Difficulty in recovering skill and luck discussion.

[darksoul]

Player Characters engage in combat often, but the more they engage in combat the more likely they will eventually suffer a critical hit and lose skill along with stamina. Skill is harder to restore then Stamina which can be nearly fully recovered after one day of proper rest and food.
Luck can be used up quickly by a character, especially if they have to face a spellcaster.

To restore Skill you need to either a week long proper rest (per point), or a skill potion.
Luck can only be restored at the end of a story, or by special events. I've places special events into my story but an encounter with a wizard can drain luck pretty quickly. 3 spells from a wizard will reduce luck from 10 to 7. Add in some forced luck tests and players will be getting nervous.

I am surprised that there are so few ways to restore these two statistics. There is no priest nor wizard power that has the ability to restore these abilities. I am thinking of modifying the priest heal spell so that the player can restore either stamina or skill or some combination of the two. I'm also thinking of modifying the bless spell to allow the priest the option to either use the standard effect or restore some luck. This might make the 1 luck point cost for extra spell use redundant though.

Perhaps I'm missing the point, perhaps players should be nervous about luck being lowered and not being able to restore it to full till the end of a story. Maybe the reduction in Skill is supposed to keep players on edge. Maybe it's a way for players to continue the story in a way that demonstrates the toll the adventure has had on the players. It's a way of showing that the adventure has become more difficult but not in away that is as deadly as loss of stamina. Maybe players shouldn't expect their characters to always be in peak physical ability and divine blessing. If that's the case then I'm perfectly happy to leave the effects as they are since the emotional pay off on players is much better.

[drbargle]

I think that your final paragraph is key. STAMINA is pretty easy to recover, really, and as STAMINA is whittled away there is no effect on capability. AFF doesn't have a 'gory wound' table to simulate the toll of combat, so 'critical hits' reducing SKILL provide an abstraction for this. I have narrated a debilitating (but non-permanent) wound when the PCs are struck by a critical hit. The LUCK thing does bother me a little, as NPCs and Monsters in similar 'Test Your Luck' situations roll against non-diminishing SKILL, but I think AFF is the kind of game that is best understood 'asymmetrically'. What I mean by that is that the rules work best when they are understood as descriptions of PC capabilities, but not as a model for the 'physics' of the whole world. In this case, it is accepted that NPCs need not work on the same rules at all. I'd be happy doing away with SKILL tests for monsters and simply giving them an 'x in 6' chance - whether resisting a spell or dodging a trap or climbing a cliff etc. - as I might in OSR D&D, leaving NPC and monster SKILL as solely a measure of combat capability.

[darksoul]

I'm split between leaving the system as it is, or modifying it so that priests can use healing to restore a skill points as well and bless to restore some luck, and maybe ill-luck to take away luck.

I really like my last paragraph as well. Having an emotional impact on players takes work and planning and having low luck and lowered skill is gold as far as I'm concerned. I still want healers to have the ability to heal skill. Maybe I can have my cake and eat it, too. I'm thinking that the player gets the choice of healing stamina or, for every 5 stamina points they heal, they can heal 1 skill point but no stamina, but it can't happen in combat. Suddenly I don't like that since it loses the emotional impact set above. I dunno.

I agree with your point about asymmetricsm. The game emphasizes the players as heroes. It's why they get talents an luck.
I don't mind the monsters using their skill in place of luck for spell resisting. It can easily be adjusted to have the storyteller keep track of spell effects on the villains and reduce the skill check by 1 or 2 or however many previous spell attempts they've avoided.

[Mr Nibbs]

I'm split between leaving the system as it is, or modifying it so that priests can use healing to restore a skill points as well and bless to restore some luck, and maybe ill-luck to take away luck.

A third option is to say that it takes a lot longer to restore a skill point, maybe a few days of uninterrupted treatment.

The game emphasizes the players as heroes. It's why they get talents an luck.

I disagree... the game emphasizes the characters as heroes. The players hardly get a mention )

[Al Livingstone]

Maybe players shouldn't expect their characters to always be in peak physical ability and divine blessing.

This is the correct answer. The default assumption of AFF is 'combat as war', not 'combat as sport'.

[bottg]

Potions of Stamina restore STAMINA to full, but also a point of SKILL. This however comes with a lot of thought required. If you take a critical in the first combat but only lose 3-4 STAMINA and are then first aided, do you drink your potion now and get the SKILL back but "waste" the extra STAMINA, or wait until you are more injured and put up with the SKILL lost...

[darksoul]

I disagree... the game emphasizes the characters as heroes. The players hardly get a mention )

lol, I'm usually very particular about titles. Good catch. I wonder how my players would feel if I told them that.

[darksoul]

Potions of Stamina restore STAMINA to full, but also a point of SKILL. This however comes with a lot of thought required. If you take a critical in the first combat but only lose 3-4 STAMINA and are then first aided, do you drink your potion now and get the SKILL back but "waste" the extra STAMINA, or wait until you are more injured and put up with the SKILL lost...

Parkusuk,
I've looked in the AFF book under character creation, potions and healing and injuries. It's not written anywhere that a stamina potion will also restore 1 skill point. Is that an errata?

[Nuvole!]

Perhaps I'm missing the point, perhaps players should be nervous about luck being lowered and not being able to restore it to full till the end of a story. Maybe the reduction in Skill is supposed to keep players on edge. Maybe it's a way for players to continue the story in a way that demonstrates the toll the adventure has had on the players. It's a way of showing that the adventure has become more difficult but not in away that is as deadly as loss of stamina. Maybe players shouldn't expect their characters to always be in peak physical ability and divine blessing. If that's the case then I'm perfectly happy to leave the effects as they are since the emotional pay off on players is much better.

I like the final part of your post! On top of this, when it's time to test the LUCK I allow the characters to voluntarily fail the test without losing the point of LUCK. This sometimes seems to adds some extra tactical thinking and it's a way to preserve LUCK (at a cost...).

[bottg]

Potions of Stamina restore STAMINA to full, but also a point of SKILL. This however comes with a lot of thought required. If you take a critical in the first combat but only lose 3-4 STAMINA and are then first aided, do you drink your potion now and get the SKILL back but "waste" the extra STAMINA, or wait until you are more injured and put up with the SKILL lost...

Parkusuk,
I've looked in the AFF book under character creation, potions and healing and injuries. It's not written anywhere that a stamina potion will also restore 1 skill point. Is that an errata?

Sorry, my mistake! Having said that, that is how i usually play the Potion of STAMINA.

But certainly changing the Priest heal power so that it either restores a point of SKILL or some STAMINA would not break the game.