> >
>
> Obviously folk are going to just have to wait until the new HeroQuest
> rules are finally released, but until they are I think I am obliged to
> explain the source of this dispute. Assigning resistances for
> contests is handled very differently in HQ2 than in HQ1 or HW. Or RQ
> for that matter. Because of this, stat blocks are not only unnecessary
> under the new rules, but they are actually misleading. David Dunham,
> Ian Cooper, Lawrence Whitaker, and the whole HQ2 team have discussed
> the issue and I think we are all in agreement.
>
Well, this is all getting a little into system rather than world but I know
that relative resistances caused a lot of discord in D&D 4e. A lot of the
simulationist folk don't like the fact that caverns are harder to jump
across for high level characters and so on. Without having seen HQ2.0, as a
narratological game then it makes sense to say that a cavern is hard to jump
across and have the meaning of hard be relative to the heroes. After all, we
measure our lives in relative terms.
To bring it away from systems, I've occasionally wondered if one of the great joys that fans get from a world of which they are fans, is imagining what it would be like in real life. To do that they draw maps with "realistic" geography, figure out how far a is from b, try to sort out chronologies, wonder how big, strong or fast something is or how much damage a lightning spell would do. This is an attempt to render that world in absolute terms and such people will find relative terms frustrating to say the least. They don't want to know that a cavern is extremely wide but how wide it is in terms of feet and inches and then compare it to how far a human character can jump with a run-up and no armour on.
You could possibly compare the two approaches to Macs and Windows (just considering this out loud.) A Mac, like a relative description, tells you what you need to know and no more. It tell you the the cavern is "really wide" which means that if you want to jump across it you need to be able to jump across really wide caverns. In the end, who cares exactly how wide, let's just got in with the jumping and see if we fall to our death. Windows tells you the cavern's width in millimeters and lets you compare that to a bunch of other rubrics and suggests you run the jumping skill program with the appropriate parameters. After much calculation you jump and, sometimes, the system crashes half-way through anyway so the GM makes up the result.
Glorantha is a specifically unusual case because it works through myth and poetry and the cavern really is as wide as the story dictates, no more, no less and, of course, the story changes depending on who tells it. Glorantha was probably the fantasy world out of all that exist which was the least suited for RuneQuest as a rules set. Yet, oddly enough, RQ is by far my favourite rules set to use for Glorantha. As a folklorist I find HQ to be a little too much like work; I like the number crunching and absolute values of a mechanistic system - it's a change of pace for me.
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