Sword of Spirit
Legend
Hi all,
I just picked up The One Ring yesterday, after looking at generally highly positive reviews. I spent all day looking through it (including supplements) and it seems really well put together. However, the lack of a general mechanic to refresh Hope (not the benefit of buying the Confidence Mastery, which you can only do a very limited number of times in your character's lifetime, and probably won't do more than twice at a maximum) hits my "design imbalance" sensor.
I'll do some speculative math and explain both ways that it seems to feel imbalanced for me, and my request is that those with experience playing the game can tell me how accurate my impressions are, and in particular how satisfying that particular point of gameplay is as written.
1) The amount of design space allotted to Hope expenditures seems high compared to the apparent rarity of using it. Right now I'm only talking about the basic usage of invoking an Attribute. I'll get to the Cultural Virtues part later. If there are any other basic usages (ie, stuff anyone can and will want to use it for, regardless of the character they created), someone please remind me so I can take that into account in my examinations.
Now for some estimates of how much Hope you are likely to recover over the course of the assumed year (One Adventuring Phase plus One Fellowship Phase):
-Due to the automatic refreshing of Fellowship points, you essentially recover 1 Hope for free each play session.
-I can only guess at how often recovery from your Fellowship focus not getting seriously harmed comes up, but I will try. I'm going to speculate that they get seriously harmed every two sessions. Someone correct me if that's a poor estimate. This amounts to recovering 0.5 additional Hope per session.
-The method of immediately recovering Hope spent to protect or favor your Fellowship focus needs to be treated as two separate elements for evaluation purposes. The first is when you intentionally change or decide your course of action to do this. In that case this shouldn't count for these determinations. It's essentially a separate mechanic for getting a bonus to help your Fellowship focus. The case where it should count is when you do what you'd basically do even if it didn't involve your Fellowship focus, and it just happens to involve them. For example, you are going to protect someone in combat, committed to spending Hope if need be to make it work, and it occurs to you that if you pick your Fellowship focus as the one to protect, you will recover that Hope, so you choose them as the target of your protection. That seems pretty rare to me. Let's be generous (since I might have been stingy regarding the prior usage), and say that happens every fourth session, for 0.25 additional Hope per session.
Per Session Estimate: On average, a character recovers 1.75 Hope per session.
The game assumes three sessions of play for each Adventuring Phase. A Fellowship Phase "ideally takes place at the end of a gaming session", so I will assume that it is included in that, rather than being a separate session (and it doesn't seem like it would be long enough for it's own session).
Per Adventure/Year Estimate: On average, a character recovers 5.25 Hope per adventure/year. It would seem quite difficult to recover substantially more than that.
To break even on Hope, that is the amount a character can spend.
There are likely to be sessions when you need to spend more than your 1.75 Hope, but I don't image there are many sessions where you won't be spending at least 1 Hope. But you will probably need to be going entire sessions spending 0 Hope in order to actually recover it instead of just breaking even. This would imply an overall ongoing loss of Hope over the lifetime of the character. This is one place where I really need input from experienced players to tell me how well my estimates fit their experiences.
The design imbalance that I'm speaking of is that the quantity of design space dedicated to elements centered around spending Hope seems to imply that the mechanic is going to be used regularly, while the impression I'm getting from the math of the actual systems is that it is actually going to be used quite rarely, as a last resort, and you are going to try to avoid using it at all in a session whenever possible. If this is true, then rather than having rules for Favoured Attributes and Favoured Skills, the regular references in the text to invoking Attributes, or even the Hope system as presented, it seems like the actual rarity of doing this would be better served by a simpler rule.*
2) Cultural Virtues that require spending Hope are substantially weaker than those that don't. The power of the effects produced by Cultural Virtues that require Hope seems generally only slightly more powerful than those that don't. But since most Cultural Virtues can be used again and again without cost, while spending Hope is a very limited resource, the power of the effect produced by a Cultural Virtue that requires Hope needs to be substantially higher than the effect of one that does not. That's the first element of this imbalance (as I see it). The second one involves the additional opportunity cost of giving up the opportunity to invoke an Attribute in order to use a Cultural Virtue. While one may think the balance point for spending Hope on a Cultural Virtue compared to invoking an Attribute, should just be that the listed effect is roughly equivalent, this isn't correct. While it is harder to determine the actual balance for this one than for comparing Cultural Virtues to other Cultural Virtues, the fact that Hope points are so rare and precious magnifies the opportunity cost of acquiring more potential uses for them. In other words, due to the rarity of Hope points, characters that spend resources to acquire more ways to spend Hope than the default need those ways to each be more powerful than they would otherwise be. It sounds counter-intuitive, but is a result of the resource being so rare. If the resource were common, this would not be true. (And if the resource were both common, and it were true that acquiring access to these new methods did not incur an opportunity cost compared to acquiring access to free effects, this result would be reversed--the more intuitive result). This last factor adds to the imbalance a design dilemma.
