IMO D&D 4e is a beautiful piece of design because it tries to be coherent rather than all things to all men. So it recognizes that its strength is as a game about killing monsters, taking their treasure, and levelling up and plays to that. D&D has always been a game about beating the challenge of the dungeon or the encounter, and now it focuses on that.
> 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.<
Sure but you don't need a game system to do that. That's a vital and beautiful part of Glorantha fandom, but it does not need to influence mechanics.
> This is an attempt to render that world in absolute terms and such
people will find relative terms frustrating to say the least.<
This is a different style of play if used in an rpg to that taken by storytelling games. That approach is all about allowing someone to simulate life in an imaginary world. It is a valid approach, but the system needs a different set of trade-offs to make it happen, and a different set of rewards. The system needs to be gritty, the challenges about survival. RQ2 has this feel
> I like the number crunching and absolute values of a mechanistic
system - it's a change of pace for me.<
More power to you.
IMO HQ suffered because it tried to appeal both to the RQ style gamers who wanted gritty realism. HQ2 is much more coherent, and to me a better design because it tries to be more clearly a storytelling game focused on helping us deliberately tell a story around the table in our session (as opposed to the more accidental, emergent story of RQ2). HQ2 is for those games what RQ2 was for people who wanted a little more gritty reality than D&D did.
The trick is to pick whatever game gives you the least friction to play as you want.
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