Ponderings on HW

From: Jon S Green <jonsg_at_harlequin.co.uk>
Date: Mon, 03 Aug 1998 09:19:05 GMT

Following on from the HW system musings, here's a few random comments...

1. Yep, the Urox pork-sword-waving contest was pretty daft!
2. I like having to have only one die. All you need for a PC is one die, a pencil and one, uncluttered, sheet of paper. Not just rules-light, but travelling light, too -- a good thing OMHO. I can see how things could be changed to make it diceless, which would be even better for my preferred style of play.
3. Some aspects of how to resolve non-combat conflicts may need more careful thought, although that may be a failure of the playtest material, rather than the system as such. My case in point is the showdown in the Clan Chief's audience hall.

Here's how it worked, for those who didn't play, or couldn't make it. It's a dispute between two adjacent Orlanthi clans. "Our" Clan Ring journeys to the other clan's tula and try to win over their Chief to our own point of view.

The two Clan Rings, theirs and ours, meet in the audience hall to chew out the issues before the Chief. To be honest, role-playing was superfluous in that situation. It was simply a matter of picking a debating skill, picking an opponent in the other Clan Ring, and rolling for attack and defense. To make it more RP, we'd suggested the arguments our characters were using, but we could just have rolled the dice without any RP input at all: no mods were made to the dice rolls based on the nature or force of the arguments used. Worse still, if you had two debating-related skills at different skill/points levels, you could switch skills to "reset" your score if things were going badly -- playing the system, not the game.

Now, in all fairness, this was a play-test. It wasn't a "real" scenario, and it didn't feel like one. It was constructed in order to familiarise players with the basic system mechanics, and it's quite possible that the full HW system allows for more role-playing in these sorts of situations, and less-intrusive game mechanics, but it left a slightly sour taste in my mouth. Perhaps the style or content of the playtest scenario needs tweaking.

I seriously hope that HW doesn't tip the emphasis from role-playing to roll-playing. I've enough confidence in Robin's work and commitment that I strongly suspect it won't, but I'm a little worried.

Jon
- --
Work: jonsg_at_harlequin.co.uk | ICQ: 4500882 | http://www.harlequin.co.uk/ Private: jonsg_at_pobox.com | PGP key avail. | http://www.pobox.com/~jonsg/ Opinions expressed may not be Harlequin's! <*> Junk email utterly reviled

---