[X] Roil Waters - You bend the waters to your command against your enemies, sending larger waves at the settlement near you, or creating deadly sprays and whirlpools that will capsize any boat they dare put upon the surface of your waters. Costs: 5 DE
[X] Calm Waters - You calm the waves and direct the currents for those under your care, ensuring the boats that travel your surface are safe and see greater success in their endeavors. Costs: 5 DE
[X] Roil Waters - You bend the waters to your command against your enemies, sending larger waves at the settlement near you, or creating deadly sprays and whirlpools that will capsize any boat they dare put upon the surface of your waters. Costs: 5 DE
[X] Calm Waters - You calm the waves and direct the currents for those under your care, ensuring the boats that travel your surface are safe and see greater success in their endeavors. Costs: 5 DE
[X] Calm Waters - You calm the waves and direct the currents for those under your care, ensuring the boats that travel your surface are safe and see greater success in their endeavors. Costs: 5 DE
[X] Bless Petitioner for Sacrifices - Expend some of your DE to empower those who come to your shrine or pray to you in exchange for more offerings. Current Skills that can be blessed: Astrology.
-[X] Expend 4 DE on petitioners
[X] Calm Waters - You calm the waves and direct the currents for those under your care, ensuring the boats that travel your surface are safe and see greater success in their endeavors. Costs: 5 DE
[X] Bless Petitioner for Sacrifices - Expend some of your DE to empower those who come to your shrine or pray to you in exchange for more offerings. Current Skills that can be blessed: Astrology.
-[X] Expend 5 DE on petitioners
[X] Calm Waters - You calm the waves and direct the currents for those under your care, ensuring the boats that travel your surface are safe and see greater success in their endeavors. Costs: 5 DE
I don't like the roil/calm combo. Primarily because as our first action on the blank slate that is our spirit there are people wanting to make us capricious and unstable.
I don't like the roil/calm combo. Primarily because as our first action on the blank slate that is our spirit there are people wanting to make us capricious and unstable.
[X] Bless Petitioner for Sacrifices - Expend some of your DE to empower those who come to your shrine or pray to you in exchange for more offerings. Current Skills that can be blessed: Astrology.
-[X] Expend 5 DE on petitioners
[X] Calm Waters - You calm the wavesand direct the currents for those under your care, ensuring the boats that travel your surface are safe and see greatersuccess in their endeavors. Costs: 5 DE
[X] Roil Waters - You bend the waters to your command against your enemies, sending larger waves at the settlement near you, or creating deadly sprays and whirlpools that will capsize any boat they dare put upon the surface of your waters. Costs: 5 DE
[X] Calm Waters - You calm the waves and direct the currents for those under your care, ensuring the boats that travel your surface are safe and see greater success in their endeavors. Costs: 5 DE
Avatar Actions (Disabled, no avatar) [] Form Avatar (0 Ambrosia) (Avatar 0, cannot form an Avatar)
[] Study Stars - Study the skies and stars, seeking patterns that will tell you what was, what is, and what may yet be. -[] Read the Future
-[] Read the Past
-[] Scry the Present - See distant places as they are, reflected by the stars above. NOTE: Option available only while Avatar is 0. Costs: 1d5+2 DE
It seems strange to mark a section as "disabled" when just under half the options remain available...
More pertinently, would you consider using a different color for the disabled options? Maybe the medium-dark purple or something? Or the medium grey? As it stands, the medium-dark grey you use is all of one shade off of the default black text used in the FlexWhite skin, and it makes it rather difficult to make out which options are "off".
Final note. One thing I learned from the original Amber Age quest was that variable cost actions are a pain. For the plan-makers, it makes plan-making more complicated and error prone while simultaneously making it trickier to do small adjustments. For prospective plan makers and voters in general, it makes the planning step less relatable overall, since the "true" costs of actions are somewhat obscured by the mechanic. Finally, for the QM, it adds an extra step that needs to be taken care of each turn, and can easily be screwed up.
