Talk:Mage Factor
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I've looked a bit more into Spellcasting and Endowing Incompetences, with its Incompetence Point subsystem, and it is becoming more and more clear to me that Mage Factor should probably "normalize" to 1 rather than 3, meaning that a character with an average value (3) in all four relevant Attributes should have a MF of 1 rather than 3. Likewise, the function should be "starker", using an exponent higher than 2, to make the differences between average Attribues and magic-use-suitable Attributes much greater than it currently it. The reason for this is that Mage FActor's primary purpose (so far its only purpose) is to derive compensatory points, and the compensatory points for a spellcasting or Endowing Incompetence should be much greater for a character with, e.g., Psyche 6 and Will 5, than for a character with Psyche 3 and Will 3. Currently the difference is something like a factor of 2.5, but it needs to be much larger. One can argue that "normalizing" to 1 instead of to 3 is breaking scale, and that this slippery slope is leading to the eventuel multiplication of all Essence costs by 10 to get rid of decimals. However, Mage Factor is already out of step with the scale, because while for attributes, just a few points difference, e.g. Will 6 compared to Will 4, represents a stark difference, for Mage Factor a difference such as 4.5 vs 3 is relatively minor. MF 4.5 is little better (usually - it depends on the valuyes of the specific attributes, of corse) than a cantrip caster. Another possibility is to make the derivation of MF simpler, by removing the squaring, and then just square it (or more often - at least - cubing it) in the functions and formulae where it is used. This "keeps" scale, so that players can compare Mage Factors, i.e. "My character is a 7.2, what's yours?". So MF = (4Y+3B+2W+I(my))/10 (nice and simple!) and possibly even formalizing MFC = (MF^3)/27, whee MFC then does "normalize" to 1. Main problem is, I'm not sure cubing is enough. I may have to use an even bigger exponent than 3. --Peter Knutsen (the Designer) 21:13, 25 December 2010 (UTC)
