Re: Augments and arithmetic are irritating...

From: Tim <tim_at_...>
Date: Mon, 08 Oct 2012 13:34:08 -0000

>
>> HQ2  rules go back to 1 Augment to prevent the "abuse"  in HQ1
>> that could see The Augments being worth More than the base
>> Skill...
>
> But in what way is this "abuse"?

"abuse" was in quotes, because not everyone necessarily agrees that it was, or was always abusive...

> effectively "if you want to kill my husband, you do it over my
> dead body".
> Lead skill was a combat one, at about 6.
> Augments from "love husband", "protect clan", "stubborn", "proud", > and Ernalda only knows what else. The augments came to a lot more
> than 6, anyway. (And the husband was killed, over her dead body,
> because it still didn't get within a mastery of the Sword of Humakt
> she was facing).
>

This sounds perfectly fine, and (I suspect) how HQ1 was intended to work. (In HQ2, I think you would probably not even bother with the combat skill of 6, probably leading with something like "stubborn" or "Proud" - The reason she is putting herself between the Humakti and her husband being far more important than the fact she barely knows which end of the sword to hold...)

Problems could potentially arise in a couple of situations

1. "All the augments, all the time" - In the Climactic scene, it might make sense to pull in lots of augments, but if every dice roll is preceeded by players scouring their character sheets and trying to justify every ability as an augment the game will slow down and the "narrative flow" will be disrupted
2. "Challenge Setting" It becomes harder to calculate what level a Challenge should be set at if players can use unlimited augments - If you've designed a challenge to be tough assuming players will be getting around +6 from augments and they end up getting +6W, then the contests become a lot easier

Of course neither of these are insurmountable, even if they do occur, but I think part of the intention of HQ2 was to ensure they didn't.

>
>> I always use automatic augments to reduce the number of dice rolls
>> before the contest rolls.  I have also in the past put in the
>> value of the autoaugment on the character sheet to speed up the
>> calculation process. 
>

This makes sense to me

>