I gotcha. I suspect the different treatments of this sort of idea, in particular, Will vs POW, will all come down to the same sort of thing in the end. I think the main problem with the old Chaosium idea on the subject was it was trying to do two rather disparate things: represent your own inherent free will; and your ability to change the cosmos. This in turn led to rather kludgy restrictions, such as never being able to raise your Will once you'd started heroquesting, which doesn't really make much sense. Separating the two ideas out, one way or another, would be a Good Thing, I think. Your "free will" really is on the skids, as everything one does on the HP constrains it further, in whatever way you represent it. But one's capacity to change the universe ought to be able to go _up_, especially as one gets more Hero Cult support, succeed in other Quests, etc. Eventually, though, the first overtakes the second, and you wind up with absolute power to do absolutely nothing.
> Let's run it up the Block and see if anyone thinks its a Griffin....
A Hippogriff, at the very least.
> You might express the sacrifice that Heroes and HeroQuesters make in
> terms of directed traits and 'frozen' traits and passions.
That's roughly what I was suggesting earlier, though with geases rather than directed traits. If all such are of the "Never..."/"Always..." form, then quantifying them with a roll seems redundant, though this might be useful in some cases, where the result is some sort of "inclination", rather than an absolute prohibition/injunction. Such as if instead of "Never harm a fox", you get "Love Foxes, 18", or "Merciful (Foxes), +10." It'd also be possible to have Passions that wear entirely negative "imposed" on a character by an HQ, such as the way "Fear" already works, in Pendragon.
> By the way, has anyone proposed a set of revised personality traits for
> Glorantha? Some of what we have in Pendragon isn't quite right.....
Greg's made noises about this, but I don't know exactly he's proposing. One element of it was that not every race/culture would have the same set of trait-pairs. I agree with someone else's comment that "Pious" needs some work. "As a Pious Orlanthi, I get drunk and beat up the wimpy Yelmalio guy. Great, my "Worldly"'s gone down again! <cackle>"
David Weihe picks up my flub:
> > precedence seems to treat [HP rituals] as spirit magic.
> What precedent? Where? The only rituals for entering the HeroPlane that
> I have seen have all been Divine Magic, like the Seven Stones Ritual that
> Londra of Londros (from Chaosium's house campaign) had.
Oops! That was the example I'd been thinking of, except that memory (as well as spelling) obviously let me down. Makes perfect sense, then.
Jane W:
> If you need a HQ-level result tomorrow, you just won't
> have time to get rehearsals done, and a disorganised mob would be worse
> than no support at all.
Not necessarily. It seems there are different sorts of HQ support, if my Gregology serves me correctly. Part of this is indeed "organised" -- people sitting around the temple lighting candles, chanting, and dodging the fragments of exploding idol, that type of thing. But some of it seems to be be much more implicit than this -- your family, just by their very existance, provides a sort of "support", which is even explicitly represented in the G:tG "character sheet" that Greg yammered about at Conjunction (way back in '90!), and which later appeared in a Tales (#7? later?). He's also talked about it in yet more wooly terms - -- the clan tells you "Go do whatever is necessary", and thereby gives you (some thus far unquantified) Support, while you're in the HP.
Slainte,
Alex.
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