The Undying wrote: ↑Mon Feb 27, 2017 10:13 pm
The main thing is that your changes work for you and your vision of the game, regardless of how others feel about them.
Oh, they work brilliantly. Still, input is usually nice.
The power boost doesn't worry me. Quite the contrary, I welcome very strong PCs. The house rules apply for NPCs too, so weaker adept opponents are less of a challenge, while non-magical opposition is a piece of cake. This feels right for my vision of Earthdawn.
Yes, the defense got intentionally stronger, as I considered an often weak combat option before.
This doesn't speed up the game, it slows it down.
This very slightly increases the number of dice rolls in my sessions. However, the close combat specialists (currently the troll troubadour...) already skilled, uh,
talented Avoid Blow high enough that they would conceivably try to avoid almost any attack anyway even without the reduced strain. And being able to risk two to three fights is a good thing in my book.
You've also trivialized the idea of Karma . . .
I run games with very little competition and a more cooperative narration style between me and the players. I generally don't kill PCs without consent and I tend to reward players' initiative with few dice rolling. I want my players to succeed and since I only play with a select group of cool gamers (tm), we have a solid group contract about what flies or rather feels narratively good.
So normally the question isn't if the players use their game mechanic resources cunningly enough to achieve their aims;
it is how they will co-create a dramatic scene which allows them to extend the legend of their characters on the basis of their abilities to the narrative benefit of all.
If you stack on their Step ~10 Karma on top of that, you're going to pulp your players.
Good point, yet irrelevant to me. Even before my house rules, which I started to implement with the very appreciated 3rd edition, I never used the monstrous demon karma points. It was never necessary to play their resources in the hardest way possible to create an atmosphere of challenge and threat.
Races have different Karma modifiers, meaning that at higher Circles, some races have significantly more Karma than others.
That balance was IMO hugely skewed from the beginning. So I have little care to reduce the importance of racial karma modifiers. The karma strong races always felt overpowered (except maybe orks), so it not just saves everyone the notetaking, it nerfs the damn humans and windlings.
Strain is meant to be a limiter, which helps build drama, and you've lost that.
In my experience, the stakes of game mechanical limitations inspire less enjoyment in my groups than our verbal cooperative creation of dramatic scenes. Limits rarely appeal to me and I stress again that my group mostly shares my approach.