Quote Originally Posted by Tavar View Post
So, here's a question. Would adding the following feature impact the game negatively in any meaningful way:

Universal Excellence; Often considered the root principle upon which excellencies are based, this fundamental law allows beings with essence to improve their abilities. By spending 4 motes, they may add one die to any roll, or to a static value as if using the first excellency. They may add only Essence dice in this manner, and these dice count as dice from charms.

Essentially, a horribly inefficient proto-excellency. It doesn't need to be specifically taken though, and it can also be used by beings who normally don't have excellencies, like mortals with awakened essence.
I make charms like this open to my players (in the event I should ever get a tinkering-oriented Twilight) through the Art of Charms, a thaumaturgical style to writing charms that will probably stay half-written until I get a player who might use it. For charm design, I would have my players pick between a number of different design principles like raw power (which Solars have bunches of), cost efficiency (Which DBs have more of), XP efficiency (Lunar excellencies are a good example), and some other factors which are less fleshed-out.

Low-level players would, using my system, probably be unable to create your "Universal Excellency" as it's only two mote efficiency steps below the Solar excellency, while it's a _big_ XP efficiency above the Lunar one (so at least 2 steps, I'd say 3, over the Solar excellency), and is only 1-2ish power step below the Solar excellency, for a total of 1 to 2 power steps weaker than charms created by the Incarnae. And low-mid XP characters can probably not make charms better than the Incarnae can.

A more achievable mortal-designed Excellency under my system would be one with very narrow application: Say, a Specialty excellency. That's one XP efficiency step below the Solar one, so you're looking at a much more achievable 5 power steps below an Incarnae's charm - you might even be able to improve the mote efficiency to 2 per 1.

Ultimately, the discovery and propagation of thaumatugical charms like this could be important to a Lunar game, as it makes the Thousand Streams River much more viable. But unless a game was oriented around charms like this and mortal discovery and development of them, it's unlikely to be too serious.