Okay, so here's an actual critique of the Styles mechanics, both pros and cons.
I'll elaborate on these to illustrate what I was thinking when we built this thing, eh.
Unless I have missed it somewhere, Styles are purely Quantitative, based on Dice; Everything is +X to or in Y Context. Qualitative, by contrast, are phrases like 'you may parry lethal or ranged damage without a stunt'.
Because this would have, yet again, moved us into the realm of having to judge exception-packets against exception-packets to determine what is or is not broken, because you would need to have unique qualitative effects per style. A dice-adder is a dice-adder is a dice-adder, so to speak:
every style which exists and which could possibly ever exist takes up the testing/"does this fucking break lol" resources of... a non-charm +1 dice adder and +1 conditional success adder. It's reasonable to say that this definitionally cannot break anything, so we're pretty safe on that part.
Styles offer an illusion of a broader approach. It seemingly makes tactics more viable, but rarely offers truly outstanding differences. It convinces a player to act in a specific manner, but the rewards for that manner are meager at best.
It's primary utility becomes increasingly less useful as more dice are added to the pool. +2 dice for a mortal is notable. +2-3 for an Exalt is less notable. Especially in context of Excellencies.*
Uh, this isn't actually true: look at the dice probability tables. Four dice is a lot even when you're throwing around 20-odd dice in your attack pool. +4 dice or +2 DV can move your to-hit probability from a nice even 55% at 24 dice vs DV 12 down to 32% at 24 dice vs DV 14, losing what approaches a good 1/3 to 1/2 of your hit rate, for example. Or push your hit rate up from 55% at 20 dice vs DV 10 to 77% at 24 dice vs DV 10, on the other side of things. This is absolutely not trivial.
Due to how the dice work, you always have a
very strong systemic incentive to stunt/style, even if you're running Infinite Ability Mastery at +10.
Styles are presented in such a way as to discourage further expansion. Players can make new styles all they want, but are not yet encouraged to progress beyond those mechanics. **
Yes, because only a crazy person would try to balance a game system around "you can create whatever style you want which fits your character's personal flair" and "this is a CCG-like exception-based system which is balanced enough for CCG-like fights" where "create a style" also means "write new Magic cards which don't break the game". That's impossible unless you're me, or you, or someone equally experienced with the system, which is totally unreasonable to expect. So I cut "you can define your character's personal flair" away from "your character's personal flair may require you to write new Magic cards which don't break the game", deliberately.
Projected style mechanics which may exist in development and/or the future tie mostly to "do you have one" and "can you apply it" conditions attached to pretty strong/useful native charms. To extend the Magic metaphor, these cards are not written by the player, they are written by R&D. The player can choose the name, the card art and the flavour text, but not the effect.
Styles fall victim to what is best described as memetic tunnel vision: Their names and concepts are repeated until they become take beyond archetypes or useful shorthand, into 'facts' and concrete terms. They reduce active thought and consideration due to their nature, in the same vein as quotable soundbites. They can be remembered easily with a quip, but Styles run the risk of becoming the quip.
This isn't a mechanical issue, so I can't address it. Do you think this is mechanically solvable for you given the aforementioned constraints?
Styles themselves are a Basic Math solution to a Conceptual problem, which in my mind is best articulated as this: Charms were originally envisioned as a deck of TCG cards, and you were allowed to build your own as you saw fit. unlike most healthy TCG (competitive) gameplay environments, cards were almost never phased out, nor were restrictions leveled on their potential combinations at a systemic level. Example being, you weren't restricted to a single damage-adder charm per combo, even if you had 10 damage adder charms available.
Not... quite. Styles are a solution to a problem where I really needed to keep a conceptual/thematic element in the game but the mechanical subsystem attached to that concept was toxic radioactive cancer. In terms of allowing me to retain the former and happily divest myself of the latter, they work flawlessly.
IMO, "You are allowed to make your own" always came with the caveat "so long as you know what you're bloody well doing", and this is, well, not that common.
