Nick Brooke:
> The first two sound "right" to me: Hate Black Oaks is pretty "broad"
> (there's a *lot* of situations where you could use it as an augment,
> and many others where you couldn't)
I suppose this depends on the "prevalence" of said Black Oaks -- it's the old Champions Disad phenomenon... ("Vulnerable to Flying Jellyfish, 14-" "Duck!!") I was trying to think of a notably narrow ability, since this is the converse "problem" (players being disincentivised to choose abilities that would add to the colour of the game due to lack of "cost-effectiveness").
> while Fyrd Combat is, of course,
> currently a subset of the single Close Combat ability (but I wouldn't
> want to get any broader or narrower than that as a defining breadth).
Nor I. Granting making something of this sort the "benchmark" is a "narrowing" of the present one, but I'd like to hope it wasn't so drastic a change to involve for most characters doing anything more than making _what_ sort of combat it is their character does a little more explicit.
> I would frown on and penalise attempted overuse of "Smart," (or use
> Tim-like trickery to marginalise it), while I'd ban "Do Everything"
> outright
Ditto.
> (unless there was a valid reason to allow it for an unusual
> NPC or 'high concept' PC).
I hope this isn't "High Philosophy of Glorantha" again...
> I think Greg's posited "Hunting" fits about half-way through the
> list: it's obviously abusive (as there's a whole occupation keyword
> full of Hunting abilities), but it's not unreasonably broad (so long
> as the Narrator balances the one-trick pony of "Hunting" against any
> PCs, NPCs and scenario challenges which are aimed at a broader-based
> Hunter character).
Hrm, obviously abusive, and yet not unreasonably broad -- prhaps "reasonably abusive", then? <g>
> I agree. But a cheap Close Combat skill with Narrated improvisational
> penalties for any weird-ass stuff still works well enough for me.
On what basis to you determine imp-mods, if the ability covers "by definition" all of Close Combat?
> What situation observed in game-play has led you to want a different
> approach?
I have to plead diminished responsibility with regard to the "observed in game-play" part -- my gaming group has gone AWOL playing Pendragon for the entire time HW has been in print... And when I was running a playtest game, after several rules flip-flops on this very issue, I eventually settled on a compromise not unlike the above. But here are some of my concerns:
Character generation. I'd like to encourage players to use a bit of imagination when describing their combat abilities: I got some peevish looks when I told my bunch that whatever they wrote on the topic, it all came out as "Close Combat: 12", regardless.
Cross-cultural differentiation. Several advocates of CC have claimed or implied that some CC abilities are "different" from others. I can see no basis for this: if they're not identical, why is the game system, which otherwise makes a big hoo-hah out of self-described tags, forcing to be identically described? Wouldn't it be more logical, convenient, and evocative to describe different abilities differently?
Martial arts. This is an instance of the previous item, to a large degree. If one wants to run a game focussing on (Eastern, most obviously) martial artists, or develop more detailed rules for "mystical martial arts" schools, the dead hand of "Close Combat" is not a help. (And I've given a good deal of thought to both, though currently have given up on any immediate plans of doing anything with either.)
Trivialisation of learning utterly different combat skills. Whatever you do, however orthogonal it might be from your existing martial knowledge, it'll be one HP please, to learn that new "style". (Or 2 if the GM's being fussy.) Evidently the Five Dragon Warriors need a whole 4HP to complete their training, after having done the hard bit of learning just one martial style.
I accept that one has to draw a line somewhere about what's a "single ability", and wherever it is, it'll be unsatisfactory and arbitrary in some respects (especially other peoples' lines...). But the HW status quo is both too broad (in this _particular_ area -- I'm not at all convinced this is a 'symptom of a wider non-HW-correct malaise' of any sort), and ironically, too "off the shelf" for my liking. Stipulating that there be one and only one melee ability makes it more awkward to tweak around with than had it chosen benchmark subdivisions that just happened to be different from the ones I (or a player) had in mind.
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