Pag designs a game... again!

[Paganini]

Jeph,

Thanks for posting the numbers!  You've given me a lot to work with.

Here's the main concern as I see it:

The Passion raising mechanics mainly serve as a balance to the Power dice mechanics. That is, if you lower a Passion to take a Failing and get Power dice, you're eventually going to want to raise that Passion back up. I want Passion increase to be slow enough that the choice between adding Passion dice, and taking a Failing is something the player really has to think about. Yeah, you can lower the Passion and get dice now. The Power loss is a danger, true, but Power regenerates between sessions, so it's not a *lasting* danger. I want there to be a real choice between loads of dice now, and diminished effectiveness for the future.

[Jeph]

One thing to think about is that taking a Failing doesn't really give you "loads" of dice--typically about 3 extra or so, I'd guess. (Side note: as I currently understand it, when you turn to a Failing you get bonus dice from power loss instead of your Passion. Is this correct, or do you get dice from both?) So, the cost of turning to a Failing should probably be worth about 3 bonus dice. Directly, this would be using the passion about three times at its reduced form before it goes back up again. At the moment the original  mechanic is the one which most closely mirrors this rate, although the wait inflates the higher a passion gets...

This specifically is a bit odd in a purely statistical sense, for this reason: the relative benefit for turning to a Failing and the cost change inversely. IE, if you have a high passion, you will effectively gain fewer extra dice, but it will take you longer to get your Passion point back.

Example: I've got the passion of Knitting at 2, and I want to knit socks for the Dragon of Skuthing Deep. However, he has a high standard for his socks, and will kill me if I don't knit satisfactorily, so I turn to Fear and take out the 7th power level, for 7 bonus dice. It will take me 3.6 uses of my Knitting passion to return it to level 2, and I gained 5 extra dice on the roll. That's 1.28 bonus dice per passion use.

Suppose I'd had Knitting at 5. I'll still take out the 7th PL. So, in this case, I only get 2 extra dice on the roll, but it will take me 9 uses to return to my old PL. That's 0.22 bonus dice per passion use, about 1/6 the benefit I'd have gotten were my Passion at 2.

...I'm not sure what my point is. Just more food for thought I guess.
--Jeff

[Daniel Solis]

Each time you lower one of your character's Passions, add one to your character's Saga score. A newly created character has a Saga score of zero. Saga points do not have a during-play function. Instead, Saga points are used when a player is creating a new character to replace a defeated character. After determining the new character's Passions, the player may make a number of Passion improvement rolls (exactly as previously described) equal to the defeated character's Saga score. These rolls may be made on any of the new character's Passions. The only limit on the number of attempt to raise a single passion is the number of improvement rolls available.

This is a very intriguing mechanic for settings where the goal of play is to resolve your character's destiny then passing that experience (to use a well-worn but apt term) to the next generation. I'm imagining some sort of magical dispersal of knowledge at the moment of a character's denoument. Note that I say denoument and not "death" because a character can be retired without killing him off. Unless, of course, the character's death was part of his destiny, in which case one would hope that he would have dealt with his other destinies before resolving that big one.

[Paganini]

Jeph,

You are correct: when a player takes a Failing, he does *not* get dice from the Passion.