Conversely, I don't really see the mechanic making the game more fun overall; the type of risk involved in cost rolls just doesn't feel particularly exciting (especially once we start rolling a large number of dice there), and if something fails it feels more like a car breaking down than a difficult challenge that needs to be overcome - not only unpleasant, but also mundane.
Anyway, that is just my 2c. It is your quest, so the question is totally up to you - but I would diverge from the orginal Amber Age along this particular axis.
[X] Bless Petitioner for Sacrifices - Expend some of your DE to empower those who come to your shrine or pray to you in exchange for more offerings. Current Skills that can be blessed: Astrology.
-[X] Expend 5 DE on petitioners
[X] Calm Waters - You calm the wavesand direct the currents for those under your care, ensuring the boats that travel your surface are safe and see greatersuccess in their endeavors. Costs: 5 DE
[X] Bless Petitioner for Sacrifices - Expend some of your DE to empower those who come to your shrine or pray to you in exchange for more offerings. Current Skills that can be blessed: Astrology.
-[X] Expend 5 DE on petitioners
[X] Calm Waters - You calm the wavesand direct the currents for those under your care, ensuring the boats that travel your surface are safe and see greater success in their endeavors. Costs: 5 DE
It seems strange to mark a section as "disabled" when just under half the options remain available...
More pertinently, would you consider using a different color for the disabled options? Maybe the medium-dark purple or something? Or the medium grey? As it stands, the medium-dark grey you use is all of one shade off of the default black text used in the FlexWhite skin, and it makes it rather difficult to make out which options are "off".
Final note. One thing I learned from the original Amber Age quest was that variable cost actions are a pain. For the plan-makers, it makes plan-making more complicated and error prone while simultaneously making it trickier to do small adjustments. For prospective plan makers and voters in general, it makes the planning step less relatable overall, since the "true" costs of actions are somewhat obscured by the mechanic. Finally, for the QM, it adds an extra step that needs to be taken care of each turn, and can easily be screwed up.
Conversely, I don't really see the mechanic making the game more fun overall; the type of risk involved in cost rolls just doesn't feel particularly exciting (especially once we start rolling a large number of dice there), and if something fails it feels more like a car breaking down than a difficult challenge that needs to be overcome - not only unpleasant, but also mundane.
Anyway, that is just my 2c. It is your quest, so the question is totally up to you - but I would diverge from the orginal Amber Age along this particular axis.
If your primary skill wasn't astrology, you wouldn't have any options open in Avatar. I probably could have put it off to the side, but I wanted to keep everything where it's technically supposed to go (there may be a trait that lets you scry present with an avatar if you can find it).
Huh, I didn't know that. I use flexspace myself, so it happens to be especially noticeable for me. I can use a different color (or perhaps strike-throughs).
That makes a fair amount of sense. I can remove the randomness from it, but it will cost more than 5 in that case.
I have some questions, if you don't mind @Powerofmind
Was rolling high or low a good thing? Because these all seem good for a water/sea based spirit and ridiculously low on a d100. Is the limit to how high one can raise their skill based on Shrine, Avatar, Influence, etc? Out of curiosity what other options could have been available? Is Endless a god or a spirit?
Will we be able to decide which Skill is taken first when we sufficiently raise Avatar? Can we potentially have more locked skills? What sort of skill would Astrology fall under(e.g. Performance, Toil, Lordship)? As Endless has a shrine one and Elemental Affinity: Sea is inherent, does that mean we have space for another trait? You mentioned that upgrading attributes cost accumulative level plus one so would upgrading from Avatar 3 to Avatar 4 be 1+2+3+4+1(i.e 4!+1)?
It seems strange to mark a section as "disabled" when just under half the options remain available...
More pertinently, would you consider using a different color for the disabled options? Maybe the medium-dark purple or something? Or the medium grey? As it stands, the medium-dark grey you use is all of one shade off of the default black text used in the FlexWhite skin, and it makes it rather difficult to make out which options are "off".
