Re: Improving magical items

From: bethexton_at_...
Date: Fri, 28 May 2004 17:13:43 -0000

Roderick, I think you missed the original point on this one. It was about the differential between the best of the heroes' skills and the rest of the heroes' skills. That when you have sword and shield 2W, there are times that you will use brawl 17, dodge 19, intimidating glare 17 or glib 14 to solve certain problems. But once sword and shield has reached 2W2, if those other skills haven't improved much, any opponent of note can only be defeated by using sword and shield, so you become more reliant on it, and so it is the skill that you can most often buy up cheaply, and it pulls even farther ahead.....

Going back to the original topic, or how to get various skills to improve more in sync: One simple suggestion that was batted around this list some time ago was to tag on an extra 1 HP per mastery cost to improvements. Alternatively, another take was to do the same, but only to mundane skills, to model "you can only be so good, being merely human. But when you call on the power of the gods, it can be much greater." I'm not saying either idea works out well or not, I have no idea, just passing along what I recall being discussed.

The other solution suggested comes down to narrator choice. Make sure they face a variety of challenges regularly, so that no one or two skills are always the solutions, or are always the ones that can be bought up cheaply. The players are then more apt to increase a broad array of skills. At least that is the theory. Again, no idea how it works out in practice ("no plan survives first contact with the players.....")

--Bryan

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