As per the subject, I've been wondering if the system would work okay if say, a character's Cunning Die degrades only when failing at a task instead of simply by using it.

Hey Nathan,

I assume you're talking about helping dice here. Just to be clear, dice become impaired in these cases:

1. A simple conflict roll is failed.
2. An ability is used as a helping die (the helping ability is automatically impaired after the roll).

So, if you roll a simple contest of Athletics, your Athletics die becomes impaired if you fail the roll. If you succeed, the ability is not impaired.

If you roll a simple contest of Athletics, and use your Cunning die to help, then your Cunning ability is impaired after the die roll, regardless of whether you succeed or fail.

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Now, I guess you're suggesting that a helping die become impaired only if the contest is failed? Personally, I don't think that will work. Since there's no limit to the number of helping dice you can pile on, a player would have no reason not to roll every single die she had in order to try to succeed and face no impairment.

The opposite case is interesting, though. What if a helping ability only becomes impaired if the contest succeeds? This creates a little anti-whiff effect where the player doesn't lose anything when a helping die doesn't help. I think a change like that would work just fine and would work well for players who dislike the gambling element of helping in Agon.

Thanks for the insight, John.  I'm going to try out "impairing a helping die if the test succeeds" in my upcoming game.

Cool. Let me know how it works for ya.