>Just off the top of my head, I'd say you should maybe use your magical
>leaping feat to augment your mundane leaping ability (or vice versa), and
Yeah, except this sucks. Say you use your Burst of Speed feat to augment your Running ability... and all you dare try for is a +1 (this ties in with another grudge of mine, more later in this post), so your Running goes up from 17 to 18! Maybe 19 or 20 if you're exceptionally daring and lucky. Well, whoop-de-doo. What a "burst of speed" _that_ was.
>HW doesn't ever say "anything magical is better than anything mundane" --
No, except that Run on Treetops etc. let you do things that can't be
duplicated by mundane abilities at all.
So returning to the Burst of Speed example, while you certainly _can_ use
it as an enhancement if you want, I would think that it could also be
used on its own for exactly what it sounds like - a brief infusion of
supernatural energy that e.g. lets you sprint several hundred meters in a
single round. I would also think that the resistance for this is a
standard 14, unless you're trying to do something that stretches the
Narrators' credulity (frex sprinting several kilometers in a single
round).
>NB: it still seems wrong to me that augments and edges go:
>
> Critical 2x success
> Success 1x success
> Failure 1x penalty
> Fumble 2x penalty
Me too. You're simplifying the chart here, because if you roll a success but the resistance rolls a lower success, you also get the 1x penalty. Which makes the situation even worse...
>I think it would be more reasonable to have Failure be no effect, and Fumble
>be a 1x penalty.
Yeah, that's what I've been suggesting for a while. I recently came up
with another idea, though, where a bad defeat instead means a penalty to
the ability you rolled against, lasting for maybe a day or a scene
(whichever seems more appropriate):
Tie or Marginal Defeat: no effect
Minor Defeat: -1
Major Defeat: -50%
Complete Defeat: reduced to a rating of 6.
My rationale for this is that magic isn't a rubber band, it's a muscle.
;-) So instead of it snapping back in your face, you strain it. This is
still untested, of course...
>ISTM the Gloranthan Gods are not such a vindictive lot that
>their response to many calls for help is to penalise their worshippers.
I don't think they are, either. The chart is absurd in Gloranthan terms, and in rules-speak I think that it also breaks the basic definition of what a Marginal Defeat means ("no lasting side effects", HW p.116). To get really rules-philosophical - IMO there's a basic asymmetry between victory and defeat: a certain level of victory is always better for you than the corresponding level of defeat is bad for you. Victory is definitive, you succeed and that's all there is to it. But a defeat is usually 'negotiable', you can try again later or using a different approach. Any attempt to impose symmetry on this structure (which is what the Augmentation Results Chart does) is doomed to become unreasonable.
(BTW, what's ISTM short for? Never seen it before.)
>Skewing the odds this way would make for more sensible use of augmentations.
Yes, it would.
>I could be wrong, though.
No, you're absolutely right. :-)
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