[TSoY] Secret of Imbuement

[colin roald]

The Secret of Imbuement says:

Turn an item into a weapon or armor, using the rules found in the Resolution chapter. You can add one weapon or armor rating to the item each time you take this Secret. In addition, you can use this Secret to imbue the item with the power of another Secret. That Secret will have its costs lowered by one pool point. The item can be taken away from you, but you must be given a chance to get it back, or you can roll your advances spent on this Secret into a new item. You can take away someone else's Imbued item, but you'll have to pay the original cost to keep it.

Here are some questions, and my tentative answers.

1.  When you spend an advance on Imbuement, do you have to name the particular item you're Imbuing, right there?  Or does having the Secret give you the ability to Imbue items in general? 

It must be the former.  Otherwise taking Imbuement multiple times would make no sense.

2. It says, "in addition, you can use this Secret to imbue the item with the power of another Secret".  Suppose  I want to Imbue my stylish Indiana Jones hat as +1 armour, and also with a Hidden Pocket.  Does that cost two advances (one to buy Hidden Pocket, one to Imbue the hat as armour and additionally with Hidden Pocket), or three (one to buy Hidden Pocket, one to Imbue the hat as armour, and one to imbue the hat with Hidden Pocket)?

Has to be the latter, right?

3. Suppose I had Secret of the Hidden Pocket, and then I spent an advance to Imbue it into my hat.  And then I lose the hat.  While I'm chasing to recover the hat, can I still use Hidden Pocket the basic way (for 2I), or is it "committed" to the hat now?

I'm inclined to the former, but I guess I could see it either way.

4.  Suppose I want to Imbue "A dagger forged to kill the Potenate of Ammeni, which deals +3 harm in attempts to kill her," like in the example in the book.  Does that cost three advances, or because of the specificity, is that only one advance?

It seems to only make sense to count that as one weapon rating, which happens to be the "+3 in specific situation" option.  So one advance, then.

5.  It says, "You can add one weapon or armor rating to the item each time you take this Secret."  Does that mean that if I spend a second advance, I can Imbue my splendid hat as +2 armour, in all combat situations? 

It must be no.  "Add a rating" means "add an additional situation in which the item counts as a weapon/armour, and a modifier for that situation", not "bump a modifier up by one".

6.  In play, how long does it take to Imbue an item?  If a player has a spare advance lying around, would you let him whip off:  "I Imbue my sword with +3 against this dude right here" at the start of the fight, or do you insist on some kind of story justification for that?  This one isn't so much a rules question, but I'm curious.  I'd tend to want at least a night spent keeping vigil to sanctify the blade, or something similar.

[colin roald]

Oh, and suppose I have a sword, +1 harm in combat, Imbued with Mighty Blow.  Suppose I'm in a swordfight in BDTP.  I roll SL 3, and my opponent rolls SL2, so base harm is one.    The sword adds one to harm, so harm after weapons is 2.  Now I spend a point of Vigor.  Imbuement lowers my cost by one, so effectively that's 2 points, so that should raise the harm level of the hit up to 4, right?

What if I want to use the Imbued Mighty Blow to add one harm level?  Normally that would cost 1 V.  Does having  Mighty Blow imbued mean I now can get that for free?

How about Secret of Disarm?  Normally that costs 1 V, flat.  If I Imbue that, is it now free whenever I want it?

[Eero Tuovinen]

Some pretty weird questions there. Here's my take:

1: as you say.

2: it's certainly not three, that'd be abysmally weak. You should read the Secret of Imbuement as giving the benefit of another secret at -1 cost. As the secret reads: "imbue the item with the power of another Secret." You're not actually dealing with the original secret, only it's power (which could in some situations form a basis for interesting rules-lawyering, if you tried to use an imbued secret to fulfill a requisite or bypass one). Why this makes sense: The game assumes that having a Secret in an item is a drawback (classic gamer think, as there's the possibility of misplacing the item), and thus the imbuement itself is not a benefit at all; the actual benefit is the -1 discount. Interestingly enough, I clarified this in the Finnish version by splitting the Secret of Imbuement into two secrets, one dealing with the equipment ratings and one with the imbued secrets. Easier to understand that way.

