To clarify a bit, when I said "action categories" I meant "Diplomacy/Martial/Stewardship/Personal/etcetcetc" + "You get 1-2 Diplo actions, 1-2 Martial actions, etc, and you can't use them in any other category" like in the original CK2-esque-sorta systems. There things can get unbalanced and feel empty or pointless; because the GM has to hustle to come up with ideas for all categories turn after turn, or else the AP overtakes or equals the option-count. And even if you have 4 actions to choose from and can pick 3, that's still... you basically can do everything.
And that'll happen to some categories. Things'll just dry up that way.
Whereas with Divided Loyalties or Rhunrikki, you don't have those exact kinds of categorical divisions. Sure, the categories exist to tell you what stats will apply where and to describe what kind of action type it is... but you're not utterly locked in with the actions you have.
This has actually led to a much more fun and engaging experience; things are actually lively! It's... it's unbelievably different, and in a good way, compared to most things.
You think Divided Loyalties has some problems? At least those problems are on the voter side of things. At least that's just disorganization. It'll take "selfish" voting over "hit the 'Next' button to progress the game to the next scene" voting any day of the week. (Votes then become about "interesting" or "event" votes; those are the ones wherein you exercise choice. But meanwhile, the whole set of voting you're doing, is going more or less on automatic. While still giving off a feeling of "These are the choices you made! This is the character you made." so if you do poorly in an event, mini-turn, or campaign, the specter of "Well you should have done something differently/prepared better" comes up except... Except there wasn't much choice involved in there, was there. You're just sort of along for the ride. You can make small, or very large, adjustments but that's it, no real in-between. Customization is sort of out the window.)
Note also that, actually, getting too many AP is far more problematic in the setup I described.
A DL, Ulthuan, or Rhunrikki setup can weather the increase or decrease of AP or options much better; hell, tweaking is even possible to begin with. It just can lead to undesireable voting patterns... but that in itself is a sign of greater fortitude. Give more options or take away, or give, more AP. Hell, you even can notice the problem in the first place! (In the other system... it'd be harder to figure out what category you should strip AP from. Hell, it can be hard to tell what's responsible for the change in feel for some people. And even if you do figure it out... you'd have to overhaul your system. A system which you may have been using for literal years. And across multiple quests. :S And even if you did lower AP, you still have to work to come up with stuff for all 7 categories turn after turn; in a UQ or DL system, you can just add to other categories instead, if you're feeling unsure of what to add to a given category.)
Anyway. To bring things back to Rhunrikki directly...
Let's also keep in mind something very basic and which we have been taking for granter; Snorri didn't necessarily have to end up with productivity/efficiency-boosting traits in the first place!
We don't actually know if we would have seen Productivity Like No Other/Student Of The Odd-esque actions in other character creation sets! And yet, it is these traits (combined with not having tons of AP) that have made things fun and interesting and... game-play-able; the state of having game mechanics and tools to engage with and interact in a game with. (Also, Apprentice Actions when they showed up, and with them having limitations, also kept things interesting!)
And as a second thing... Snorri didn't necessarily have to start with apprentices. So he could have had the full 5 free actions to work with all along.
So 5 AP probably doesn't break things. And if it does? We could tweak it again. Hell, we could tweak it in-universe even due to apprentices, heh. ... ... Although... Actually, I don't think I want to have to choose between "more actions" and "having characters directly in Snorri's day-to-day life to play off of and interact with." I don't want to have to choose between "interesting game and more people to play off of" and "feeling less horrible action-crunch."
Hm. How to solve...
Like... Hm. Hey, what if we got a '1 free per turn' in a category action? Like "pick 1 free action from the 'Requests' category" or "pick 1 free research actions." (... That's, in fact, sort of what Apprentice Actions already are. Which's'neat. Only this time, it would be a Snorri action.) (So we'd have, what... 1 Apprentice Action, 4 Snorri actions and either 1 Free Request or 1 Free Research? Hm, that might be neat. It's even not too different from having multiple Apprentice Actions. Just, these ones would be able to proc the Snorri traits.)
Alright this took me a second to parse.
