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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6264462" data-attributes="member: 4937">I'm inclined to agree, but still think that misses the point of the OP.  The point is that effort is a situational enhancement to your chance of success, as opposed to something like skill ranks that consistently enhances your chance of success.  Everything else is just talking around that point.Yes, exactly.In my experience, by not casting Bless very often.   Bless is not generally seen as a reliable and potent spell (unless you've got 50 1st level allies you are trying to buff), and generally a waste of a spell slot IME.  The reliable benefits of something like Cure Light Wounds are seen as being vastly more important than Bless.   I can probably list a half-dozen 1st level clerical spells that are relied on more than Bless precisely because it only helps about 1 in 20 attacks.No, but I have seen players argue that a buff that doesn't gain a sufficiently large edge isn't worthwhile to spend an action on, and more to the point that it is not worth it to spend resources on anything unless you can become reliably good at that thing.  For example, don't spreading skill points around among many categories and instead focusing on a few categories they intend to be able to reliably succeed in.   If the DC is 25 for example, having 3 skill ranks in 5 things is pretty meaningless compared to having 15 ranks in one thing, and that's generally true if you can be proactive even if (and maybe especially if) the DC is 15.The bolded part is the answer to your own question.That's pretty much what I thought edge was.   Basically, back when the system was just being previewed, from my casual reading I thought that characters would be in large part defined by their Edges, so that a character with edge was reliably advantaged without spending scarse narrative resources compared to one that wasn't.   What I was thinking of was a situation similar to GURPS, where spellcasters are defined by the spells that they can cast with sufficient skill to avoid spending fatigue/spell points.  So for example, I thought you could define a fighter as having an Edge in combat, so that they would reliably be a better fighter without spending effort, or that you could define a rogue by having an Edge in sneakiness, so that they would be reliably better at sneaking without having to spend effort at it.  But now that the system is out, that doesn't seem to be how it works.   You doesn't seem like you have specific edges like that - that's the province of skills, apparantly.   And you have to have a lot of edge to get free effort, so its more of a 'level up' sort of thing than initial character differentiation.The 'randomness' of the system that the OP is talking about seems to be a very common complaint, and its resonating for me because I just took Baldur's Gate out for a spin since I never played it back when it was out and had heard so many good things about it.   And frankly, the 2e mechanics feel really clunky to me compared to modern cRPG mechanics (or even Neverwinter Nights 3e derived mechanics).   Basically, in a cRPG I've gotten used to the idea over the last 10-15 years that if you die, it's because you made a tactical mistake, and you start over and do something different in order to progress past that point.  Heck, I had that idea back from Ultima IV.  But that's not the experience I'm having of Baldur's Gate, where death just seems to come out of the blue almost completely randomly (3 kobolds land 3 successive ranged attacks on my highest AC character from across the screen, doing 21 damage, for example).  Instead, Baldur's Gate seems to encourage more of a 'if at first you don't succeed, it's probably just because the enemy rolled a critical hit before you did, try try again...' mentality.   Now, I'm a bit frustrated because I can tell that BG is even more random than 1e/2e do to 'tweaks' they've made, but the fact remains right now I'm really feeling that sort of randomness is really primitive (and its worth noting, I'm running a 3e game right now that hasn't felt really random very often).   If Numenera ends up just being 2e D&D meets FATE, I'm not sure I'm that interested.</blockquote>

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