Re: Game Discussion

[Daveth Coldbrook]

Status(Breeding) is a lot more useful than Will(courage), so I reasoned that difference should make up for less stuff.

Yeah, which is why I was suggesting it be mostly a flavour thing - the mechanical balance was fine, it was just the ... narrative balance, I suppose? that felt 'off'. But that's probably just my brain fixating on strange things, as it is wont to do, so I wouldn't worry too much about it.

[Baelon Drakeson]

Status(Breeding) is a lot more useful than Will(courage), so I reasoned that difference should make up for less stuff.

Yeah, which is why I was suggesting it be mostly a flavour thing - the mechanical balance was fine, it was just the ... narrative balance, I suppose? that felt 'off'.  But that's probably just my brain fixating on strange things, as it is wont to do, so I wouldn't worry too much about it.

I think Dedication is a better fit than Breeding - Breeding is about knowing how to comport yourself in high society (proper decorum, basically), and can be purely an act. Dedication, on the other hand, is about holding true to something - like the Andal ideals of a proper lady.

That might leave PL a hair short mechanically, but I think that can be easily remedied - a +2 bonus to Persuasion tests (or maybe +1 Influence) when defending against false accusations of improper behavior would be powerful enough to be attractive but situational enough not to be disruptive.

[Daveth Coldbrook]

More random pedantry! This time from the 'Cast of Thousands' page.

Ser Walton Wyl: 'For this House Wyl earned some enmity from the Yronwoods, whose domains were severely ravaged'

Leo Tyrell: 'some whispering that he is a glory hound whose only redeeming quality'

Margarey Tyrell: 'her grandson's inclination to openly support Daemon Blackfyre.'

Butterbumps: 'Some say that the fool of Highgarden mimics the high septon in that he gives up his given name in favor of Butterbumps and each is then referred to in accordance to their quirks. This one is known simply as the dwarf.'
Confused. Is he referred to as 'Butterbumps', or 'the dwarf'?

Alicent Yronwood: 'she seems to delight in keeping such hopes alive.'

Reynald Florent: 'as knights compensating for lacking in other departments.'

Aemon Flowers: 'The natural nephew of Lord Florent and a great bastard besides, an accomplished, handsome and well spoken knight that earned his spurs from Lord Leo Tyrell, he turns the head of many a young lady, and many a lord would be inclined to grant him the hand of a daughter.'
I admit this one is simply one example, but seriously, that entire paragraph is a *single* sentence! May I suggest:
'The natural nephew of Lord Florent and a great bastard besides. An accomplished, handsome and well-spoken knight that earned his spurs from Lord Leo Tyrell, he turns the head of many a young lady, and many a lord would be inclined to grant him the hand of a daughter.'
Many, many others could also do with having commas replaced with full stops, especially at the end of the first, introductory would-be sentence.

Jon Hightower: 'His first marriage produced no heirs, and his first wife died under mysterious circumstances invoking the enmity of Cider Hall, he chose his second wife, having given birth to two healthy bastards widely believed to be King Aegon IV's get, for her proven fertility, and she has granted him four sons and a daughter to carry out his line. His main concern is that his grandson and heir is a boy of five. '
Am I correct in inferring that his first wife was a Fossoway? Or did Cider Hall take umbrage for some other reason? If so, I'd like to suggest the following instead:
'His first marriage produced no heirs, and his first wife, a Fossoway, died under mysterious circumstances, invoking the enmity of Cider Hall. He chose his second wife for her proven fertility, her having previously given birth to two healthy bastards, widely believed to be King Aegon IV's get. She has repaid this choice by granting him four sons and a daughter to carry out his line. His main concern is that, after his eldest son died in a hunting accident, his heir is a boy of five. '

Roland Redwyne: 'the finest knight in Westeros as far as the Reach is concerned'

Desmond Bridges: 'The shift has been positively felt' 'Ser Desmond is a deeply serious man. His half-Dornish blood resulted in him gaining few friends, and much mockery. As a result, he rarely smiles and lives a strict life with few luxuries.'

Normyn Flowers: 'being the champion of the house and the leader of its forces'

Owen Roxton: ' in the heat of battles and melees as earned him his moniker', ' Though with two daughters as his only heirs'

Aerion Baratheon: 'Lord Baratheon's uncle, and champion of Storm's End, believed to be nearly the equal of Ser Daemon Blackfyre. He earned his moniker by being first in the wedge that smashed the lines of House Yronwood during the conquest of Dorne, so that the king's army could march on Sunspear.'