Design Dilemma: If Cultural Virtues that require Hope are powerful enough to be balanced with those that don't, they will be too powerful to be balanced with invoking Attributes (given the rarity of Hope recovery).
So my question for experienced players is how does it work in actual play? Do my numbers in 1) seem to fit your experiences? If so, how does that feel? Do characters gradually lose Hope over the course of a campaign rather than breaking even? Do they spend any appreciable time at their maximum Hope, or is that mostly only relevant at character creation? How often do those with Cultural Virtues that require Hope use them versus invoking Attributes? Do players feel such Virtues are worth it? If you had been designing the game, knowing then what you know now, would you have set up the Hope economy differently? Would you have kept the basic rarity of usage, but changed the rules to reduce the design space it takes up? Do you think it works perfectly as is? Do you think it should be adjusted depending on what sort of tone you want for your campaign? What else would you like to share about your experienced with the mechanics for spending and recovering Hope?
Thanks for any responses!
* For examples of the kind of things I'm talking about, the Favoured mechanics could be entirely replaced by a mechanic something along the lines of "If an action fails by 5 points or less, you can spend 1 Hope point to turn it into a success." In fact, it could be even simpler and just say you can do that once per session, and leave your Hope score as just a set value for purposes of comparison to Shadow points, with no such thing as expending Hope points. Or, to preserve the element of spending Hope and only address Hope not actually being recovered back to it's maximum on a fairly regular basis, the existence of a maximum could be removed as an unnecessary game element. It would be more consistent for there to simply be a starting value, and for those rare features that set your Hope to your maximum to just give you a certain number of Hope points (for example, the Confidence Mastery could just give you 17 Hope points.))
I just picked up The One Ring yesterday, after looking at generally highly positive reviews. I spent all day looking through it (including supplements) and it seems really well put together. However, the lack of a general mechanic to refresh Hope (not the benefit of buying the Confidence Mastery, which you can only do a very limited number of times in your character's lifetime, and probably won't do more than twice at a maximum) hits my "design imbalance" sensor.
I'll do some speculative math and explain both ways that it seems to feel imbalanced for me, and my request is that those with experience playing the game can tell me how accurate my impressions are, and in particular how satisfying that particular point of gameplay is as written.
1) The amount of design space allotted to Hope expenditures seems high compared to the apparent rarity of using it. Right now I'm only talking about the basic usage of invoking an Attribute. I'll get to the Cultural Virtues part later. If there are any other basic usages (ie, stuff anyone can and will want to use it for, regardless of the character they created), someone please remind me so I can take that into account in my examinations.
Now for some estimates of how much Hope you are likely to recover over the course of the assumed year (One Adventuring Phase plus One Fellowship Phase):
-Due to the automatic refreshing of Fellowship points, you essentially recover 1 Hope for free each play session.
-I can only guess at how often recovery from your Fellowship focus not getting seriously harmed comes up, but I will try. I'm going to speculate that they get seriously harmed every two sessions. Someone correct me if that's a poor estimate. This amounts to recovering 0.5 additional Hope per session.
-The method of immediately recovering Hope spent to protect or favor your Fellowship focus needs to be treated as two separate elements for evaluation purposes. The first is when you intentionally change or decide your course of action to do this. In that case this shouldn't count for these determinations. It's essentially a separate mechanic for getting a bonus to help your Fellowship focus. The case where it should count is when you do what you'd basically do even if it didn't involve your Fellowship focus, and it just happens to involve them. For example, you are going to protect someone in combat, committed to spending Hope if need be to make it work, and it occurs to you that if you pick your Fellowship focus as the one to protect, you will recover that Hope, so you choose them as the target of your protection. That seems pretty rare to me. Let's be generous (since I might have been stingy regarding the prior usage), and say that happens every fourth session, for 0.25 additional Hope per session.