Alternatively( as I have everything in pink for me so both his options are difficult to distinguish) maybe change how you mention them such as
Avatar Actions [] Form Avatar (0 Ambrosia) (Avatar 0, cannot form an Avatar) [] Study Stars - Study the skies and stars, seeking patterns that will tell you what was, what is, and what may yet be. (Avatar 0, cannot perform action) -[] Read the Future
-[] Read the Past
-[] Scry the Present - See distant places as they are, reflected by the stars above. NOTE: Option available only while Avatar is 0. Costs: 1d5+2 DE
Avatar Actions (Reduced actions, no avatar)
-[] Scry the Present - See distant places as they are, reflected by the stars above. NOTE: Option available only while Avatar is 0. Costs: 1d5+2 DE
Was rolling high or low a good thing? Because these all seem good for a water/sea based spirit and ridiculously low on a d100. Is the limit to how high one can raise their skill based on Shrine, Avatar, Influence, etc? Out of curiosity what other options could have been available? Is Endless a god or a spirit?
Will we be able to decide which Skill is taken first when we sufficiently raise Avatar? Can we potentially have more locked skills? What sort of skill would Astrology fall under(e.g. Performance, Toil, Lordship)? As Endless has a shrine one and Elemental Affinity: Sea is inherent, does that mean we have space for another trait? You mentioned that upgrading attributes cost accumulative level plus one so would upgrading from Avatar 3 to Avatar 4 be 1+2+3+4+1(i.e 4!+1)?
I use a similar but not identical 2d10 system. It has mostly the same range of possible results (and I still use AN's doubles rule), but it produces slightly less extreme results on average.
I also was doing a weighted check from a set of skills Gaerig would narratively be able to possess.
[X] Bless Petitioner for Sacrifices - Expend some of your DE to empower those who come to your shrine or pray to you in exchange for more offerings. Current Skills that can be blessed: Astrology.
-[X] Expend 4 DE on petitioners
[X] Calm Waters - You calm the waves and direct the currents for those under your care, ensuring the boats that travel your surface are safe and see greater success in their endeavors. Costs: 5 DE
But it is, and we do . More seriously, the only problem I had was with the section being marked disabled; since you dropped that, everything looks great.
Huh, I didn't know that. I use flexspace myself, so it happens to be especially noticeable for me. I can use a different color (or perhaps strike-throughs).
I use a similar but not identical 2d10 system. It has mostly the same range of possible results (and I still use AN's doubles rule), but it produces slightly less extreme results on average.
I also was doing a weighted check from a set of skills Gaerig would narratively be able to possess.
[X] Bless Petitioner for Sacrifices - Expend some of your DE to empower those who come to your shrine or pray to you in exchange for more offerings. Current Skills that can be blessed: Astrology.
-[X] Expend 4 DE on petitioners
[X] Calm Waters - You calm the waves and direct the currents for those under your care, ensuring the boats that travel your surface are safe and see greater success in their endeavors. Costs: 5 DE
I'm going to be the math-pedant here and point out that 4! is 1*2*3*4.
I do want to know the answer to the question you posed, though I think the more natural answer is that upgrading Avatar 3 to Avatar 4 costs four points.
Please no. Take this from someone who has designed plans for the previous Amber Age game - plans get long and complicated fairly quickly. It may not seem this way right now since we only have a small handful of DE to work with, but once we get more, figuring out what to do with it all gets complicated. With more DE and more actions to spend on it, turns will have a lot of moving parts soon enough, and that just makes it harder for people to participate.
Thus, from a design standpoint, we really want the options for choosing DE allocation to be straightforward and maximally meaningful as possible. Having an option to tweak an action by moving around one or two DE is probably just too small-scale for people to get excited about, while at the same time it is extra work for everyone who has to keep track of the plan, ranging from planmaker to voter to QM.
