Empowerments and 2.0

P

Polare

Count
Good morning folks,

The Prerelease packet leaves some questions in the air as to what happens with the True Empowerment Ritual Manipulation. Now that we have final text for the rulebook, I wanted to post it here so Chapters can start using it if they want to:

Empowerments in general:
Some Ritual Manipulations provide Empowerment effects for varying lengths of time. Using an Empowerment, a caster can “supercharge” the Ritual they are casting, granting a greater effect in some unusual way. The Empowerment itself cannot be extended by any means. After this period, these items return to their base Ritual stats as the magic settles down. The exact nature of how a Ritual is more effective is up to the local Plot team. The more impressive role-playing and Ritual casting performed, the greater the Empowerments.
An item may only ever have one Empowerment active on it. Further attempts to Empower other Rituals on the same item will automatically fail.
Empowerments do not count as "Rituals" for the purpose of Ritual Slots. Plot may choose to preemptively expire or alter an Empowerment at any time if they choose to do so. Empowerments may never travel outside the chapter in which they were cast; an item with an active Empowerment will act as normal for its base Rituals (without the Empowerment effect) if taken to another chapter.

Spark of Empowerment and Touch of Empowerment have the same duration in 2.0 as they do in 1.3, granting an Empowerment as noted above.

True Empowerment: This Manipulation provides an Empowerment for a variable length of time, up to a maximum of the duration of the Ritual batch in which it was used. Plot may choose to set an expiration date earlier than the duration of the batch if they choose to do so.

Basically, this allows Plot to do something like the following with a True Empowerment:

Imagine Bob is casting an "Assassin's Edge" Ritual and Preserving it for 100 Logistics Periods. He True Empowers the Assassin's Edge. Plot adds the following as an Empowerment:

For 5 days, the user of this Ritual swings Body from Behind. For the first 10 Logistics Periods of use, the user of this Ritual gains +2 Backstabs. For the next 10 Logistics Periods of use, the user of this Ritual gains +1 Backstab. For the remainder of this Ritual's duration, the user of this Ritual gains +10 damage when using this Assassin's Edge Ritual.

Those effects would NOT travel outside the Chapter of origin, but the base Rituals still would.

If Plot makes a mistake and gives something too powerful, they have the ability (as with any Empowerment) to alter it or remove it completely at any time. Expect this to happen if someone misuses a True Empowerment against the spirit in which it was intended.

-Bryan Gregory
ARC
 
If an empowerment were to be cast at a National/Regional game, would the host chapter become the chapter of origin, or would the ritual target owner's home chapter become the chapter of origin for the empowerment?
 
I feel as though this change is directly contradictory to the intent of the 2.0 magic item changes, in that it makes items that replicate XP skills (and are even less regulated/consistent than the original True Empowerment effects). That said, may I ask what the rationale for this change was?
 
The other option is to disallow the casting of TE at national events. But that should be probably put in the bylaw section of national events if so.
 
Gandian Ravenscroft said:
I feel as though this change is directly contradictory to the intent of the 2.0 magic item changes, in that it makes items that replicate XP skills (and are even less regulated/consistent than the original True Empowerment effects). That said, may I ask what the rationale for this change was?
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Getting "free" traveling Rituals with True Empowerment rapidly became abusive, where characters would create tons of little items each with a True Empowerment "bonus" rit on it. This effectively multiplied standard rituals at little to no additional cost, instead of being unique special coolness, which was the original intent behind Empowerments.

Changing to this paradigm allows chapters to determine what they feel is appropriate within the scope of their own game, but not affect other Chapters with what effectively became unintended "free" Treasure Policy. Chapters can decide how much rope they want to give their players, and have the explicit ability under these rules to reel it back in if they make a mistake (which they couldn't do before).

True Empowerments also become noticeably more expensive (from a resource point of view) under the new High Magic rules, which should somewhat decrease how available they are to cast.

-Bryan
 
Brandon Mintken said:
If an empowerment were to be cast at a National/Regional game, would the host chapter become the chapter of origin, or would the ritual target owner's home chapter become the chapter of origin for the empowerment?
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Unless otherwise specified, the National Chapter would become the chapter of origin. This limits how useful True Empowerment might be on multi-chapter created items.
 
Seems fair enough.

Even if someone were to cast a Diff 10 ritual, they would need 45 HM to cast and still need an additional for the Rit Manipulation itself. Meaning no HM for anything rest of the day. The issue I still see is the cost of such empowerment’s. I can’t imagine how much a caster will charge when they are allocating 46 HM for a TE vs. 1 as with 1.3 (I have 51 Formal in 1.3 currently). But that’s a local economy thing to figure out and can be controlled.
 
Is the intention that this effect functionally like an LCO item? IE, if there are chapters who honor each other's LCO items, they will also honor these True Empowerments? It seems like you are saying that this will not be the case, given that national home TE's don't travel.

