Hi,
Agreed! The hallmark of an excellent rule is that using it makes the game better.
I have a different issue with the Research rules. Breakthroughs change the rules of the game. They change what Hermetic Magic is. Changes of this kind are better represented by story events than by dice rolls. After all, if the group doesn't want a certain breakthrough, the research rules don't work. If the group does want the breakthrough, the rules are probably not relevant; the stories that lead to the breakthrough matter. So the breakthrough rules don't work well for NPCs, because GMs will simply decree what breakthroughs have been accomplished, if any, and they don't work well for PCs.
I would also be very surprised if the Twilight rules are actually applied rigorously to NPCs, except when they go Twilight during play rather than behind the scenes.
considers
My solution for Breakthroughs ITSIDR is that I let players know that they almost certainly will not succeed, but the attempt involves less experimentation and more questing and adventuring. So a player might need to find the last copy of a rare book, spend a few seasons reading until he feels confident that his Cult of Acathla Lore is sufficiently high for him to infiltrate the Cult. Then he has to find the Cult, which takes some more reading, unless he prefers to discuss the matter with a dragon who lairs deep in the Alps and figures in an old story involving some wayward cultists who became lunch. Naturally, there's no point meeting the dragon without a good Parma Magica and without a gift that both suits the dragon's taste and that corresponds to the quest....
I suspect any game mechanic that has players rolling dice during downtime, because downtime becomes longer, often at the expense of uptime. I also suspect any game mechanic where the GM feels a need to ignore extreme rolls; if the GM does not want the player to gain 512xp on a good stress roll, then some other mechanic belongs. (This, btw, is why I dislike rolling up characters. The guy with perfect stats is possible, but never welcome.)
I have not yet written up my variant Warping and Twilight rules. They still need tweaking. But they go something like this:
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Warping Score adds to all casting scores, supernatural abilities and lab totals, representing connection to and affinity with the supernatural. Go Warp!
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As a character's Warping Score increases past a certain point, he becomes less able to function in inimical Auras. First he begins to suffer the penalties and extra botch dice to everything he does there, then must make an extra aging roll during any season he spends even a moment in such places, and finally Wounds of increasing severity, potentially Fatal. These penalties start to apply only at the very highest inimical Auras, but work their way down as Warping increases further. To survive, a character with a high Warping Score must increasingly retreat from the world. Old magi don't die, they fade into Twilight.
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A magus can suffer temporary Twilight, but the character often does not leave play for even an instant. When he does, that is the botch effect and, like any botch effect, is determined by the GM rather than by a die roll. Subjectively, the character gets to do the usual Twilight comprehension thing.
Anyway,
Ken
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