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Hey cats and kittens, I have a question. Seems like I read somewhere that while the average of step 10 is the same as the average roll of step 6 +4 - but! rolling step 10 was more likely to hit higher DNs. And it has a lower chance of all 1s. So the increased step is better against higher DNs and avoiding catastrophic failure, but flat bonuses are a more reliable way to hit average DNs. Is that right? I ask because I've often thought that a good way to simplify the difference between skills and talents would be to make all skills Attribute + flat bonus based on rank and just eliminate all the other differences.

Slimcreeper wrote:Hey cats and kittens, I have a question. Seems like I read somewhere that while the average of step 10 is the same as the average roll of step 6 +4 - but! rolling step 10 was more likely to hit higher DNs. And it has a lower chance of all 1s. So the increased step is better against higher DNs and avoiding catastrophic failure, but flat bonuses are a more reliable way to hit average DNs. Is that right? I ask because I've often thought that a good way to simplify the difference between skills and talents would be to make all skills Attribute + flat bonus based on rank and just eliminate all the other differences.

Assuming your dice are fair, that is correct. Step 6 + 4 has a .167 chance of rolling all 1s. Step 10 has .016.

I don't think the way to simplify the difference between Skills and Talents is to make Skills work completely differently from everything else in the system.

My thought is to make one global rule for skills vs. talents, rather than individual rules for each skill.

So what you are suggesting:
Melee weapons as a rank 3 skill and my dex step is 5 I would roll Step 5 + 3 (d8+3).

Melee weapons as a rank 3 talent with a dex step of and I would roll Step 8 (2d6)

I like it. More stuff to track but an interesting concept.

Someone with Rank 5 in Melee Weapons skill is actually far more knowledgeable and better trained than the counterpart using the Talent of the same Rank. That person has magic guiding their blows.

Which is why it takes weeks to months to level a skill where a Talent is increased immediately (relatively speaking).

The result is that they are equally capable for different reasons. Why handicap the skill (even if ever-so-slightly)? Why increase bookkeeping and discourage skill acquisition (again, even if ever-so-slightly)?

Because we hate non-adepts and they should feel bad for not using magic? Good point as well. Although I'm not running an ED campaign right now so my players are safe.

Well, the idea is that otherwise the skill and talent would be identical. Whatever the rules are for the talent apply to the skill. I haven't gone through each skill yet to weigh each one, though. At low ranks, the skill may even be better - more reliable.

Slimcreeper wrote:Well, the idea is that otherwise the skill and talent would be identical. Whatever the rules are for the talent apply to the skill. I haven't gone through each skill yet to weigh each one, though. At low ranks, the skill may even be better - more reliable.

I just don't see why they shouldn't be identical. Mostly, as there are already differences.

Mechanical differences:
Skills can be used in non-magic areas
Skills have a hard cap of 10, Talents haver a soft cap of 15 (that is, magic can raise them above 15)
Skills take a week per rank to level and cold hard cash, Talents take 8 hours flat
Skills require a long period between leveling, Talents only a day (actually 16ish hours)

Fluff differences
Magic could be mistrusted, so skills might be looked on more favorably
Talents can have a flair to them, and often allow for "impossible" things (like picking a lock without tools) that skills can't do
I'm sure there are other fluff differences

All this talk has sparked an idea of a John Henry-esque enemy of the group.

He'd be a very skilled non-Adept angry with the group (perhaps because they displaced his role in a town or humiliated him), so he collects a group of similarly highly skilled non-Adepts to fight them.

Perhaps this group starts off doing good things to prove you don't need magic, but then they go off the rails when trying to sabotage the characters. Start doing some bad things, perhaps led astray by another, even a Horror.

Eventually raw skill can't keep up with magic and he fails, preferably in some tragic way that the players mourn.

My house rule is modifying the Result is for Temporary/Situational Modifiers, modifying the Step is for Magic Enhancements, Spending Legend, or Pattern Changes (i.e. more "permanent" changes to the total rating). The reason for this is that the multiple ability Steps that a player has to deal with do not rapidly change up and down the chart, changing dice, but are still modified by situational/temporary effects. It also makes more sense* to a player to SEE their dice-pool change only when they spend Legend Points, weave Thread ranks, or get Cursed (instead of all the time, arbitrarily).

*(Experience with a player who is slightly dyslexic with numbers, and could easily handle [DicePool]+/-[Mod] for her abilities with rapidly changing modifiers, but got lost when asked to jump up and down the step chart multiple times in combat for multiple abilities as Wounds and other modifiers from spells, etc, etc happen.)

I do like playing with the mechanical distinction between the two methods though. Hmmmm... I'm going to run some numbers and Steps through AnyDice.com. I have a program that has stored all the Step Die combinations as shortcuts, but so far it only runs one step against a series of difficulty numbers: http://anydice.com/program/9f80