If you used an LCO only scroll at a regional/national ritual that allowed them, and created an LCO only item; would it then make the True Empowerment tied to that LCO chapter instead of the national chapter?
 
Feldor said:
Is the intention that this effect functionally like an LCO item? IE, if there are chapters who honor each other's LCO items, they will also honor these True Empowerments? It seems like you are saying that this will not be the case, given that national home TE's don't travel.
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True Empowerments, as written, do not travel, and are not intended to travel. Chapters can always do whatever they want with LCO stuff - if one chapter wanted to say "we allow True Empowerments to come in from other Chapters" they could do so, but I would strongly advise a "case by case" basis at a minimum.

The reason it's not stated as a straight-up LCO effect is that any LCO effects on a Ritual Batch make the whole batch effectively LCO until the LCO effects are all gone. A chapter cannot normally accept "part" of a Ritual Batch for transfer; it takes the whole thing or none of it. True Empowerments allow a standardized way around that, where the Empowerment stays "for home use only" while the rest of the item is not prohibited from traveling and does not count against LCO limits.

If you used an LCO only scroll at a regional/national ritual that allowed them, and created an LCO only item; would it then make the True Empowerment tied to that LCO chapter instead of the national chapter?
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Yes. In this case, I would expect the home chapter (whose plot team may not have had anything to do with the decision made at the Regional event) to review and quite possibly entirely rewrite or remove the True Empowerment, to reflect what they want to come back into the home chapter. Of course, reviewing such a choice with them *ahead of time* would better allow them to coordinate on the original Empowerment, but that's up to the player.

Bottom line: The new Empowerments are intended to allow a neat "extra" (which was the original intent behind Empowerments in the first place) in the chapter in which it was built. If you try to come up with a way to move an Empowerment to a Chapter that didn't originally come up with it, you should expect the Empowerment to be altered or removed in return, and should not complain when that happens.

-Bryan Gregory
ARC
 
Is there a 'ritual casting for dummies' document anywhere? With 2.0 I have access to High Magic now, so I may need to cast a ritual in the future, and want to make sure I understand: a) how to do it b) how difficulty is calculated c) ritual manipulation and all that fun stuff.
 
The basic Ritual Casting rules haven't changed in 2.0. They do a pretty good run down of "here's how to cast a ritual step by step : get this together, get that together, make sure you're doing this, make sure you're doing that" as a process.

edit: Or just ask Polare in-game for an overview at Big West, that would work too :D
 
The rules for Ritual casting are in the 1.3 ARB; they haven't changed in 2.0 to my knowledge, other than an alteration of High Magic in general.

ETA: Ninja'd.

But also, I'm studying up on Ritual casting because they're one of the sets of rules I haven't fully committed to memory yet, so you can also pester me with questions.
 
Correct the overall rules are the same the big difference is you must spend 1 High Magic to generate each rank of formal now. I think folks may actually cast with less than a 90% success rate from time to time now as they try to save that one or two points of high magic for their favorite tricks.
 
Yup, and still have to have a 9th level spell on your card in order to even take HM: Formal Magic... don't forget that.
 
Can an individual benefit from more than one true empowerment at a time?
 
That's a good point. That would be a great way to control the "20 1-ritual items w/ empowerment".
 
Alkalin3 said:
That's probably going to be up to your local team.
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I don’t think that’s necessarily true. It’s already a rule that you can’t in 1.3, I’m simply asking if the limitation is carrying over to 2.0.

Edit: To clarify my position, I believe we need to have it in the ARB that a limitation exists. A chapter that wants to go crazy can always make an LCO rule that goes beyond that limit if they want, but an ARB limit would at least make them think about whether or not that’s a good idea. Note that once a player has invested the amount of HM into ritual casting that allows them to TE that the expense of doing a second TE is literally 1 HM (assuming that the second ritual is equal to or less difficult than the original ritual that the TE was applied to). It is thus very likely that a caster who is doing one TE will have the ability to do multiple....and rather limited reason not to.

By putting a limit in the ARB, you are encouraging chapters to tell players “No,” when they try to do multiple TEs on a single player, and that’s a good thing to do.
 
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Draven said:
I don’t think that’s necessarily true. It’s already a rule that you can’t in 1.3, I’m simply asking if the limitation is carrying over to 2.0
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I did an, admittedly, quick scan, but I was unable to find anything in 1.3 that limits the number of true empowerments one person may benefit from. There’s a limit on the number of empowerments (true or otherwise) that maybe on an item, but that was all I could find.

Is this somewhere other than the book or am I just missing it?
 
I think the suggestion was, with the changes to the nature of Empowerments in 2.0 and them becoming valid only in the chapter of creation, that making them be "only 1 active on a player at a time" would fit with the desired goals stated as rational for making the change to Empowerments.

Strictly speaking, as written above, plot teams could just implement this without it being a rules policy, as the current 2.0 Empowerment definitions allow plot to change the effect at any time. But Draven suggested that this would be a good guidance to provide to all chapters by codifying it in the rules, and I agree.
 
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