Otho Bracken: 'he has a reputation as a formidable and dangerous participant in the melee' The original French was 'mêlée', but the Anglicised variant is typically accent-less.

Since those are the important ones, I'll leave it there.

[Gwyneth Drakeson]

SHAME! SHAME! SHAME!

[Theomore Tullison]

Having the queen walk naked through KL is not on the GB agenda.

[Baelon Drakeson]

Not on your agenda maybe... but I could see that being an attractive scheme to certain Great Bastards.

[Baelon Drakeson]

ping?

[Theomore Tullison]

Tinkered some, having tonnes of RL stuff that piled up, though were I left off is something like 90% ready, so I ought to get it done before Winds of Winter.

[Baelon Drakeson]

I understand how RL stuff can be, I wish you well with that.

Also, way to set a low bar and twist the knife at the same time...

[Theomore Tullison]

I also realized that I need to write a proper IC prologue, something Southron Ambitions did starting each in-game day with an IC story from an NPC PoW. And in GRRM's books, the PoW-character always dies in the prologue. I have a few written up and a few planned, though it's not absolutely critical to have one of those to kick off every change of day.

[Baelon Drakeson]

Every game day might be a bit much... if nothing else, it's one more thing you are tasking yourself with on top of everything else.

Ramble ramble ramble...:

TL;DR - it might be worth considering what the purpose of these prologues are, and how players are supposed to interact with them (if at all) - they can be powerful or problematic, and may or may not be worth the effort.

[Theomore Tullison]

Just realized I actually only have two prepared, aside from the lousy prologue, and both of those are direct preludes to breaking IC news. The other pre-written stuff are supposed to happen in actual IC-threads where PC's are present (or at least those scenes would play out where PC's are likely to be present). I don't think I want to prep any more such PoW tales from NPC's aside from something to open up day 1, if the PoW dies he'll need to be a nobody or the whole thing happening outside the Reach, and now I have three ideas as to whom I might kill, the PoW character in my lousy first draft for prologue has been given enough DP to survive through everything he will survive through should the story proceed exactly as World of Ice and Fire says it does.

Might write more of those if I get inspiration, but I am not putting it on the list of necessities, there's enough plots and agendas in play already among the NPC's that I started to push new ideas into it's own folder for stuff which might happen if the game survives past the tourney of Highgarden.

[Theomore Tullison]

It also seems that the imagehost-site I used decided to go poof, but I made a backup for all the portraits (at least all the portraits I had when I made the backup).

[Baelon Drakeson]

I know this is not really a priority for you right now, but I wanted to put this out there before I forgot about it.

Some thoughts on Figthing & armor:
In general, having an attribute at 4 is plenty. Sure, you aren't likely to beat someone with a 5 in a direct competition, but otherwise a 4 is quite sufficient to adequately perform. The one notable exception is Fighting.

Let's take a look at an example. A fairly typical knightly opponent would have a 10 CD and 10 AR (3 Agility and Awareness, 4 Athletics, Full Plate and Large Shield). A fairly typical attacker would have Athletics 4 and a Longsword for 5 Damage per DoS. That means to get past the 10 AR of the opponent, 3 DoS are needed, and thus a roll of 20or higher. With Fighting 4 and 2b in Long Blades, there is only a 26.38% chance of doing any damage whatsoever. To me, this is problematic - 5s should be areas of significant expertise for a starting character, not a minimum needed to be reasonably effective. Further, it constrains any character who is supposed to be combat-proficient into either having Fighting 5 or to use specific combat techniques or weapons (Reckless Attack, 2h weapons, Benefits, etc).

I see two ways to address this:
First, you could lower CDs. For instance, returning Full Plate to it's by-the-book -6 AP would raise the chance of getting 3 DoS to 50.76%, which is reasonable. However, there are reasons that the Full Plate change was made - it was arguably not the best option for defense, which seemed odd at best.

Second, you could lower AR. Lowering plate from 10 to 8 would mean that even a 2 DoS hit (81.27% chance) would do a little, and a 3 DoS hit would be a major success, though not a 1-hit defeat.

I think the latter makes more sense. Really, I'd just reduce the list of armors from 14 specific armors to 4 categories, leaving the rest up to description:

Armors:

Finally, if my math is right it is possible for a Master to have Knightly Chivalry and 3 attributes at 5 (so long as one is Fighting and the other two are also attributes required for Knightly Chivalry).
it might not be a bad idea to do one or more of the following:
*Increase the cost of a 5 Attribute
*Reduce the amount of Attribute experience given
*Explicitly limit characters to at most 1 5.