Per Session Estimate: On average, a character recovers 1.75 Hope per session.
The game assumes three sessions of play for each Adventuring Phase. A Fellowship Phase "ideally takes place at the end of a gaming session", so I will assume that it is included in that, rather than being a separate session (and it doesn't seem like it would be long enough for it's own session).
Per Adventure/Year Estimate: On average, a character recovers 5.25 Hope per adventure/year. It would seem quite difficult to recover substantially more than that.
To break even on Hope, that is the amount a character can spend.
There are likely to be sessions when you need to spend more than your 1.75 Hope, but I don't image there are many sessions where you won't be spending at least 1 Hope. But you will probably need to be going entire sessions spending 0 Hope in order to actually recover it instead of just breaking even. This would imply an overall ongoing loss of Hope over the lifetime of the character. This is one place where I really need input from experienced players to tell me how well my estimates fit their experiences.
The design imbalance that I'm speaking of is that the quantity of design space dedicated to elements centered around spending Hope seems to imply that the mechanic is going to be used regularly, while the impression I'm getting from the math of the actual systems is that it is actually going to be used quite rarely, as a last resort, and you are going to try to avoid using it at all in a session whenever possible. If this is true, then rather than having rules for Favoured Attributes and Favoured Skills, the regular references in the text to invoking Attributes, or even the Hope system as presented, it seems like the actual rarity of doing this would be better served by a simpler rule.*
2) Cultural Virtues that require spending Hope are substantially weaker than those that don't. The power of the effects produced by Cultural Virtues that require Hope seems generally only slightly more powerful than those that don't. But since most Cultural Virtues can be used again and again without cost, while spending Hope is a very limited resource, the power of the effect produced by a Cultural Virtue that requires Hope needs to be substantially higher than the effect of one that does not. That's the first element of this imbalance (as I see it). The second one involves the additional opportunity cost of giving up the opportunity to invoke an Attribute in order to use a Cultural Virtue. While one may think the balance point for spending Hope on a Cultural Virtue compared to invoking an Attribute, should just be that the listed effect is roughly equivalent, this isn't correct. While it is harder to determine the actual balance for this one than for comparing Cultural Virtues to other Cultural Virtues, the fact that Hope points are so rare and precious magnifies the opportunity cost of acquiring more potential uses for them. In other words, due to the rarity of Hope points, characters that spend resources to acquire more ways to spend Hope than the default need those ways to each be more powerful than they would otherwise be. It sounds counter-intuitive, but is a result of the resource being so rare. If the resource were common, this would not be true. (And if the resource were both common, and it were true that acquiring access to these new methods did not incur an opportunity cost compared to acquiring access to free effects, this result would be reversed--the more intuitive result). This last factor adds to the imbalance a design dilemma.
Design Dilemma: If Cultural Virtues that require Hope are powerful enough to be balanced with those that don't, they will be too powerful to be balanced with invoking Attributes (given the rarity of Hope recovery).
So my question for experienced players is how does it work in actual play? Do my numbers in 1) seem to fit your experiences? If so, how does that feel? Do characters gradually lose Hope over the course of a campaign rather than breaking even? Do they spend any appreciable time at their maximum Hope, or is that mostly only relevant at character creation? How often do those with Cultural Virtues that require Hope use them versus invoking Attributes? Do players feel such Virtues are worth it? If you had been designing the game, knowing then what you know now, would you have set up the Hope economy differently? Would you have kept the basic rarity of usage, but changed the rules to reduce the design space it takes up? Do you think it works perfectly as is? Do you think it should be adjusted depending on what sort of tone you want for your campaign? What else would you like to share about your experienced with the mechanics for spending and recovering Hope?
Thanks for any responses!
* For examples of the kind of things I'm talking about, the Favoured mechanics could be entirely replaced by a mechanic something along the lines of "If an action fails by 5 points or less, you can spend 1 Hope point to turn it into a success." In fact, it could be even simpler and just say you can do that once per session, and leave your Hope score as just a set value for purposes of comparison to Shadow points, with no such thing as expending Hope points. Or, to preserve the element of spending Hope and only address Hope not actually being recovered back to it's maximum on a fairly regular basis, the existence of a maximum could be removed as an unnecessary game element. It would be more consistent for there to simply be a starting value, and for those rare features that set your Hope to your maximum to just give you a certain number of Hope points (for example, the Confidence Mastery could just give you 17 Hope points.))
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