[dataweaver]

I may be misreading, but I'm getting a distinct vibe of defensiveness from your responses, as if you feel I'm attacking your work. If so, please feel at ease: I rarely comment on things that I don't like. But I'm a tinkerer at heart; when I see something like this, my instinct is to find ways to refine and expand on it — that's what I'm going for here. One side effect of that is that my comments generally take the form of critiques and challenges rather than praise; but the motivation behind it isn't to tear down what you've built, but the opposite.

Originally Posted by Ghostdancer

Because I was the author and that's how I wrote it? I felt it should be more difficult to imbue an object that you didn't have control of. It would be like a smaller human holding onto a really big sword, except his hand wasn't the one that wielding the weapon in the first place. You are, of course, free to do as you wish in your campaigns, but extensive playtest in my own games revealed that some sort of penalty was due and -2 felt about right.

Obviously I'm free to do as I wish in my campaigns; I'm not asking for permission so much as I'm asking for insight. With all due respect, “That's how I wrote it” and “extensive playtest revealed…” doesn't provide insight.

How does the engineer not have control of the vehicle? Certainly, he doesn't control what direction the vehicle is going; but he very definitely has control of the engine. And it's in that capacity that he'd be Imbuing the vehicle with such things as better fuel efficiency or a higher top speed. Kirk doesn't ask Sulu for more speed, despite the fact that Sulu is the helmsman; he asks Scotty.

Put another way: Imbuements are generally about enhancing gear; but more precisely, they're abòut enhancing skills that involve gear. Whenever the Imbuements system asks you to specialize an Imbuement skill, it generally asks you to specialize by skill use. And while many of the Transportation Imbuements certainly strike me as being conceptually associated with vehicle operation skills, a few of them strike me as being more closely associated with the likes of Mechanic. In those cases, it seems to me that if anyone should suffer a -2 penalty for not being the ideal person to do the Imbuement, it would be the pilot rather than the engineer: Sulu rather than Scotty.

Where's the flaw in my reasoning?

Originally Posted by Ghostdancer

I think someone mentioned imbuing computers (which I do have covered in the article I spoke of), but I'm not sure where you are going. Imbuements only work on gear for the most part - you can't really use them on anything built with an advantage. The exception being is unarmed attacks.

And optionally, magic spells.

Originally Posted by Ghostdancer

What other gear is there that characters use often on adventures? Most of the breaking and entering stuff could use Attack imbuments. I'm not seeing where you are trying to take this conversation exactly.

So you feel that the attack, defense, transportation, and hypothetical “cognitive” (i.e., sensors, communications, and computers) Imbuements are sufficient to cover everything that ought to be covered? That once the last item there is addressed, the Imbuements “system” will essentially be complete, save for the occasional introduction of an individual Imbuement here and there?

That's not a rhetorical question or an attack; I don't know if there's anything else that needs to be covered, and the system very well might be one class of Imbuements away from being “complete”. Or there may be something that I've overlooked, which is why I'm asking the question.