About legend awards

[freid78]

[Kasbak]

I personally never bothered with the chart; I never liked being that formulaic with things, since I've always felt that encourages players to be more concerned with following the formula to maximize their rewards rather than just playing their characters. I always gave my awards by feel, using personal intuition to gauge how difficult the task was, how well the players played it out (both strategy and role-play, with a known bias on the latter), how good of a story it would make in character in order to spread, and how quickly I wanted them to be able to advance. I also skipped doing LP's based on kills, partially because that encourages combat and prowess in it rather than role-play as a potential solution, and partially because just fighting does not in and of itself make a story to add to one's legend. I would give awards after the players told the story of the fight in character, of course.

I realize that doesn't contribute much to revising the table. My point is more that I feel the table shouldn't be that definitive, but rather more of a loose guideline that takes a far back seat to the GM's intuition and pacing, and as such probably doesn't need to be defined that thoroughly in the first place.

[Mataxes]

[freid78]

[Slimcreeper]

I ... am okay with Mataxes giving the standard rpg developers answer of "... and that was our thinking. Feel free to ignore it if it suits you." Freid, it sounds like you came up with and posted a great house rule. Thank you! I would consider using it. Does FASA have the resources to process and test every great house rule and get the GM guide out in the same decade they promised it? Probably not. I frankly think my language skill stuff is waaay better than what's in the book, but I doubt anyone is going to be publishing it anytime soon. That's okay.

[Mataxes]

[freid78]

All legit answers!

Thanks Josh. I'll probably leave new ideas in a home rule topic next time.

Oh... and yeah, get those books out Can't wait for the Gamemaster's guide.

Edit : That being said, do you still want some product feedback ?

[Mataxes]

[Mataxes]

Okay. Looked at the numbers. (I also rebuilt my old analysis of the ED1 numbers for comparison.)

Warning: Lots of analysis follows. If you don't care about numbers, feel free to skip.

All of the figures discussed here are based on the amount of Legend you need to spend to advance talents to qualify for your next Circle. It does not assume additional spending based on Attribute raises, non-essential talents, permanent threads, etc.

ED1
The advancement between ED1 and ED3 is pretty much the same until you need to advance to Circle 12. ED3's 'using all talents to advance' option uses the ED1 scheme, where to get to C12 you didn't need to raise talents to Rank 12, only get an 11th Circle talent to rank 11 (as you would have had the remaining talents at Rank 11 already in order to reach C11). A similar thing happens when qualify for C14.

With that in mind, the amount of Legend needed to qualify for the next Circle in ED1 are as follows:

C2: 600*
C3: 2100
C4: 4100
C5: 7500
C6: 15600
C7: 28800
C8: 52300
C9: 93700
C10: 189300
C11: 344300
C12: 98200
C13: 557400
C14: 257600
C15: 1517400

* This is assuming the most "common" build where a character takes two talents at Rank 2 and four at Rank 1 at character creation. Thieves and magicians in ED1 would be more likely to spend more as they had 7 talents at C1, giving a setup of one talent at Rank 2 and the rest at Rank 1. I think the variation possible with different starting builds doesn't make that significant difference when it comes to the overall analysis.

With these figures in hand, we can get a look at how many sessions it would take to earn the Legend needed for advancement. This is pretty easy, all you need to do is divide the total amount you need by the amount of the award. Since the recommended Legend awards are given in a range, I made three calculations: one that uses only the lower end of the range, one that uses only the high end, and one that uses the average. (ED1 does not provide an "average" but it is easy enough to calculate.)

For example, getting to C4 from C3 requires 4100 Legend. The recommended C3 award in ED1 ranges from 250-900 (average 575).

