Re: [DF] Shelly Cuthbert, Professional Adventurer
 

We were hired to map the wood, so we're doing that. The players suspect it is a euphemism for something else, since the chap who hired us looked surprised when two of the characters were enthusiastic about cartography, but we have not had any clarification. Since mapping the wood involves going through the whole place, acre by acre, we are finding all the inhabitants that don't hide from us.

Re: [DF] Shelly Cuthbert, Professional Adventurer
 

For some reason I thought that the RAW explicitly says that SoD (Adventuring companions) was for PCs only, but upon rereading it it appears to be vague on this. To be fair it could certainly be interpreted as just for PCs as I have. It also probably doesn't help that I personally have a inclination for emphasizing the importance of looking out for the party as whole regardless of how the members are affiliated with you... which should translate to the appropriate Disadvantage on the sheet. I tend to not care for playing as more unempathetic characters unless they're genuinely meant to be more of an anti-hero/villainous character.

Some sort of overlap could be argued for CoH (Soldier's) and SoD (Adventuring companions), but I believe it's been adequately discussed before in past threads what makes them distinct from each other.

So, a lot of this like you seem to have noticed is left up to semantics. Effectively CoH (roughly equivalent Soldier's) + SoD (Adventuring companions) for [-15] in total or CoH (Adventurer's) for [-15], not too much difference. I guess it'd be up to the GM to discern how the fine grain should be defined here.

Re: [DF] Shelly Cuthbert, Professional Adventurer
 

Fair enough. At least from my perspective for balance you have to look at how things work as a whole. Dungeon fantasy games, from anecdotal experience, rewards characters who particularly emphasize DX and IQ (... although I guess that's true for a lot of GURPS games). IQ in particular seems to be the biggest payoff, as everyone benefits from being more intelligent, strong willed (mind control magics seem not very common but when it happens it really matters), and most importantly perceptiveness. Per is such a bang trait in DF that if I were the GM I'd specifically house rule it to be [10] per level. Environmental awareness and the ability to utilize that information from your perceptiveness through the associated skills is just so good.

Partly I don't want to raise Shelly's Per any higher as that's how I conceptualize her. You might associate lower Per more with someone with Bad Sight, but of course Per is more nuanced than just your quality of vision. I see her as someone who's enthusiastic about her pursuits and thusly intelligent as she is because of that (as many people are), but I don't see her as being equally perceptive as she is intelligent. It's a common enough trope within fiction for those even remotely nerdy in any sense of the stereotype for such characters to be smart but have a reduced sense of environmental awareness (unless they're the investigative type).

Re: [DF] Shelly Cuthbert, Professional Adventurer
 

I don't think that this enhancement to Luck is worth 0%, for the simple reason that you could still use it like normal Luck (once per hour) but ALSO use it all bunched up (5 times in five minutes). Since it emulates the basic Luck advantage, already worth 15 points, anything over that would be worth more.

Re: [DF] Shelly Cuthbert, Professional Adventurer
 

This has been on my mind for a bit, and I happened to recall some details from the Impulse Buys supplement where it mentions you can purchase "Impulse Points", or IP, that you can use to do things that normally would cost a Character Point to do (such as "Influencing Success Rolls" as johndallman mentioned).

From what I've gleaned from the passage on that, IP that replenishes to its max amount each session should cost at least [10] per IP. I can't imagine the typical session being any less shorter than 3 hours, so let's say we need just 3 IP. This is clearly Aspected as well, so about -20% to have this IP specifically for point-based Luck usage. That brings us to [8] per point, or [24] for a 3 "Luck Point (LP)" point pool.

With some Googlefu because my math skills stink, we can figure a percentage increase from 15 to 24 to figure the appropriate amount that a Luck Point modifier would be for the Luck trait. The percentage increase from 15 to 24 is 60%, so the modifier should be +60% probably.

To account for stingy GMs and pentaphilia, we can tack on another +5% for a +65% modifier instead to bring that to a handsome [25] for the LP-based basic Luck trait. A [10] increase in point cost sounds about right to me. I'm not sure if it's worthwhile to value at-will Luck higher than that as any higher and I might consider spending my points elsewhere besides on Luck. To be fair, Luck could be argued as meta-level probability manipulation (as some people are inclined to see it as, although I know it to be more nuanced than that) so 15 sort of already is a bit of a crock.

So how's all that crunchery look?

Re: [DF] Shelly Cuthbert, Professional Adventurer
 

I think that this sort of an approach is likely to be more persuasive to a GM.

Would it be 3 LP per session, no matter how long the session, or 1 LP/expected hour as you had it before?

Re: [DF] Shelly Cuthbert, Professional Adventurer
 

Hmmm.

The +65% is what it is assuming your average game session is no less than 3 hours in length. Anecdotally, I can't recall any session ever being less than that, but I also can't recall it being much longer either... if it had to go on a bit longer, 4 hours. 5 is pushing it. In the past with my groups, all young adults or older with responsibilities or other relationships to attend to besides our gaming buddies, we'd gather roughly around noon to begin playing and end or session in time for people to head home and have dinner with their SOs/families or for the late night job shift. So a min of 3 hrs and infrequent max of 4 hrs sounds right. The game session that goes on from the early hours of the day to the late hours of the night or longer is a extreme rarity, at least from my experience.

I think it's fine if it's 1 LP/hour for +65% assuming a consistently sane (ymmv of course?) length of sessions, and you're getting roughly ~3 LP a session with that assumption of "sane" session length. I think the minimum +5% added on to the base +60% for +65% is the minimum you'd want to charge for the potential for a extra ~1 LP once and a while.