3: of course you can't use the Secret, it's in the hat. Likewise, if somebody else has your hat, he gets to use it. The system is very concrete and realistic in this regard, you only use items you actually have in your possession. That's the whole point of the discount in the secret, you get it because you suffer the risk of not having the item available. Regarding this: I read the "you'll have to pay the original cost to keep it" in the secret description to mean that you pay the cost if you keep the item in a "permanent manner". Thus I can loan my magic sword to my brother when he goes to war (one conflict), for example, without us shuffling advances. Likewise, if I'm a thief and steal your hat, I can benefit from it until I decide whether I want to keep it. Only permanent ownership counts.

4: this is apparently unclear in the English rules, because it's been asked multiple times. The answer is that all equipment ratings, whether +1, +2 or +3, are handled equally; you pay once to imbue with any rating. There is no relationship nor synergy between different ratings in the same item, except for the limitation of having only a certain number of ratings in one item.

5: you're certainly right. Anything else would, again, be unbalanced.

6: I require in-game justification for unexpected ratings, but it can be a flashback or anything, as long as it makes some sense. This depends very much on the style of the campaign and the conception of equipment bonuses. If you consider a +2 against heavy armor, for example, a "magical" bonus, then you might well want some exceptional explanation. If it's tacitly assumed that all suitable equipment has these bonuses (even if they don't, rules-wise), then it doesn't make sense to ask a player to justify it. So most of the time the principle of immediacy (that is, players can spend advances whenever they want) rules.

The rest of the questions: the cost is deducted by one. So you get a 1-point Mighty Blow for free, 2-point for 1 and so on. Likewise, you get the Disarm for free. This is exactly the same situation you have with threecorner spells, which can have multiple discounts: if you reduce the price to 0, you can use the spell or item at will.

[JMendes]

Hey, :)

I'm going to disagree with Eero's answer #3. I believe that if you already had the Secret of Hidden Pocket, you don't "lose" it just because you imbue an item with it. In other words, if you buy Secret of Imbuement for the purpose of sticking Hidden Pocket in your hat, you will now have access to two forms of Hidden Pocket, one in yourself for 2 instinct and one in the hat for 1 instinct. If you lose the hat, you lose the latter, but you still have the former, always had it, always will.

Cheers,
J.

[Eero Tuovinen]

You're right, actually. I didn't read the question carefully enough. I suppose that if you really had the secret twice for some reason, then you could certainly use it either way. Likewise, if you had two hats imbued with the secret, losing one of them wouldn't affect the other. So read my answer as pertaining to the situation where you'd only have the secret in the hat.

[colin roald]

Mental glitch, there.  For some reason it didn't occur to me that you could Imbue a secret (or the effects of a secret) that you didn't already have.

[Clinton R. Nixon]

Oh, and suppose I have a sword, +1 harm in combat, Imbued with Mighty Blow.  Suppose I'm in a swordfight in BDTP.  I roll SL 3, and my opponent rolls SL2, so base harm is one.    The sword adds one to harm, so harm after weapons is 2.  Now I spend a point of Vigor.  Imbuement lowers my cost by one, so effectively that's 2 points, so that should raise the harm level of the hit up to 4, right?

What if I want to use the Imbued Mighty Blow to add one harm level?  Normally that would cost 1 V.  Does having  Mighty Blow imbued mean I now can get that for free?

How about Secret of Disarm?  Normally that costs 1 V, flat.  If I Imbue that, is it now free whenever I want it?

I almost wrote out a whole justification, but honestly - you got me. This combination never occured to me before. Here's what I'd rule, as a GM:

- I'd rule that you can't stack a general +1 harm with Secret of Mighty Blow, as they have the same effect.
- I'd rule you could use the Secret of Disarm for free with that sword, certainly, but you'll have to use as action, as normal.

