There's some serious confusion going on here. Two separate issues are getting conflated, I think.
I'm not proposing doing away with rolling for Augments or anything like that. On the contrary, I love rolling for Augments, and am trying to get it to happen more. What the above quote is about is the fact that, once you've generated an Augment, whether by the automatic method, or by the random method, then you roll the primary contest. In many cases, it turns out that the Augment wasn't pertinent with the current system.
For example, if I'm rolling a Simple Contest between an Ability of 17 and a Resistance of 14, and I augment for 2 (using whatever method), then I have a TN of 19. If I then roll a 15, and the resistance rolls a 12, then I get a marginal victory. But I would have gotten the marginal victory even had I not augmented. Yes, as a statistician, I can tell you that the odds were greater before the roll for me to succeed because of the augment. But I don't "feel" any difference, because I don't see a reward in many cases. This psychological effect can be pronounced (at least I and the other poster have noted it).
My suggestion above would be to find some way to ensure that *some* effect was gained through an atttained Augment in the end conflict. The problem with this is that it requires some sort of output granularity based on the margin of success or something. I don't have anything like a good suggestion for how to accomplish this at this point. I was just lamenting that, often you get your augments, roll, and see that they didn't actually have an affect on the final outcome.
This is totally separate from the issue of how to incentivize rolling for augments. The one topic drifted into the other, as the suggestion that one person gave seemed to me to address this second issue more than the first issue. I totally agree that the random augment should be a gamble. I've pointed out in previous posts just where I think the return value should lie, and it's not only a gamble, but I still think it should be a "bad" gamble (in that the payoff is less than the auto augment level). Just not as bad a gamble as it is, currently. There are a number of ways around this potentially, but nothing I've suggested says that the gamble should be taken out of the randomized option when augmenting.
Does that clear things up, or just muddy the water worse?
Mike
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