Reading today's email on the changes to the Akodo Commander school and the Shiba Guardian school, I felt something was off and had to say something about it. Fundamentally, having different timing restrictions on these abilities imbalances these abilities more than you can feasibly correct through simple buffs and nerfs. As an example, I'm going to talk about three schools; the Doji Diplomat, the Bayushi Manipulator and the Hida Guardian.
The Doji Diplomat is a 1/scene school that lets you add kept dice equal to their school rank in Opportunity dice. This is a powerful ability, it adds a lot of strength to a single dice roll and lets you make use of opportunities more reliably at low ranks and more separate opportunities at high ranks. However, you can still only do this once per scene. As a result, this school gets weaker and weaker the longer a scene goes on. A particularly long intrigue, and the Doji spends one turn being a Doji and the remaining turns lacking a school entirely.
Conversely, the Bayushi Manipulator's ability has the opposite problem. It does require some setup, and is weaker, but able to be used on every roll provided you meet its other criteria. So here, the time issue goes the other way. On a check where you have to convince a single person, you'd rather have a Doji who can use multiple opportunities on that singular roll to get the best possible outcome.
Fundamentally, these schools are imbalanced. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. I would expect these schools to do different things. The problem is that how they're imbalanced depends on a really odd part of games, namely how long scenes tend to be. If you make the mistake of picking a Doji in a game where scenes have several rolls in them per player, you're going to have a hard time. Similarly, in a game where a social conflict might be to talk down one or two people, the Manipulator is going to be weaker. While normal imbalance can be planned around by determining the campaign (not taking a Doji in a Thousand Years of Darkness campaign, for instance), guessing average scene length is less of an obvious prospect.
So, what's the solution? Well, the solution already exists. The third school, Hida Guardian. The Hida Guardian has a powerful ability that is once per scene use, but it also has a passive ability that is always on, helping them as they use heavy armor (which, for a Hida, is probably always). The once per scene ability shows its worth in short fights, while the passive ability gives benefit to having chosen that school all the time.
To summarize, I believe it is unnecessarily difficult to balance schools between having a single always-on ability or a single once per scene ability. A more effective way to manage this balance is to have each school have one passive ability and one once per scene ability, to maintain school uniqueness when the ability is not being used, but allow for clever use of the powerful ability to turn the tide of battle.
) will bring balance at Rank 1.