Low: 4100/250 = 16.4*
Middle: 4100/575 = 7.13
High: 4100/900 = 4.56

* I broke out the decimal places here, but for the most part I prefer to round up because you can't really play a 'partial' session. Future numbers are rounded up to next whole number

Breaking this out across the whole chart gives us the following:

Circle: Low / Mid / High
C2: 6 / 3 / 2
C3: 14 / 6 / 4
C4: 17 / 8 / 5
C5: 19 / 10 / 7
C6: 26 / 13 / 9
C7: 29 / 15 / 10
C8: 35 / 18 / 12
C9: 47 / 24 / 16
C10: 64 / 32 / 22
C11: 69 / 35 / 23
C12: 13 / 7 / 5*
C13: 47 / 22 / 14
C14: 15 / 7 / 5*
C15: 61 / 25 / 16

* Remember the ED1 advancement does a couple of weird things for these Circles compared to others.

You can see the increasing time required for advancement pretty clearly. If you add that up, you will find that at best (that is, using the highest recommended award every time), it takes 150 sessions to earn the Legend to reach C15 from C1. Using the average, it's 225 sessions. That's over four years of play, assuming weekly sessions and no spending Legend on anything else. In a practical sense, it would be much longer.

That's a long time.

ED3

Using the new version of Circle advancement, the costs are the same until C12. The cost for advancement from C12 on is:

C12: 618400
C13: 1099600
C14: 2197300
C15: 3973900

Doing the same calculation of sessions required to earn the Legend needed for advancement from the ED3 recommendations gives us:

C2: 6 / 3 / 2
C3: 6 / 3 / 2
C4: 6 / 3 / 3
C5: 8 / 4 / 3
C6: 8 / 4 / 3
C7: 8 / 4 / 3
C8: 8 / 4 / 3
C9: 10 / 6 / 4
C10: 10 / 5 / 4
C11: 11 / 6 / 4
C12: 11 / 6 / 4
C13: 12 / 6 / 4
C14: 13 / 7 / 5
C15: 13 / 7 / 5

As you can see, while required number of sessions still increases, it does so much more slowly and those increases map more closely to the different tiers (Novice, Journeyman, etc.) In this setup, using the best highest per-session recommendation, you can get from C1 to C15 in 49 sessions, and the average is 68 -- just over a year, assuming no spending on anything else.

Incidentally, if you use the "all talents to advance" option, the higher Circles would go much faster using the suggestions in ED3. This is why the book suggests that you reduce the Legend awards for those Circles.

Freid78's suggestion

Finally, let's take the suggestion that matches the recommended Legend award to the advancement cost, as proposed earlier in this thread. Only one value is given, the cost to advance is the same, so we just need to plug in the new numbers (multiplying each recommended award by 4 to get the session award). Since there isn't a range, we get one result:

C2: 2
C3: 3
C4: 4
C5: 4
C6: 3
C7: 4
C8: 4
C9: 5
C10: 4
C11: 4
C12: 5
C13: 5
C14: 4
C15: 4

Adding things up, we're looking at a total of about 55 sessions from C1 to C15 (assuming no other spending). So it isn't quite as fast as the 'fastest' recommendation from ED3, but still a little bit faster than the 'average' (not as much as I expected on my initial eyeball, but still about 3 months, assuming weekly sessions -- I don't know how much of a difference that makes when dealing with a true long-running game ). It also ends up with an almost flat advancement -- it's about the same number of sessions from Circle to Circle, as opposed to the gradually increasing scale from ED3 (which starts faster but slows down).

Both of which, IMO, are much better than the almost glacial pace set by ED1 (especially once you get into mid-high Circles). At least in these later schemes, there's a much better chance for a dedicated group to get into those Warden and Master Circles.

[freid78]

Thank you for you time and calculation... and insights about your initial thoughts from ED1 to ED3.

I held similar results using a more detailed simulation, but over 2 circles only. Don't forget that these are for the strict minimum advancement. If you add optional talents, this will tend to take more session. And the more circle you have, the more talents you have too... so the "flat" advancement ain't that flat, just a bit more than what ED3 chart has in mind.

On a final note, there's one thing that we did not considerate. We used a scheme where the players are awarded 4 legend award per session, but this ain't clear if a circle 12 adept can manage it. At those circle, the missions aren't just "the mob of the week" and it more and more something of the long run (with bigger rewards, but less often). But using a model or the other one doesn't change that fact.

Anyhow, I do hope the players and gamemasters will consider both Legend award table before starting their game! That's all for today!