> Il giorno 14-03-2003 13:18, Julian Lord,
> jlord_at_... ha scritto:
>
> > Alexandre :
> >
> >> Re: Equipment, edges etc. I like the way
> Pendragon scales everything
> >> on the basic character (the knight).
> >
> > Most games do the same thing, but given that in
> Glorantha
> > you can play a duck, a runner, or a trollkin, I
> think it's
> > best to scale everything from the weakest possible
> > player character upwards, so that playing those
> > characters requires no special rules..
>
> I prefer to have special rules for characters that
> (almost) nobody plays
> rather than for the characters (almost) everybody
> plays.
In whose game? Half my party are ducks, and another is a trollkin. In a game I play in, iron and/or enchanted swords are the norm.
> you are introducing an absolute scale which has the
> weakest creature possible in the origin. I prefer to
> set the "zero" more or less in the middle.
And it's that "more or less" that's the problem. Where, exactly, is it? The position of zero needs to be constant for all games that use the published books, or it and all figures derived from it are useless. Its exact position doesn't matter, just as long as it's very very clearly defined. We all know what "naked, no natural armour, no weapons, claws or sharp teeth" means. "Normal armour" is meaningless.
Think about RW systems of measuring temperature for a moment. The Farenheit scale was supposed to be usefully set with human body temperature at 100. Only they got it wrong, and none of the points actually mean anything, so we dropped it. Centigrade is better: we all know the freezing and boiling points of water. (Unless we're a long way up a mountain). And Kelvin is ideal, because absolute zero is just that, even if we're never going to actually meet zero degrees (I hope!)
What does help no end is that the + given to weapons is usually about the same as the + given to armour. For any given game, armour and weapons probably cancel each other out, whether your average value is 0, +3, or +6.
Still, I gather the new system is dropping edges altogether? Somehow?
Powered by hypermail