FML. It looks like my post was eaten by the internets (currently on a bus and therefore experiencing internets prone to eating things). This is going to be a pain - it was a long post.
Alright. What I had was threefold. First, I responded to what you said about needing to have keep progress at a "moderate" level (as opposed to the WoW-esk scheme). My counterpoint is that whenever you introduce a rule, it should be significant enough for people to care about and make gameplay decisions based off of. If it isn't, the rule is just extra bookkeeping.
In the current income equation, 1 extra point of Shrine gives us an extra 0.4DE per point of Vehemence. Assuming 1 VE on average per turn, it would take
25 Years for for a single level of Shrine to pay for 10DE, which is about as much as we get from an Omake or Two. It just doesn't feel significant. To mitiage this, one of my suggestions was to double the role of Faith/Fear and to get rid of Shrine in the equation. Then, the calc becomes
4*[(5 + Faith)*3 + Pop]/10 for Faith spirits doing Faith income, and
V*4*[(5 + Fear)*2 + Pop]/10 for Fear spirits doing Fear income. It changes the balance of things slightly, but not in any major way, and it makes the rules for the impact of both Shrine and Fear/Faith on income more meaningful - by eliminating the former entirely (so it is no longer a thing to worry about in the first place) and by doubling the latter (so the effect size at least starts
approaching significance).
My second point was in response to your suggestions to move over stuff from Shrine to Faith. I felt that was a bad idea; as is, without a meaningful income component (note: even before the adjustments above, I don't consider the shrine contribution to income meaningful), Shrine is actually reasonably balanced; nerfing it would make it weaker than the other traits. I'd rather have it keep its responsibilities. Plus, thematically, the things you had reassigned to Fear/Faith just felt like thematically Shrine things; in terms of narrative, it seems strange to hacve them switched to be under Fear/Faith.
My final point, and
this is BY FAR the most important one, was a suggestion for how I thought Faith/Fear could be treated to make it meaningful. Namely, tie it to our legend. In particular:
- When we gain Legend, make it Faith/Fear roll instead of an Awe roll. As is, Awe is already super-important as a social-combat roll; it doesn't need to be responsible for Legend gain as well. And thematically, this makes perfect sense - it is the depth of feeling that our people have for us that determine how much our epic actions are remembered and thought about.
- Mechanically, I see this as rolling Fear or Faith/2 for Fearsome actions, and Faith or Fear/2 for "Faith-some" actions. This also lets you distinguish Fear and Faith spirits more by classifying legendary acts as Fear allighed or Faith alligned (and thereby making some epic things more useful for Faith spirits and others more useful for Fear spirits).
- Spirits with Awesome&Fearsome or whatever that thing is called would roll Fear + Faith/2 or Faith + Fear/2 as appropriate.
- Alternatively, you can make it Faith or Fear for the roll, or the larger plus half the smaller for A&E spirits. Or something. That is if you don't want to characterize epic things by alignment.
- The current thing about inspirations being misattributed because of low legend becomes about inspirations being misattributed because of low Faith/Fear.
- When we destroy a shrine, how much we gain from it is a Faith/Fear roll. There is already precedent for this from AN's quest when the spirit-kill roll on avatar-kill from Harzivan's Hunter trait was based off of Faith & Fear.