On the other hand, an action to give a major boost to something else (costing 10+ DE, probably) would be interesting - but that is really the sort of thing we unlock a bit later.
[X] Roil Waters - You bend the waters to your command against your enemies, sending larger waves at the settlement near you, or creating deadly sprays and whirlpools that will capsize any boat they dare put upon the surface of your waters. Costs: 5 DE
[X] Calm Waters - You calm the waves and direct the currents for those under your care, ensuring the boats that travel your surface are safe and see greater success in their endeavors. Costs: 5 DE
Ocean spirit being moody and capricious is really just right on track.
No, we rolled about average. 2d10 rolls from 2-20, with the average being 11.
Doubles were criticals, the precise nature of the double determining the relative strength of the crit. A 77 was a much better crit than a 22, for example, and would increase the level of success - or reduce the level of failure - by one or more steps. I don't recall precisely how.
In the current quest, my guess is that the 'doubles' depend on each die rolling the same number - two ones, two twos, etc - for the same effect.
Edit: I'll figure this thing out...
Edit 2: There we go. 2d10 = 15, in this case, with the forum roller.
Not particularly. 8, 11, and 12 are middling in 2d10. AN's doubles rule comes into play when both dice read the same value (2 and 2, 6 and 6, 9 and 9). They denote somewhat higher narrative significance (and are better than their total value suggests, a 2 + 2 = 4 isn't quite as terrible as 3 + 1). Yes.
Was rolling high or low a good thing? Because these all seem good for a water/sea based spirit and ridiculously low on a d100. Is the limit to how high one can raise their skill based on Shrine, Avatar, Influence, etc? Out of curiosity what other options could have been available? Is Endless a god or a spirit?
Will we be able to decide which Skill is taken first when we sufficiently raise Avatar? Can we potentially have more locked skills? What sort of skill would Astrology fall under(e.g. Performance, Toil, Lordship)? As Endless has a shrine one and Elemental Affinity: Sea is inherent, does that mean we have space for another trait? You mentioned that upgrading attributes cost accumulative level plus one so would upgrading from Avatar 3 to Avatar 4 be 1+2+3+4+1(i.e 4!+1)?
The value of the roll was somewhat important, since more significant skills to the narrative of a water spirit had wider spreads (and had extra copies higher on the table). The limit to how high you can raise skill is 10, always. The limit to the number of skills you can possess is based on Avatar.
No skill could be valued lower than 2 (since locking 5 skills would be brutal), but you could have gotten Fishing 3, Astro 3 for example. If you got a 4 and then another 4, the second 4 would become a 2 (max starting skills was 6).
EDIT: You will gain the highest locked skill first, otherwise it's randomized.
You could accidentally pick up more locked skills by purchasing aspects that have locked skills on them, but you can never have more than 11 total skills, so any excess would drop off into the ether at that point.
Astrology is a Mystical skill, and falls under Lordship.
You have space to gain more traits. Plural. Even an Animal Spirit would be able to gain at least one regular trait to go with their inherent one.
Wrong word. I get needlessly verbose sometimes; I should have used current plus one instead of accumulated plus one.
Going the roil+calm route is really leaving our fate up to the RNG. We will have no idea of who we are hitting with either action. We could end up aiding raiders and sinking the ships of people that are living here in which case I believe we would be a fear spirit. Or it could work out correctly or it could leave them confused and unsure who to pray to. By blessing we can start working on getting our name into the locals so they pray to us to keep the water calm.
[X] Roil Waters - You bend the waters to your command against your enemies, sending larger waves at the settlement near you, or creating deadly sprays and whirlpools that will capsize any boat they dare put upon the surface of your waters. Costs: 5 DE
[X] Calm Waters - You calm the waves and direct the currents for those under your care, ensuring the boats that travel your surface are safe and see greater success in their endeavors. Costs: 5 DE
. More seriously, the only problem I had was with the section being marked disabled; since you dropped that, everything looks great. 