You're right in that if you have CK2 esque action categories of Diplo/Martial/blah blah blah and you give the players enough actions to make a dent in it, QMs are basically forced to add more and more and so on and so forth. My point aimed at that is that such a dynamic leaves you a player of such a system trying to seek more AP, thus forcing the QM to light more things on fire. And nothing actually really
impacts the scale or amount of Stuff that Needs Doing, just changes the names and costumes of What Needs Doing. It's an actual problem of the CK2 category plus X number of actions per category set up. It is basically tailor made to force people who run it to light stuff on fire constantly.
You are also correct that Divided Loyalties and this quest have more lively structures. But Divided Loyalties has in my opinion a crucial difference from this quest where both the system being used and the voters have a problem. You can't knock things out in Divided Loyalties because Boney has something like 80 different things you could be doing spread across multiple categories and stuff is constantly On Fire. Even though in that quest you have an action pool you distribute between categories, if you put everything into a category in an attempt to knock it out it wouldn't
matter. More stuff would just appear. So people are left to just try and find More AP, even though it effectively means nothing. Even with these systemic issues its still a decent quest.
This issue doesn't happen in this quest because of what we've done to the Request category. Soul isn't immediately filling the requests with Stuff To Do, and when he does it comes with warning like the Defenses for the Underway project. Personally, a system leading to
more undesirable voting states is not a sign of greater fortitude in my mind, its a sign there's something wrong with this damn thing because its generating more failstates than alternatives and whatever it is we're discussing needs fixing. Unless you meant something different from this bit:
It just can lead to undesireable voting patterns... but that in itself is a sign of greater fortitude. Give more options or take away, or give, more AP.
This isn't the case in this quest thankfully.
The thing about Productivity and not ending up with anything I don't have anything to say to, its a kind of "well yeah" topic. Sort of obvious premise. As lead in to your point about 5 AP not breaking the system it makes sense, and I agree! 5 AP wouldn't break anything I don't think. My point that I'm bringing up is that I don't think it would do what you think it will, i.e provide us with choice that we'll actually
take. It will provide us with choice between 4 and 1, 3 and 2, all in 5 action set ups and such like what you described with 2 on requests and 3 on research or exploring. But if we hold to the assumption that people will try to do what they specifically want to do, with as much AP as possible which has support from the 3+ actions on research and 3+ actions on requests dichotomy we are experiencing here then it is pretty clear we won't
take that choice very often.
Which as I said personally isn't much of an issue to me because I do not feel like we are in a crunch because our actions actually meaningfully reduce the Amount of Stuff We Have To Do unlike many other quests so even if we are in a situation where we have a lot of stuff to do and are crunched we will eventually move to a situation where we have less to do. If it comes, we can basically have confidence the crunch will end. Unlike in most other quests I can think of. I also do not feel much like we are unable to use a portion of the mechanics, because we can and will go through all of them in their own turn as time passes and we already have. We may not be able to use a specific combination but that is just personally not a big deal, because I gain having apprentices in return and I like them a
lot.
I will be honest though and say the 1 Free Category action doesn't fire me up very much for a couple of reasons: First, its more bookkeeping, and part of the elegance of this quest's system is its utter lack of complexity. Second, it is basically just asking us to be given a new AP that we can only use on that category but is otherwise identical for free, thus making the choice between "Teach people what you know" and "Do grand things and make esoteric discoveries" which is one of the central choices to being a Runesmith much less meaningful. Particularly because it would bump us up into the 5 action paradigm we've been discussing. I like having this choice.
It actually gives a mechanical impetus to get into Snorri's head and
think like a Runesmith would by asking questions like "is it worth my time to teach, or do, or seek?". And that's touching on an entirely
different discussion about Roleplaying the Character You Are Playing in Questing. Anyway, skipping getting into that today, getting into Snorri's head is well pretty fun! It's sort of the point of making an interactive game/story with a character we all drive around.
Would the system break? No probably not, but in my view it would lead to a less fun state for reasons outlined above.
Our current apprentices have raised our standards. It might take awhile before another one worth our time comes along.
Not mine. We need Apprentices in order to pass along our knowledge, and as a vector for actually DOING things with what we learn they can act as stand ins for us when we can't do something with some bit of knowledge because we're busy. And I like DOING things with what we learn as a general rule.
