Excellency and Long Actions

Solar Excellencies suppose to represent an instance of absolute genius. They are also duration Instant, which is perfectly fine when in combat. But it becomes problematic when applied thematically to something like giving an 8 hour debate on the floors of the Solar Deliberative.

In such cases even if the GM turns it into an Extended roll, it would still make little sense that 1 Excellency would cover 1 hour of activity and implies that throughout this 1 hour that, let say a, Solar will be performing at twice his dice pool.

So to make the game depend less on motes and more about actually having high competency, I am ruling that Excellencies cannot be used in such long duration activities - unless the character has Infinite Mastery and spend enough Essence as Essentially that the Infinite Mastery Excellency covers nearly all the time in an Extended Roll.


For Example:
Dace is involved in organizing the Logistical Train of the Harborhead Army of the West. He wants to get the army moving as soon as possible, and the GM decides that he need to get a total of 20 successes as an Extended Roll, with each roll taking 3 hours.

With average time of a Scene being ~20 minutes, GM rules that each Extended Coverage would count as 3 uses of Infinite Mastery, Dace has Essence Regeneration of 8 per hour so 24 in the time of the Extended Roll.

He decides to add his maximum dice pool in the hopes of leaving in 1 bold swoop. So each invocation would cost 20 motes, 3 per extended roll will cost him 60-24 points regained = 38 motes.

On his first 3 hours he rolled only 6 success out of 20 dice (Player explained the result as he is unfamiliar with desert warfare and took the time to understand its specific needs, and thus leading to a slower start)

He then Spent another 38 Motes for the 2nd Extended Roll. He gets 10 successes on 20 dice. Bringing the total to 16 successes, 4 more to succeed.

He decides that he wants to have some Essence left in case they are immediately ambushed by the Realm War Fleet Marines so did not use Infinite Mastery for the last roll.

Out of 10 dice he rolled 5 successes, so he finished ahead of time. 3 hours for 5 successes means 180/5=36 minutes each success, x4 = 144 minutes or 2 hours 24 minutes.

So the 8 mile long logistics train which a normally takes (assuming average mortal of 4 dicepool, and 2 success per extended action, so 10 extended actions) more than 2 days to start moving was whipped into shape and miraculously left in only 8 hours and 24 minutes.

Thus at the end, Dace is glowing like the Anathema he is (72 motes used), but the army is now moving.

If the War Captain tried to do the same thing, since he does not have Infinite (War) Mastery, he would have only relied on his raw abilities (5 dice) and probably won't be ready to leave (assuming average success rate and no botch) for 8 extended rolls - 1 day.

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