>True. I'm not wild about the augmentation rules, myself, but that's
>not really particular to magic. An especial disappointment is if
>you want to have 'passion' type abilities. ("Hate Pernitious Black
>Oak Oiks.") There's just not enough bang for the buck about them.
The thing that bothers me about the chart on p.134 is that you get smacked with a negative modifier just for a marginal defeat. The definition of a marginal defat is: "The loser suffers no lasting side effect of his loss." (p.116) On a minor defeat you get consequences that are "mere annoyances at worst" (Ibid). I can't help but feel there's an inconsistency here.
The way I understand the HW rules, a basic tenet is that how difficult something is to accomplish is based on one thing and one thing alone: the resistance. Once you know that you roll a contest and interpret the results using the guidelines on p.116-7. But there are a few instances where the writers seem to break this formula and try to sneak in other measurements of difficulty. The most obvious case is the "Crossing the Barriers" disaster. My opinions on that one where accepted because I could show the statistical error in it, but the reason I bothered to do the math in the first place is that the rule annoyed me for what you might call philosophical reasons. The normal definitions of victory and defeat had been taken out of play and replaced by a new, seemingly arbitrary interpretation.
I feel somewhat the same way about augmentation. So let's look at some numbers. Take a typical disciple of a warrior deity, with 5w or less in the Combat affinity, who wants to get a simple +1 bonus to a weapon skill. Turns out the chances of getting a -1 (or worse) instead are better than 20%. So at least 1 in 5 theistic warriors preparing for a fight will actually be struck with the punishment of the gods and have to go into battle with a sub-par fighting ability. (BTW, if you dare try for a +2, the chances of getting -2 or worse are 30% and up, depending on your magic skills) Does this seem like a reasonable representation of Gloranthan reality? And how on earth was it missed in playtesting?
I guess you could argue that most fighters will have the chance to try several augmentations, one physical and a couple of magical, so on average the positive and negative modifiers will cancel out or even leave a positive residue. But this amounts to extremely little bang for your buck (to quote Alex): going through all that rigmarole and ending up with maybe +1 total, which in case you need to be reminded doesn't have a tremendous practical effect.
So how can this be fixed? Well, turn marginal defeat into "no effect" for starters. Sure, this will ruin the symmetry of the chart, so if you want to salvage some semblance of that, move the other results down a peg too. Minor and major failure -1x and complete failure -2x. With this change, someone at the starting value of 17 still has a 7.5% chance of a negative modifier, but at 20 or above this probability dips sharply.
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