[shadowcourt]

Clinton,

The whole "free disarm" thing got me thinking-- I would be worried about people becoming disarm maniacs, where it becomes their one trick which they do all the time. Sometimes the pool costs can keep characters from becoming one-trick ponies, though perhaps its using the rules to fix a player issue. I've certainly noticed that in some games (D&D springs to mind), grabbing a feat option which spices up the use of disarm, trip, or sunder attacks makes it people's go-to manuever in most situations, which sometimes leads to the terrible in-game spiral of building opponents specially made to thwart those options just to get a decent melee on. And that sometimes feels cheap, particularly towards the player who bothered to spend feat slots or advances or whatever in-game currency for advancement to get these cool options. And convincing them to "please not use their cool gimmick all the time" feels just as lame; why give someone an option which is so good you're worried they'll overuse it?

Particularly as disarming or breaking weapons via Secrets in TSOY doesn't require any additional oomph out of the dice roll (just the expenditure of pool points), I'd be worried about eliminating the last element of cost.

I'm sometimes tempted to house-rule in those situations that Imbuement (or other similar options) shouldn't reduce the cost of another Secret to zero. That said, I can definitely conceive of people taking "spell" Secrets using Three-Corner Magic to reduce cool effects to a total cost of zero, so maybe I'm being a hypocrite.

Maybe this is a more complex issue that I'm dipping my toe into here. Anyone else want to sound off about similar situations they've encountered, and possible solutions?

[Miedvied]

I should ask, first, whether imbue has ever actually *led* to people being one trick ponies. If this has not happened in actual play, I would suggest we may be finding a problem where there is one. It doesn't even seem a problem to me - at worst, you're stealing a few points of auto-harm from an opponent, which can be mitigated by his picking up *most any other weapon* (granted, for something like a +1 instead of whatever power he was packing).

Second, it's worth pointing out that other Secrets can be reduced to a cost of 0 using imbue. This could lead to a wide variety of lower-power "one tricks" available to players. If they wish to plow their advances into giving themselves a utility belt of lower-end freebie powers... cool! Not to mention that the imbue is linked to an object itself which, as I'm sure everyone's already thought of, can itself be disarmed (though I wouldn't over-use this option, as I think it'd be mean to steal a player's move from him frequently if he paid up for it).

Third, it seems to me that this is precisely what imbue was for. I see from Clinton's comment that this is not so, but it was how I read the secret from the word go, and without that particular use, it seems to lose some of its utility to me. Sure, you can use it to design complex enchanted items, but I never even understood the depth of its use until Clinton outlined some possible magical items that could be built with it. To me, it was always meant to turn other secrets into freebie powers.

Anyway, I think it's cool to let players invest in giving themselves free-to-use trademark moves, and keeping this from being abused seems to me much more a social contract issue than a rules issue. For all that it matters, you can invent a "resist disarm" secret without stealing the player's thunder (by making it cost the NPC vigor points - if the NPC has no pool, he's not important enough to be able to resist the player's disarm). For that matter, you can then feel free to try and disarm the player of his cool weapon, 'cause he can use a secret to resist that.

I've gone on, all nonsensical on post-gym high. Bottom line seems to me that if this problem has so far only been observed in theory, and considering this is more social contract than rules problem, ... let it ride, baby.

[Eero Tuovinen]

I'm not seeing a problem. Whenever a certain combination of secrets comes to dominate play, it's soon enough that somebody invents a new set of secrets and abilities to deal with it. You could say that the rules are predicated on this process; secret of disarm can be seen as a start of a whole tree of secrets, with all the rest of it only implicated. If your game is high on complex duels and swashbuckling, you'll probably explore these options, and if not, you'll never need to know what those advanced disarm/anti-disarm tactics would consist of.

To give an idea of the enormous differences in play emphasis: would you believe that in the majority of the games I've played, we've had almost no imbued items at all? The most common weapon bonus in my games has been the +1 GM discretion bonus. Consequently nobody's even considered the Secret of Disarm. On the other hand, threecorner magic and uptenbo have been a big deal in most cases, as well as elf Past Lives comboing. Consequently those are things we've developed, while neglecting many other rules options.

More generally, I find it foolish to worry about player activities. Better to play with a computer if you don't trust your friends to play well, consider feedback and try their best to make the game fun.