Hi,
I was thinking about this back during the Great Gathering of Errata, but I was not typing recreationally at all at the time and this was a bit off-topic.
Virtues that grant xp in AM have a few problems.
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Virtues that grant an ongoing benefit almost never provide a benefit during character creation. Such virtues purport to describe a character, but make no effective difference until late in the game. A player who guesses wrong about the duration of a saga is punished.
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Virtues that grant a benefit up front provide no benefit after character creation. The benefit is diluted into insignificance as time goes on. A player who guesses wrong about the duration of a saga is punished.
Interlude: I take for granted that it is good design for a virtue to have mechanics that match and reinforce its fluff, and to not reward this kind of metagame consideration when possible.
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Some of these virtues are thematically redundant with other virtues. I'm especially looking at Affinity vs Puissant, which do almost the same thing thematically but involve different mechanics. Taking one over the other (or both) is purely a mechanical consideration. Great for optimizers, which is fine, but not great for anyone else, which is not.
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Affinities are hard to use:
4a) Division should be avoided whenever possible.
4b) It is not always obvious which xps an Affinity applies to. This has been clarified, but is still not 'always'.
Interlude: I do not consider always rounding up to be a problem. I cannot take this for granted because this is the problem most people have with Affinities, so I will talk about this for a bit.
Let's consider an 'abusive power-gamer' who decides to maximize undeserved benefits from an Affinity. Obviously, he is going to find a way to get an undeserved xp every season. In a 'fair' game, a magus would get 13.5 xp from a typical SQ of 9. But he gets 14xp, a whopping 11% benefit! (9% for SQ11) But this is not unfair enough for our abusive power gamer, because a GM or designer might prefer to allow a player to feel good about getting a tiny extra benefit in the 50% of seasons that the SQ is odd rather than even; to really abuse this virtue, he needs to trickle 1xp/season into an Affinity, for a 100% benefit. Now we're talking!
Except... who cares? Leveraging an Affinity involves getting lots of xp, not incremental xp. A magus who never gets to round up but invests 20xp per year (increased to 30xp) gets much more from the Affinity than the 'abusive' magus who achieves +100% xp but invests 4xp per year (increased to 8xp).
A total non-problem. Carrying the 0.5 is a big problem, because fractions are bad. Rounding down is not as good as rounding up, because why not give players a small bonus rather than a small malus?
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Affinities distort character creation. Using an Affinity well involves dumping lots of xp into an Art or Ability, and then coming up with a story for this. I see nothing wrong with this, but other people have different mileage. A better mechanic would work well regardless of what a player does.
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Puissant is bad because it involves extra rules, clutters character sheets and requires an extra addition when processing a character sheet.
So:
Alternate Affinity with Whatever (minor)
Gain 50xp in whatever when you acquire this virtue. You also gain 1xp per season in whatever regardless of what else you do, including Exposure. You can take this virtue multiple times, but no more than twice for the same whatever.
Then drop Puissant.
Other virtues that grant xps can be similarly revised and consolidated.
Anyway,
Ken