Apprentices: In my hands...

[Berengar]

@Timothy Ferguson

That a rule can only work with the adjudication of the troupe is not new.

As an example, it's a "problem" all of the line's authors for all of the Tribunal books have faced, and they face it deliberately because I built it that way. In Covenants, the number of Hooks a covenant can take is set by the amount of play a real life group of people does. It's "six months' play", so if you play often, you get more, and if you play monthly, you get less. And NPC covenants need to scale against that. How do we scale NPC covenants? We just shoot basically for what we think most of he playtester groups will say is reasonable. So, what will happen here is that authors will just shoot for a conservat5ive middle, or pitch ideas that people let slide because of their innate coolness.

It's worked so far, for the last however many years.

After looking at p. 6 of Covenants again (in particular the end of the introductory chapter of 'Chapter 2 Boons & Hooks', and the end of the following 'Paying for your choices' chapter), I would say that you made abundantly clear there, that the entire 'Chapter 2 Boons & Hooks' has no bearing to canon of Mythic Europe. And if a writer provides a PC covenant like an ArM5 Triamore and wishes to stick to Boons & Hooks balance for that, there is no problem with that either.

If one would just add something in the same vein to Apprentices, namely how this book is meant to provide ideas for detailed development of characters specific to players' campaigns only, it would safely remove a problem.

@Timothy Ferguson

If the page makes utterly no sense, and is important, an errata will be issued eventually, because Matt's aesthetics aside, there's a business case to be made that the line can't be unwritable.

That's good to know.

@Timothy Ferguson

The idea that the book breaks canon because it has troupe input seems a bit, well, unlikely, given some of the stuff I pulled in Covenants. All of that unreliable narrator / ask your troupe stuff actually makes it easier for an author to come in later and say "There's no rule against X, and X is cool, so watch me do X."

So, although I've not seen the specific example, I have to say I'm realtively sanguine about canon surviving. What you do at your own table is something outside that. I, for example, prefer to play diceless.

I agree with you here completely. Just that I did not find this "unreliable narrator / ask your troupe stuff" signaled in Apprentices, like you did e. g. signal it in Covenants for 'Boons & Hooks'. So I made an attempt to remedy this with Card & Board Games ARCHIVE & LINKS - which certainly still can be improved. But for now I just have Matt's post on this thread pasted to the book.

Cheers