>It is certainly possible to play out life at the farm, but there are two
>problems:
>
>1. I don't know the first thing about bronze-age agriculture, in
>fact I know nothing about agriculture at all and find it _real_ hard to
>fudge that knowledge.
>
>2. I really don't think it's fun or interesting to see how much of last
>year's crops were eaten by rats or to worry over the health of the pigs.
Orlanth NO! I wasn't suggesting anything _that_ boring! Of course we have adventures, they're just low-key, unheroic and usually pretty well SNAFUd. Perhaps I need to give an instructive example. Here follows the plot of "The Wolf Sceptre", an old scenario from when we were playing in Dragon Pass:
The party arrives in a little village and is offered a job by the local Issaries potentate. Seems an object dear to his heart and of great value has been stolen. Prime suspects are an Etyries caravan passing through. His daughter's boyfriend has been acting strangely too. Other people available for questioning are "The Wise Man of the Woods" (a spaced-out shaman) and a strange geezer who lives in the old ruined fort.
What's really going on: the sceptre is actually worthless, but it's the merchant's Raw Greed fixation, acquired for past sins during his adventuring days. The Lunars are completely innocent. The guy in the fort is an old adventuring buddy of the merchant and knows most of what's behind all this, but is reluctant to talk. The shaman will go into a trance and come back with his eyes bugging out, screaming "CACODEMON!!!", and then refuse to have anything more to do with the PCs. The real thief is the daughter, who is trying to help her father get over his debilitating curse. Oh, yeah: she's also an ogre - back in those days we used the "birthday tables" from an old DW, where you could be either "blessed" or "cursed" by the gods if you were born in the Sacred Time, so the rationale is that the gods were still pissed at the merchant for his transgressions (I've forgotten what they were) and unloaded a curse on his offspring (the parents don't know about this and are actually proud to have a child born during the Sacred Time, assuming that it must be Good Thing).
>As to the in-character player to player conversation, it sure is fun,
>but to me it isn't the be-all and end-all of a game. Just like combat
>it grows stale if overdone.
What? Such boring players you must have.... :-) But, like I said, you need a little combat now and then to get the old adrenaline flowing. I suppose the exact balance between various elements is a matter of taste that we will never agree on.
>I admit
>unashamedly that I love high action, high power level, high magic, heroic,
>cinematic stuff,
OK, another matter of personal preferences here... to my tastes that type of adventure can be fun once in a while, but a steady diet of it is too much. To each his own, it's not a main point of my argument anyway.
>but I want the drama, magic and mythical aspects to
>spill over on the non-combat scenes too. The problem is, lowering the
>power level and focusing on in-character interaction won't achieve that.
What if you _don't_ lower the power level, but just implement the other change? Infusing the non-combat scenes with magic and myth is simply a matter of keeping your Glorantha Lore at the front of your mind when you're creating the NPCs and plotting out the scenario, isn't it?
((( Jonas Schiott ))) Revolution ((( Ide- och lardomshistoria ))) is the opium ((( Goteborg ))) of the intellectuals ------------------------------
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