IN> Oracle Bones

[Asher Densmore-Lynn]

On Sun, Mar 9, 2008 at 9:58 AM, William Keith <wjk26 at drexel.edu> wrote:

>  A typical Oracle Bone, answering the question "will [course of action]
>  be auspicious?" is statted as follows:

>  This version can be used by pagan Soldiers with an Ethereal Connection.
>   It is limited to one use per week and costs 4 Essence to use, but is
>  generally accurate a bit more than half the time, and is fairly cheap
>  for a relic.  The "limited CD" feature is new, indicating that the Song
>  can only give, at best, qualified yes/no answers: course of action is
>  very favorable (as the user would view it), somewhat favorable,
>  neutral, mildly inauspicious, highly inadvisable.

I'm not sure I'm following. It's giving a five-answer range to a
yes/no question, but it's accurate "a bit more than half the time" --
steep for four Essence, isn't it? Especially when three Essence is
probably enough to MAKE a given action auspicious? (Or series of
actions. Two Essence goes a long way at TN 7.)

What happens when it doesn't work -- does it give wrong answers, or
just no answer? Does it still eat the Essence, if so?

As it is, I can... hmm... actually, with a Rite, I can see somebody
using one of these to ask questions about harvests. Those would be
important enough to spend a couple day's effort gathering Essence for.
Are there any ways to grant the song a bonus by narrowing the
complexity of the query -- perhaps by trying to distill it to be
relevant to a single Word?

-- 
Asher Densmore-Lynn <jesdynf at gmail.com>