David Cake's honor

From: Carl Fink <carlf_at_panix.com>
Date: Tue, 24 Oct 1995 20:45:40 -0400


David Cake <davidc_at_cs.uwa.edu.au>:

> Hmmph. Firstly - you have missed the point. Even if the illusion is
>utterly hilarious, 5 or 6 points is an enormously expensive spell by
>anybodys perspective (and not only tricksters get illusion magic, anyway).
>Feeling an urge to balance the game system appropriately is, IMHO, the exact
>opposite of power gaming. I politely swallow a couple more personal comments
>at this point.

My example would require two points, of course, but feel free not to pay attention. (I am under no compulsion to be polite.)

I will retract the jape "power gamer" in favor of "rule concretizer". As Sandy Petersen says, the rules should be fun, not "balanced" like a wargame.

(What's the word for "taking an abstraction or fiction as real"? I can't remember.)

However, I'll admit that Illusion magic is weaker than Lie. In most cases, *any* rune magic is weaker than Lie, which is absurdly powerful. Trickster magic is wildly varying in power, from the utterly ridiculous (Remove Finger, amazingly trivial for a rune spell) to immensely powerful (Lie, Become Roc).

Tricksters are just plain not *meant* to make sense. That's the point.

Granted other groups get Illusion spells, but I feel that a deliberate decision was made by Greg or other designers (Sandy?) to make Illusion magic weak, perhaps as a reaction to AD&D, where Illusionists can be absurd.
- --
Assistant Sysop, GEnie's First and Fourth Science Fiction RoundTables The SFRT page has moved AGAIN, to http://www.sfrt.com/sfrt1


End of Glorantha Digest V2 #175


WWW material at http://hops.wharton.upenn.edu/~loren/rolegame.html

Powered by hypermail