[Theomore Tullison]

Hmm, Standard KoQ has athletics 3, so CD 9 in general, and fighting 4. Longsword gets a +1 damage bonus on horseback (another +2 if stationary), so it should mostly add up to how you describe, but the extra mounted bonus dice skewers the probabilities up to a 75% shot at a 3 DoS. At athletics 4 you're dealing 6 damage per DoS (8 if stationary), I think the problem mostly arises with a character more min-maxed for fighting taking on someone that's mostly average.

The only people fighting on foot in full plate are either PC's or knocked off their horses.

[Theomore Tullison]

I think I'd be leaning more towards making some weapons better able to deal with armor than to lower it's effectiveness, there probably should also be rules about how a mob of peasants might gang on a single knight to pull him to the ground, drag off his helmet and stab him in the eye. That's how peasants deal with full plate. Maybe that's called warfare rules.

[Baelon Drakeson]

Hmm. Forgot to take into account the mounted bonuses and updated weaponry. Really, that makes the attribute situation way worse... with 5s in Fighting and Athletics you'd be looking at about a 92.5% chance to one-shot a plate-wearing, Endurance 4 opponent with a longsword...

Animal Handling 2+, Athletics 5, Fighting 5(Long Blades 3b); 10d6k5 vs CD 10 has a 92.48% chance of getting a result of 20+ for 3 DoS, 9 damage per DoS (stationary) is 27-10AR = 17 damage, forcing an Injury... if they can take one. It's worth noting that there's a 49.68% chance of 4 DoS.

Or take 3b in strength and a morningstar and do "only" 8/DoS, but be able to do it while moving.

Oh, and it's doable as an Apprentice while still qualifying for Knightly Chivalry...

[Theomore Tullison]

Yay, rocket tag, I did put in a line somewhere about players likely to be asked to not have Fighting and Athletics both at 5 if they submit a concept with that. I think I also added something about such characters finding a big target on their back for all the schemers in the rogue gallery to pursue, there's a couple of hundred tertiary nobles and courtiers around that can talk a PC that has crammed all his XP into combat way deep into trouble, while the number of NPC's that could match such a PC in a fight who isn't a big shot living legend is rather small. The other risk one runs by making that sort of character and mostly only interested in simply doing fighting and nothing else is that I might have zero motivation going out of my way to help make your story interesting.

In other news, I got my little intro written down, managed to drop the quotes about the present state of politics and what's at stake at the tourney that I wanted into it, also managed to kill the PoV character, which I also wanted. Going to give players some OOC knowledge of stuff their PC's never will find out, and it does tie into a subplot which mostly concerns the potential sequel chronicle of sorts.

Other than that, I could theoretically go fix up all those avatars that seems to have gone poof (Hopefully my backups haven't gone poof), set up IC forums, edit and add some rumors in the grab-bag to account for the little intro story, decide that the rest of my to-do list is stuff I can fix on the fly, or not bother with in the first place. But it's out of the question to launch anything before second week of June because I have exams and stuff, though maybe I get so bored with econometrics* and feel the need to do some creative stuff or maybe not.

*econometrics is actually fun, studying for exams, not so much.

[Daveth Coldbrook]

Other than that, I could theoretically go fix up all those avatars that seems to have gone poof (Hopefully my backups haven't gone poof), set up IC forums, edit and add some rumors in the grab-bag to account for the little intro story, decide that the rest of my to-do list is stuff I can fix on the fly, or not bother with in the first place.

After all that time and effort, I feel the least I can offer is a hearty 'congratulations'. It's a real achievement to even get this far.

[Baelon Drakeson]

Other than that, I could theoretically go fix up all those avatars that seems to have gone poof (Hopefully my backups haven't gone poof), set up IC forums, edit and add some rumors in the grab-bag to account for the little intro story, decide that the rest of my to-do list is stuff I can fix on the fly, or not bother with in the first place.

After all that time and effort, I feel the least I can offer is a hearty 'congratulations'.  It's a real achievement to even get this far.

Agreed.

Yay, rocket tag, I did put in a line somewhere about players likely to be asked to not have Fighting and Athletics both at 5 if they submit a concept with that. I think I also added something about such characters finding a big target on their back for all the schemers in the rogue gallery to pursue, there's a couple of hundred tertiary nobles and courtiers around that can talk a PC that has crammed all his XP into combat way deep into trouble, while the number of NPC's that could match such a PC in a fight who isn't a big shot living legend is rather small. The other risk one runs by making that sort of character and mostly only interested in simply doing fighting and nothing else is that I might have zero motivation going out of my way to help make your story interesting.

