Hi Jane. Good point. I rather like it - I do it in Blue Dog, an excellent online game where we can spend a while thinking, and make sure that we are being sensible about what is appropriate.
However it does not work as well in the heat of the moment in a story told round the table: most of our players enjoy this, but one, Luke, spends up to twenty minutes arguing with the rest of the group about why his "cookery" ability is directly relevant to attacking the lunar encampment. This breaks the mood. We also have one player with fairly significant number blindeness, who needs someone else to help with the math, which means we lose the dramatic tension while we add numbers up. He still likes the rules though, but for luke it is a real game breaker.
We have said to him "so why do it?" and he says "because I need to win". OK, he is a Magic te Gathering player whose enjoyment comes from min maxing, finding game mechanics thatw ork to his advantage and inventing silly abilituies like "Spurious Augment" he wants to apply to everything: meta-gaming is his thing. Games like Ars MAgica give him something hard to kick against, but he calls HQ "Blagfest", and claims it is a bad game, yet it is his behaviour alone whioch leads to this problem.
Problem is he is a regular part of out gaming group, and a nice guy, who plays interesting characters, he just seems intent on breaking the game which annoys everyone else and has led to us playing RQ for a while instead. :( He just can't seem to get that his own behaviour is what causes the issue...
Still, once again: augments are great online, or with players happy to break
the modo to work out math. They are not so hot face to face in my opinion,
though I do like them
cj x
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