New/Revised Luck Talent

[Xylan]

Here's is any idea a few us have been kicking around in our games. I just wanted to get soem feed back and see what everyone else thought of it.
I kind of liked the hero point idea that Eberron had but wanted more Hero-esk. So It takes the idea of Re-rolling failed attempts and uses the Find weakness structure to build the talent:

Revised Talent: Luck

With the talent a characters get a "second chance" at a performance or action to tilt in his favor. In other words a with a successful luck roll a character can re-roll a failed roll.
This can apply to characteristic checks, to skill rolls or even to combat rolls.
For a base of 10 pts a character starts with a roll of 11- , the roll is then modified by the amount that the failed roll was missed by. So if a character failed his dex check by 2 pts and wished to use luck to re-roll he would have his luck roll minus 2 to succeed so (11-2+ 9 or less). This roll can be improved by paying 5 pts for every +1 to the Luck roll. The Luck applies to a base of abilities check (str roll, dex check per rolls etc) , +5 pts luck will extend to a group of skills such as dex based or Int based (not all groups just one), for +10 pts luck apples to all skill rolls. For +10 pts Luck applies to combat hit rolls.

If a character fails his Luck attempt he is not eligible to attempt luck on that check for the rest of the encounter or roleplay engagement.
This is not absolute for all luck rolls just to the Skill, ability check or hit check against a combatant that the attempt was fail on. If a character has base luck plus skill group and combat hit rolls and he fails a to re-roll a dex check he still may apply luck to other ability checks as well as skill rolls or combat rolls.

Comments suggestions?

[Sean Waters]

The cost structure is not too cheap, and the talent mechanics are reasonably straightforward, but, speaking for myself, I'm not keen.

The reason is twofold.

1. To re-roll combat skills costs 20 points, for which you could have bought +4 OCV with all attacks, which is probably a better bet - if it doesn't exceed your campaign limits. That's a minor niggle: nothing wrong with having the choice.

2. I can see it slowing down the game, which is never a good thing in my book, and it adds an extra and unnecessary level of randomness tot eh proceedings. The chances of a successful re-roll will never be more than 50% for the base power (you will have failed by at least 1). You'll have players agonisiing over whether to make a luck attempt or not, and they'll have to record which categories they have blown it for - both of which will slow things down for a limited return.

Luck should only be rolled when it is really needed - you are already rolling your luck in effect by rolling the dice in the first place. The current luck mechanic allows for re-rolls at critical moments and doesn't require you to roll to make a re-roll assuming you use the variation where you roll your total luck points at the start of the game session.

If you don't mind either of the objections, then go for it.

[Derek Hiemforth]

I share TheRealLemming's concerns, and would add another one. To me, the effect of this wouldn't really feel like someone being "lucky". Since they're more likely to make their Luck roll if they had only missed their CHA/DEX/Attack/Whatever roll by a little bit, this essentially means that they'll get lots of extra chances to succeed at things that weren't particularly unlikely for them to succeed at anyway, but relatively few extra chances to succeed at things that would have been extraordinary.

In other words, it doesn't make a character into someone who can semi-regularly do amazing things... it makes them into a character who almost never fails at doing routine things. That doesn't "feel" like Luck to me. :)

[Lord Liaden]

TRL and Derek have summed up concerns that I would have very well.

OTOH the idea of expanding uses for Luck, and using it as the basis for Talents, has a lot of potential to add interest to the game IMHO.

Scott Bennie proposed a well-developed Luck expansion, including constructing Luck-based Talents, which are closer to the way Luck is handled in default HERO system than what you propose. (Not that stretching the rules is a bad thing in itself, but balance issues became tougher to evaluate in that case.)

You can read Scott's system here (http://www.herogames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=21786).