That may be so, however the same point applies to intrigue specialists, or jousters, etc. Further, while an apprentice with 5 fighting & athletics wouldn't be able to have much more, a master can have decent intrigue stats too, with 4 persuasion, 4 awareness, and the benefits of knightly chivalry to boost them.

The simplest solution would be to limit starting characters to only having one 5. Alternatively, have the cost of attributes scale up faster (or just boost the cost of 5+).
10/30/60/90/120 would leave most characters relatively untouched (10 more xp for a 5, if they even have one) but means that an apprentice with knightly chivalry, 5 fighting & athletics would have exactly 0 xp for anything else, leaving them rather vulnerable even in combat (a more balanced character would likely win initiative and tag them first). A master could do the same and shore up some of their combat weaknesses, but not be oppressive in combat (or other area of specialty) and hold their own in another.

[Theomore Tullison]

I added a soft-cap provision in character creation, with some examples of what probably won't pass muster. Healing, Knowledge, Survival or Warfare at 5 can probably go together with any other ability at 5 without me being concerned about it, but there are combos that are probably best avoided.

[Davain Bartheld]

Maybe you can tie in the amount of stats at 5 to what level of character they are starting out at, ie apprentice can have 1, journeyman 2, master 3.

[Baelon Drakeson]

My preference has always been for hard rules than soft caps, but that's a matter of preference I suppose.
I like that you explain why.

[Daveth Coldbrook]

Minor query: what happens if someone takes both Romantic and Naive?

Also, and I appreciate this is a holdover from the base game, and a non-trivial fix, but I note there are several benefits/flaws that have an impact on a complex intrigue, but none on a simple intrigue (e.g. Marked, Weak Willed). Just seems a bit strange to me that it would have an impact on a long conversation, but not a short one*.

*Yes, that's a simplification of the difference, but I think the point stands.

[Baelon Drakeson]

I note there are several benefits/flaws that have an impact on a complex intrigue, but none on a simple intrigue (e.g. Marked, Weak Willed).

OK, I started writing up a suggestion as to how it could be done, but then i thought about there maybe being a better way to handle simple intrigue that would solve most of it anyway, then I reread the rulebook entry on simple intrigue and realized that I might have had the mechanics of simple intrigue wrong in the first place.

So - my understanding of a simple intrigue - what I thought we had done here, but honestly can't remember - is that it was an opposed persuasion/deception test, higher wins. No Intrigue Defense, Disposition modifier, no DR, nothing. Or maybe it was just a single test against Intrigue Defense? We didn't really use it much so I don't remember. Either way, things like DR and Influence per DoS just didn't come into play.

My thought was to make it instead basically half a round of intrigue - the initiating character takes a single Influence action with all the normal modifiers. If it does at least 1 point of  Influence, the intrigue is won. Perhaps allow the defender to take a single point of frustration to reduce the Influence, as DR tends to be fairly low - some number crunching should be done on this though.

When I reread the Simple intrigue entry (pg 141), I became convinced that this is more or less what was intended all along. On 141 a simple intrigue is stated to be one exchange, and one test. On page 139 an exchange is defined as each participant taking one action. This indicates to me that a simple intrigue should be using the actions as written. On pg 149 the Influence action includes the Influence calculation, including DR. There is no example of a simple intrigue, which (a)makes it hard to verify this, but (b) lends credence to it as the authors did not deem it worthy of including an example - because the mechanics are pretty much the same as a standard intrigue, so it would be redundant.

This solves (at least most) of Daveth's concern, as with the exception of composure, every intrigue derived stat comes into play. Therefore any benefit/drawback that affects something other than composure can have it's usual effect. If you allow the defender to take a point of Frustration, even Weak Willed has an effect.

EDIT: the Frustration option does not work with your revised frustration - as written the revised form either restores composure (meaning it can't be reactively used to stop a defeat) or prevents ALL Influence (meaning a simple intrigue would always fail). Side note, the Weak Willed drawback seems to have been written with the book version of Frustration in mind, and does not actually work with the revised Frustration. I must say i do not like the revised version - it is confusing (two effects with two different penalties but the same name, a bookkeeping nightmare) and while I dislike that book intrigues are often effectively determined by who forces the first frustration, i feel like this revised form will cause intrigues to drag on longer without actually solving that problem.

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