On Mon, Feb 25, 2008 at 1:31 PM, Raymond Turney
<raymond_turney_at_...> wrote:
>
> Actually, by the way, that would be exactly my argument, that the
> rules were too abstract to do a good job of dealing with single or small
> group combat if the audience was SCA fighters.
It's all a matter of what you are looking for. SCA combat is also a somewhat abstract system, with it's own quirks, and doesn't do a very good job of reflecting *real* combat, since the effects of combat are over with the end of the bout, or a trip to the resurrection point, which encourages a lot of risky behavior that people simply wouldn't engage in if the potential result was three feet of steel in the chitlins.
But, yes, the two systems do not reflect each other very well. :)
>Hit points worked fine for a couple of levels, but when you
> got individual fighters with hit points equal to a dragon, it began to feel
> absurd, not mythical.
Agreed. They are workable while everyone is on the same scale, but eventually, heroic characters reach the point where they able to absorb the same or more damage than something the size of a bus, which I take as an indication that something is seriously out of whack. (Yes, I understand the argument that it wasn't really absorbing *more* damage, but a finer division of the same amount of damage. Works out the same either way; an 8 point hit kills a normal, but a high level character shrugs it off as a scratch.)
One of the things I like about RQ is that they physical ability to absorb damage never really increases all that much. Characters become more skilled with weapons, and avoiding damage through blocks and parries, but a solid hit will still wreck you.
Then you've got the whole archetypal "character class", which always struck me as kind of silly... I like Glorantha, were it seems like *everybody* knows at least a little magic.
> I think, by the way, that fans of story telling games generally are seen as
> elitist, because they claim to be uninterested in things that those of us
> who started in D&D or World of Warcraft were trained to care about.
One could say the same thing about munchkin power games who pour through the rules looking to mini-max at the expense of story telling and cooperative heroic efforts. :)
Grimmund
-- "Power corrupts. Knowledge is power. Therefore: Knowledge corrupts."
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