I'm shocked at the number of personal attacks on the Digest lately. Let's try to keep things civil, even though we're bound to disagree.
Jose Ramos wrote
> if you use traits anybody worthy of heroquesting should
> have heroic traits, at least in those traits he heroquests in.
I don't see why. For one thing, a heroquest is not a sequence of trait tests. For another, there is a wide range of heroquests. Jeff Richard and I each have an article in, oh wait, I wasn't going to mention Enclosure again. Anyway, they both discuss fairly low-level heroquests. Since so few people have heroic traits (I believe the Taming of Dragon Pass campaign has only 1 person at the Religious level, 5 traits at 16; the East Ralios campaign has none), I don't think it would be a good idea to restrict those without from heroquesting.
Steve Barnes wrote
> Also, my limited experience with Traits as a GM was that despite being
> generous with checks, not much progress was being made towards having
> Rune Lord level traits (score of 16 or more).
Makes me real glad that's not the system in PenDragon Pass. (Nor do I think it's reasonable to expect every trait roll to be made, as you suggested in your discussion of heroquests.)
Andrew Behan posted a great list of personality traits (though alas, with a few inadvertent deletions, e.g. Honourable). However... I dislike the idea that the game doesn't have a consistent name. It's a pointless complexity if Chaste/Lustful is sometimes called Permissive/Reserved. Granted, many games are played in a single culture, but many aren't. If the GM says, "make a Lustful roll" and the player has to ask, "do you mean Permissive?" then the idea needs reworking. (For what it's worth, Greg Stafford seems to side with Andrew, and I've told him my complaint as well.)
Also, my philosophy is that traits must be rollable. I simply can't conceive of anyone making an opposed Natural/Chaotic roll.
Since the whole message is about traits, let me close with a warning. I've seen an attempt made to graft traits on to RuneQuest, and I didn't think it worked very well. (I believe I also saw an attempt made to add them to heroquesting characters, which also worked poorly, but my memory might be deceiving me.) If you're going to use personality traits, you really ought to integrate them into the game system (as does Pendragon). Pendragon may not be the be-all and end-all of games, but it uses the same mechanics for traits as for other tests, and they can easily be tied to Gloranthan-style cults (e.g. PenDragon Pass).
David Dunham <mailto:dunham_at_pensee.com> Glorantha/RQ page: <http://www.pensee.com/dunham/glorantha.html> Imagination is more important than knowledge. -- Albert Einstein
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