auto augmentation

From: Kmnellist_at_...
Date: Fri, 9 Jan 2004 12:43:52 EST


<< 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.

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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

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