Re: New players

From: Jarec Basham <jarec_at_...>
Date: Mon, 03 Jul 2000 13:07:08 -0000

> I refereed my first HW game last Thursday, with two players, both
new
> to Glorantha.
>
> I originally tried to use the narrative method of character
> generation. After some fumbling around, we decided to switch to the
> list method. Does anyone else have experience of which is best to
> begin with? I tried to give some of the Glorantha background, but I
> think I overloaded them.
>
My HW group has been going for about 2 months now and consists of 6 players with about a 50/50 mix of previous Gloranthan experience. I started them off by giving them their Heortling keyword and got them to choose their occupation and that was it. All the magic keywords and other abilities have been picked up in game. Now 2 months on most, but not all, of the extra abilities have been chosen and everyone has a character that I hope they are comfortable with.

I wouldn't necesarily recomend this long a period for character generation but my group are all very experienced role players and I am making them justify any new abilities that they want to add this far into game. Overall I would say it has worked well and has let me get the game running quickly and concentrate on the cultural aspects rather than game mechanics.

For me as a narrator the advantages of using this method is that I didn't have to explain the vague nature of skills. This is one of the biggest hurdles in terms of working with experienced players, they instantly expect to have skill/magic lists to choose from. My players now have a good grasp of how things work and the subtleties of ability wordings and mental/physical placement, much better than if I had sat down and tried to explain it to them first.

In future I will probably continue to use this method, although with a much shorter ability selection period. The benefits to this are that even if new players are joining in we can start gaming on time rather than most of the players sitting around for an hour drinking coffee whilst the newbie rolls up a character.

Jarec