Posted: Tue Jan 20, 2009 11:10 pm
I gave him what he wanted
Reposted, link earlier in the thread is broken:
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To determine which Excellency is the best to choose for each Ability, consider the situations that you'll typically be in when making rolls for that Ability.
First Excellency is best for those times when your threshold of success (that is, the number of extra successes you get) is important. Combat is a perfect example. If you get a massive number of extra successes on an attack, you get to do a massive amount of extra damage.
Second Excellency is best for when you're making a roll against a set difficulty and it doesn't matter how many successes you beat that difficulty by. Social combat is a good example here. It doesn't matter how many successes you beat your opponent's MDV by, the result is the same: they agree with you or they have to spend a Willpower to disagree. Second Excellency is also good for those times when you absolutely can't afford to botch. Rolls to resist poison are a good example, Athletics rolls to avoid falling to your death are another.
Third Excellency is best for those times when you don't want to spend Essence unless you have to. Stealth rolls for instance, if you spend too much Essence, your anima will flare up and make Stealth impossible anyway. Third Excellency is good for rolls that you'll be making all the time and that you'll usually succeed without help from Charms, but you want a safety net just in case you botch. Awareness or Lore rolls could be examples of this. (Keep in mind you can often accomplish a similar level of subtlety using Infinite Ability Mastery and 2nd Excellency in combination.)
Here's an Ability by Ability breakdown:
Archery, Martial Arts, Melee, Thrown: 1st Excellency - You want the possibility to get huge numbers of successes on your attacks, so you're willing to risk a little inconsistency on defense.
War: 2nd Excellency (+ Infinite War Mastery!!) - The paradigm case for War rolls is a Charisma + War check at a difficulty of your unit's (Magnitude - Drill). Threshold doesn't matter, you just want to beat the difficulty. Also, 2nd Excellency is awesome to combine with Infinite War Mastery because you can use reflexive Charms at any time in Mass Combat and the scene lasts for the entire battle no matter how long it is. Commit some motes at the start of battle and you can effectively beat those Charisma + War checks automatically!
Integrity: 2nd or 3rd Excellency - It depends on how high your Integrity score is and your opinion on defense strategy. Would you rather spend more motes to make sure your opponent's argument doesn't penetrate your Dodge MDV, or would you rather be mote efficient and/or see how many successes your opponent rolls first?
Performance, Presence: 2nd or 3rd Excellency - 3rd if you don't want to glow because you're worried about attention from the Realm, 2nd otherwise.
Resistance: 2nd Excellency - Resistance rolls are always against a set difficutly and failures or botches are usually pretty disastrous. If you plan on spending a lot of time walking through bonfires or something, invest in Infinite Resistance Mastery and/or some natural soak Charms.
Survival: 1st or 2nd Excellency - Threshold matters for predicting the weather and tracking. When finding food or shelter, on the other hand, you just have to beat a set difficulty and you don't want to botch. It's a toss up.
Craft: Combo 1st and 2nd Excellency - High threshold improves your final product, but botching could spoil the whole project. Don't worry about spending that Willpower; Craft rolls are usually made weeks apart at least. That's more than enough time to recover the Willpower before the next roll.
Investigation: 2nd Excellency - Remember how awesome Ten Magistrate Eyes was in 1e. 2nd Excellency is a bit more expensive but gets the same sort of results.
Lore: 2nd and 3rd Excellency - You need two Excellencies to unlock some of the higher level Lore Charms, so use 3rd for the routine academic knowledge checks and 2nd when it's all on the line (like when you're trying to figure out how to defuse the First Age Essence Nuke).
Medicine: 2nd Excellency - Botching can mean losing your patient, take 2nd Excellency and use it.
Occult: 2nd Excellency - It would be nice if you could use 1st Excellency to boost the attack roll on spells like Death of Obsidian Butterflies, but you can't. Take 2nd for those set difficulty thaumaturgy rolls and occult knowledge checks.
Athletics: 2nd Excellency - For the purposes of lifting and jumping, 2nd Excellency is just as good as 1st for boosting those static ratings. For climbing or falling, you can't afford to botch. For keeping your balance, just take Graceful Crane Stance.
Awareness: 2nd or 3rd Excellency - It depends on your ST's style. If he has you make Perception + Awareness rolls all the time, take 3rd. If he only asks for a Perception + Awareness roll when there's an ambush, take 2nd.
Dodge: 2nd or 3rd Excellency - Like with Integrity, it depends on your defense strategy. 2nd for maximum defense boost, 3rd for mote efficiency.
Larceny and Stealth: 3rd Excellency - Glowing is worse than botching in these cases, and you can't afford to commit a bunch of motes to Infinite Ability Mastery because you might need those motes to power other Charms.
Bureacracy: 2nd Excellency - Threshold doesn't matter when pricing goods, probably doesn't matter when filling out paperwork, and haggling/negotiating/dealing with ornerry bureaucrats is handled by Social Combat. If you need to price a whole market full of goods in a single scene, take Infinite Bureaucracy Mastery. (By the way, you should probably be using Frugal Merchant Method or Insightful Buyer Technique to price goods anyway. Bureaucracy Excellencies just aren't that useful.)
Linguistics: 1st Excellency - Codes are the only thing I can think of that you actually roll Linguistics for. Huge amounts of successes can make your codes nigh-impossible to break, and allow you to crack nigh-impossible codes.
Ride: 3rd Excellency - If you make the roll to control your mount without magic that frees you up to use a combat Charm this action. If you don't make the roll, you've got 3rd Ride Excellency to fall back on.
Sail: 1st Excellency - Threshold matters for predicting weather and sea chases. It probably doesn't for navigating reefs or storms though. I'd be willing to risk failure for the chance of overwhelming success. Botches could probably be fixed with some stunted Craft (Wood) rolls.
Socialize: 3rd Excellency - Subtlety matters more for Socialize than the other social abilities since you use it to read other people's intentions and veil your own. It's also important for mass social combat, but you won't actually be rolling it.
There you go. Keep in mind this is just one man's opinion. I don't claim to be the final word on any of this.