TheJazMaster's page

Versus how it would read with the taxing trait:

Whirlwind Strike wrote:

Traits: Barbarian, fighter, flourish, taxing

You lash out in a blur of motion, attacking all nearby adversaries. Make a melee Strike against each enemy within your melee reach.

That's a reduction in text by a factor of around half, which is quite significant.

This seems like conflating 2 similar things. But I also don't believe either are good usecases.

To clarify: this is all assuming "taxing" means some flavor of "increased MAP" while "sequence" means "MAP doesn't increase until the end of the activity", which seem like fair assumptions based on the names.

With Spellstrike or Whirlwind Strike you're making X attacks and getting X MAP instances. The MAP amount is fine, so taxing wouldn't even fit. What sets these activities apart from basic actions is that the MAP isn't incremented until the action ends, which can be solved with the proposed sequence trait.

Meanwhile with Vicious Swing, you're getting more MAP than you're making attacks. This is where you'd actually want a trait for extra MAP, but it still doesn't make sense to put it on Vicious Swing because the Vicious Swing activity itself isn't an attack, the subordinate Strike is. It would be quite jank if your Strike got disrupted, but because VS is taxing you still took the MAP.

The only way this would work in a consistent way would be if taxing said "attacks made as part of this activity count as two for the purposes of your multiple attack penalty", but that makes the trait super specific and more confusing than just writing it out per feat.

In summary, sequence would be very handy, but I can't see taxing simplifying anything (both because it's mechanically an awkward thing to turn into a trait and because barely anything increments MAP multiple times with one attack). Combining both traits into one doesn't sound like it covers any situations either.

An issue with the taxing trait I can imagine is that "This counts as two attacks when calculating your multiple attack penalty." isn't much longer than "This strike gains the taxing trait.", but it IS more readable.

Additionally, abilities like this usually don't have the attack trait, so giving them taxing doesn't make much sense. Unless the trait read "After finishing this activity, increase your multiple attack penalty by 1", but at that point it's awkward and unintuitive.

As for the topic, I can't think of any repeated text, but I'd potentially enjoy a trait that said willing creatures can willingly fail/crit fail/get a penalty to this effect or something of the sort (shove, drugs, healing bomb...)

Ryangwy wrote:

I think people would generally be happier if they translated all the mystery benefits into cursebound feats or w.e. As it stands, many of the mysteries are just a pile of focus spells. Tempest gets hit hard because the free electric damage was part of their balance and now all your spells do less damage because screw you I guess. Likewise Lufe was balanced off their increased health which they lose because screw you too. The cursebound geats aren't bad but they sure are flavourless (whoever wrote the feat that's for Life and Bones which is negated by theor curse sure was on something). Feels like a divine sorcerer now.

Like, seriously, if they were going to give every mystery a starting cursebound feat, why didn't they just make the default curse benefit that cursebound feat instead? No need to balance, you know it works already!

Honestly... if they translated the benefits the same way they translated the more unusual curses, that might've arguably made things worse (if that's even possible). Looking at the few unique curses that got preserved as feats... they seem to have been made worse somehow.

Case in point, Ancestors: The most thematically interesting Mystery, but also the one that best illustrates the class' issues. Their original curse was unique, in that it made you roll a favoured action type (out of Strike, Spell, or Skill) each turn, with a 50% chance of getting what you want; using the other two types was a risk, but the favoured type would get a bonus once the curse hit moderate or higher. (Actions that don't fit those three categories were "safe" to use, and having a good selection of safe actions was the key to making Ancestors work.) This was preserved as the Meddling Futures feat, except... worse in literally every way.

1. It only applies to one action, BUT it halves the chance of getting a favourable option by turning one of the previously "safe" action types into a liability (replacing the "your choice" option with a new movement-based one,...

What's even worse is, while the old Ancestors oracle could spend all 3 actions setting up an effective usage of their curse based on what they rolled last turn, this new cursebound action requires your VERY NEXT action to be the preferred one!

Wanna stride into melee? Use reach spell? Feint? Use an activity with a subordinate skill action? Tough luck! Fail chance and you lose any benefits!

So somehow you need to be in a position where you can immediately reap the benefits from any of these rolls with a 25% chance to go "gotta dash" and run away. Real splendid stuff