>
> Mike Holmes:
> > I use concentration in my game
>
> The example you give is of out-of-game player musing over how to best
> spend his metagame currency.
We used concentration in one of the games where I played, mostly in-character. We were heroquesting, following a myth in which the protagonist (Bersochek, a minor fire god) receives running magic from wanderers in the plains. Our theist band was indeed offered running magic by Doraddi on the plains of Jolar, but it took the form of antelope spirit fetishes.
What followed was a mostly in-character discussion. We agreed that this was "bad voodoo", and that most of the spirit-talkers we knew were weirdos. However, it was part of the myth, which meant it might be important to the success of the quest. In the end, some characters opted to un-concentrate and take the magic, others just took the fetishes out of politeness but didn't use them. Mine took the fetish for the duration of the quest, then re-concentrated and gave the fetish to the one animist character in our band.
I thought this whole thing set up a nice minor conflict in the story. If you chucked the magic concentration rules, you could probably set up a similar conflict by having each religion proscribe use of "foreign" types of magic, and impose a penalty on players who use proscribed types.
But how do you define the types of magic that are proscribed, and what the penalty is, without having to do it cult-by-cult? The magic concentration rules seemed designed to solve that problem. Whether it's really a problem is a separate question.
Rob
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