where a hero might have the time and inclination to put in this much preparation (and we would have to deal with the duration mechanics).
Similarly I can see that multiple improvised feats would be a bad thing if allowed (I do not believe they are) but I think that limiting to one augment per affinity penalises devotees of gods with single-minded powers at the expense of multiple initiates who put the same effort into their divine ties yet would get twice the possible number of augments.
> I want the value of an ability to be based on the level of an
> ability. Is that so shocking?
Not at all, although I suspect it was a design decision to allow magic to dominate at the higher levels because that seems to be what the rules were designed for. Before looking too hard for fixes I think we should bear in mind that this example was a fairly special case (a set piece duel with effectively unlimited time to augment beforehand) rather than the sort of thing that is going to crop up very often.
-- Nic
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