<< Any other methods that would suffice?
Thanks for your attention,
Mike
>>
I do not really expect anyone else to use my variation but post it in case it
is of interest. I have no idea what the statistical result of these would be.
- simple contests - normally, we do not bother with any augments until after
the contest. Then the contestants can see what result they might get if they
went for an augment. In a combat if a player has a fail vs a success and can
increase his target number a few points to get a success vs a success, possibly
with a lower roll. The other contestant might try to then increase their
target number until they get a bump which would give them a critical, and so on.
- failure counts against the augmenting ability, not the augmented ability.
If you use strong to augment combat and get a negative bonus, it affects your
strong ability, not your combat target number, and may be a bad result that
will last beyond the immediate contest. The idea here is that the player can
risk one sort of failure (some disadvantage in strong) for a while or accept
failure in the actual contest. The advantage of magic is that it does not have
long term bad effects - this is an equivalent of running short of RQ magic
points.
- I only allow one augment to affect any ability, the best one, so a
character may keep rolling for augments in a ever more desperate (presumeably they
start trying to augment with their best ability) attempt to get a higher result.
This might seem like extra dice-rolling, but it is (IMO) fun when it goes
wrong on the first roll, and there are strategic decisions - go for a big augment
at the start, with a good ability, or play it safe to get a reasonable
augment while risking it to get a possibly high augment with another ability later
on. The other thing I dislike about lots of augments is that player can splend
some time going through a list of things that they get small bonuses from (and
then adding them up), which can take as much time as just finding one good
ability.
Keith