Break-point when reaching mastery?

[Alan]

Has anyone experienced in play the lack of difference between 19 and 20?  Is a rules "fix" really worth the effort, or are we just indulging the impulse to tweak?

That also would differentiate a 20 from a 1w.

There's already a difference: 1w is 21.  A roll of one scores a critical and gets a mastery bump.

With a score of 20, a roll of one scores a critical, but doesn't get the mastery bump.

[Mike Holmes]

Gelasma,

No idea where you're getting those figures from. Here's what I get:

Code Select Expand

                    10      20      1W
Complete Defeat  29.50%   9.25%   7.00%
Major Defeat     41.00%  41.00%  42.75%
Minor Defeat     24.75%  42.75%  41.00%
Marginal Defeat   0.00%   0.00%   0.00%
Tie               0.00%   0.00%   0.00%
Marginal Victory  4.50%   6.75%   6.75%
Minor Victory     0.25%   0.25%   2.25%
Major Victory     0.00%   0.00%   0.25%
Complete Victory  0.00%   0.00%   0.00%
The odds are for a character with an ability at the top of a column, going up against a 2W10 opponent.

The character in question does have an increase in Major defeats, but this is less than the drop in Complete defeats. Minor Defeats go down, Minor Victories go up, and Major Victories become possible.

It's always better to go up, in general terms. Yes, for specific results there may be an increase of that sort, or a decrease in terms of a positive result, but always because something else is getting better somewhere else. If we were to weight these with a value from -4 to +4, the expected value of the outcome always increases.

In fact, I think that the opposite is actually true - that the increaese in success rates is actually higest spending to cross the mastery barrier. I could run an analysis if anyone thought this was important.

But to confirm what Alan suspects, in actual play I've never seen anyone consider where their ability is at in terms of whether or not to increase it. If anything, just getting to put that little rune mastery in there is a psychological reward at that level. But again, nothing that I've seen that's biased anything (I don't see more 1W scores than you'd expect from a random distribution.

Mike