It's not the hoarding that bothers me. What I dislike about it is that players might not spend a Confidence point for a roll that's important for them, just to save it in case they later botch a combat roll. Lowering the amount of Confidence points you can "hoard" only makes it worse, as then you are less likely to spend those fewer points you have on important rolls rather than on just saving your hide.
If you can't avoid a botch with Confidence, then you can use it whenever it feels right for your character to try their best, without having second thoughts about whether or not having spent that point might kill you later on.
So true, I gladly stand corrected. Warping does indeed come from many other sources, beside botches. I still think, though, that being able to avoid magic botches is detrimental to the magic mechanics, but that of course is a matter of personal taste.
In other words, players are spending Confidence of the rolls that are most important to them. Maybe they don't like botches as much as you do!
Saving your hide is pretty important. If you were a character, wouldn't you want your player to spend Confidence to help you avoid a fatal car crash? Just saying.
I like the idea that things go against players, stuff goes wrong, and they have to figure out a way to get out of a problem that they made worse. Botches don't really provide a mechanism that does this easily. Botches in combat, on defense, are invariably something that kills a character. An attack botch isn't a big deal. Magical botches can lead to Twilight, which takes a character out of combat for at least two minutes. Two minutes is 12 rounds. 12 rounds without a magus can lead to killing the rest of the party, especially if there's only one magus...
As a player, I like the idea of magical botches leading to deeper insight, but they can be burdensome to the immediate story. I've said it elsewhere. Botches should start a ticking clock for some calamity to befall the character...
Another voice against bad bad botches!
Seriously, I think it depends a lot on how they are handled. If they are always, or often enough, lethal, they are highly disruptive of the game unless they only strike grogs If they are handled more like "yes, but ..." complications, then they are ok. Or at least, I am ok with them.
Just two notes on the mechanics.
First, there are sources of 2+ Warping points at the same time (which can then induce Twilight) other than casting botches, and in any case double-botches or worse from casting are quite a bit rarer than single botches in the games I see. And of course even "confidence-as-a-bonus" can be used, if not to avoid a botch, to avoid Twilight. So I don't think I agree completely with what's been said on the issue.
Second, it's really easy to avoid hoarding-for-an-emergency behaviour. The SG just has to be more generous with Confidence (in fact, Confidence hoarding is probably a sign the SG is being too stingy with Confidence). The more Confidence a character has stashed away, and the more the player thinks will be coming his way, the more freely he'll spend it.
I don't love botches, but I want Confidence to be spent for things that are important to a character. If you as an ST think the most important thing for a character is to avoid botches, then I think the best you could do is do away with stress dice, and be done with it. That would make more sense to me than use Confidence for avoiding botches. If you want your players to not botch, remove the botch mechanics altogether.
What I meant, and I think I didn't explain myself clearly, is that I don't want a player to have second thoughts about whether to spend that last Confidence point to avoid her character's nemesis from reaching the trap in the ceiling. I don't want a player thinking "it'd be neat that my character shined now, but if I do she might get killed in that fight we expect on the way out". If it's important for the character, and it's important for the player, I want the player to freely spend the Confidence without a second thought. I don't want to punish her later on when a bad botch kills her character, and we both know it could have been avoided if she hadn't spent that last Confidence point.
I want the fact that Confidence is spent in important situations, as opposed to only being spent in life-or-death situations, to make mechanical sense game-wise.
Disliking botches is a completely different thing. I very much dislike botches that can kill you, like combat botches, because I don't want the future of a character to be decided on luck, not consecuences of choices. But if you want to solve that problem, do away with botches instead of "patching" the system and breaking Confidence as well.
Confidence is a really bad mechanic to achieve this in a game where life or death situations occur.
Consider: If Confidence is a limited resource, and if it can help in life or death situations, then a wise player will always hoard Confidence to make sure he has enough of the stuff to help him survive. This is what most characters would want their players to do too, if only they knew.
In fact, in a game with botches or fumbles, using Confidence to ignore such things for a roll is the very best way to get exactly what you want, a willingness to go out on a limb (from the character's perspective) to do something risky (because the player has made it much less risky.)
Even without botches, the main point holds.
Doing away with botches holds its attractions, but doing it well for AM would require intensive and extensive redesign, because of the ways it is woven into so many mechanics regarding the supernatural. For example, botch potential is what keeps magic out of the cathedral.
I think that Yrkash would like Confidence to be a mechanic more similar to Ars Magica 3rd edition Passions (or Blade of the Iron Throne's Passion Attributes etc.). Basically, the idea would be that a character should get a bonus whenever something really important to him pops up. If nothing important pops up for ten sessions, no bonus; if it pops up ten times in a session, he gets a bonus each and every time.
But this is not the case. Confidence bonuses do not depend on the desires of the character, they depend on the desires of the player. They help the player steer the character's story in the direction the player wants, so the player is totally free to spend them on stuff that the character could not care less about, and be stingy with them on stuff that the character really would want to happen. Note that this is completely independent from the type of bonus that Confidence yields -- whether a flat bonus, or a reroll.
I must say that in my IRL game I do not face this issue. We have a house rule that each adventure, your character has his full confidence points available each time. If he spends all of them, then he will wait next adventure.
Then for the adventure itself: most time, players will be asked knowledge roll, and spend confidence to get the information they need ("because magus X spends a confidence point, you learn that "name" is in fact an old noble in such tribunal, buried in the city of Y"). Or awareness roll (or other social roll) when I say "you and you have rolled 12, do you spend a confidence point?": they know they will have an information if they do, so they often do.
And it is rare that they spend a lot of points in combat, resulting in more danger when they are not really organized against the enemies.
We used to manage the Confidence point as a +1D10 bonus (no bolch, no exponential). I'm not certain it's better than a simple +3. It depends how many points the ST give to the players.
I actually like the way Confidence works right now. I wouldn't change a thing. I was just explaining why I like Confidence in 5th and why I didn't like it in 3rd.
I'm afraid we'll have to agree to disagree, since my personal experiencie was that the opposite is what actually happened, an unwillingness to spend Confidence even in situations that were supposed to be important for a character.
I think we've both presented our points of view, and what's left now is only a matter of personal opinios.
