Too Awesome to Fail

Question: Unimpeachable Reference and Borrowed Credibility are overpowered as written. By giving someone a token to represent you, and using both knacks, the target gains your Charisma successes twice IN ADDITION to their own. They literally become better at Charisma than you.

Spurred on by your cries of injustice and inequality, we took a look at Borrowed Credibility and Unimpeachable Reference this week, just to make sure they weren't totally busted. It turned out that they weren't working exactly as we intended, so we changed them, so thanks for pointing us in their direction. Let's break it down!

First of all, you can't stack Unimpeachable Reference and Borrowed Credibility on the same roll, so worrying about someone having both is a moot point. UR allows you to give someone free and clear representation of you, in effect letting them make choices about doing whatever they want in your name as long as it benefits you; BC allows you to grant someone bonuses only if they do exactly what you tell them to do, following your expert coaching in the ways of charisma. If they're doing the one, they're not doing the other, so even if you pay to use both on them at the same time, they're only going to get the benefits of one of them to any given roll. Using both knacks on the same person will ensure that they get the benefits to pretty much any non-boon-or-knack Charisma roll they make that isn't against you, though, so it can still be useful to grant both.

Secondly, and I think this might be the most major thing you were worried about anyway, we realized that the knacks were kind of kind of broken in that they were technically allowing a target to, say, have 8 Epic Charisma, get the benefits of the knack from someone with 9, and then be able to trounce someone with 10, which obviously shouldn't happen. Marduk shouldn't be able to lend his Charisma to Geoff and make him automatically better at Charisma rolls than Zeus, because that's silly. So UR and BC have been altered to allow your target to use your Epic Charisma successes instead of theirs, not in addition to, thus preventing gods from running around with nineteen Epics or whatever other silliness some player somewhere is doubtless cooking up.

That's probably the major mechanical thing that was bothering you, but I think now's a good time to highlight the flavor reason these knacks don't have a problem, and that's that they never make someone literally better at Charisma than you. They can't. It's completely the opposite of what they do. They certainly might enable someone to get higher rolls than you ever could; granting your higher Charisma successes to someone with, say, Arete (Presence) or Serendipity definitely means they'll always roll higher than you could, but that doesn't mean they're better at Charisma than you are. Rather, it means the exact opposite: it means that they're not as good at Charisma as you. The only reason they can make that higher roll is because they're standing in your shadow; the entire reason anyone is taking them seriously is because they said they came from you, or they did exactly what you told them to do, or because they're wearing your jacket and it smells nice. If you weren't there granting them that ability, they'd probably fail, because they just aren't as good as you are at being awesome, intimidating, lovable or whatever. It's not them being good at Charisma; it's just you being good at Charisma, being so good at it, in fact, that you can be charismatic when you're not even freaking there and your target is talking to someone completely different. That is how awesome you are.

So never worry that your Charisma knacks are making someone else more awesome than you. By definition, they can't. Your awesomeness is insurmountable.