Hi,
After a lot of play with the rules as written, there is just one minor thing that comes up in fights a lot, that I consider fixing: TN stacking has no real counterplay, leading to REALLY random results.
What I mean is the following: Even a mediocre bandit, sitting in obscuring terrain, in air stance, using the tinbe-roche combination, is TN 5 to hit. Worse if the bandit commander used Slippery Maneuvers, or they guard themselves, but lets just go with a normal situation.
Unfortunately, there is no real tactical counterplay in the stance system for this: Fire is useless because it doesnt do anything until you hit. Earth and Air just try to outlast him. Water only reduces armor. Void helps a little bit with the obscuring terrain thing, so its the closest to counterplay, but most characters have low Void.
So I thought, what if I allow Fire to have the same ability as Water, just with TN reduction instead of armor reduction. This would create a system of counterplay: Earth countered by Water, Air countered by Fire, both offensive stances are good for a specific type of defense but worse against the other. Fire needing to keep opportunities, given how there is only ONE side of the black die, and none of the white that combines opportunity with strife means they now face a painful chance - in order to hit better, they will hit substantially weaker (in fact, mathematically, fire stance opportunities would still be worse than water stance), Void keeps its niche as being more efficient (needs just 1 Opportunity and doesnt cause strife) in certain cases and a bit of a wild card, and there is more incentive to use the fire stance if you are not totally built for it.
On the flip side, as it is now, we often end up in situations where 80% of the time nothing happens, and 20% of the time the high TN gets hit by the fire stance, and just annihilated. As a GM, these results are extremely dangerous to cause unintended PC kills, and difficult to balance.
TLDR: Fire stance gets 1+ Opportunity spend: Reduce the target TN to hit by 1 per Opportunity spent, to a minimum of 1.
Thoughts?