I played the whole of the Warhammer FRP campaign "The Enemy Within" with a very good group of role players. At the end, the ref. said that his favourite moment was when we ordered breakfast at an inn. It was a good moment, but one can't have an entire fantasy role play campaign consisting of ordering meals. We did save the Empire a few times too.
> it makes no sense to have the grand oration to sway the clan in
> council be reduced to one "orate" roll. HW fixes this.
Does it fix it for the player who has poor oratory, who is playing a character with excellent oratory?
> How many people use the term "fumble" in its RuneQuest sense? (More people
> probably use it as a sports metaphor, at least in the USA.)
I like the term "fumble", but "cock-up" can do just as well.
> RQ2 gave us this breadth of rules and made things consistently played. RQ3
> failed in that it invented loads of new and unneccessary rule detail for
> some things then dropped some of the more broadly useful rules to make room
> for the detail.
The RQII rulebook was excellent. I hope that Herowars is similar. The RQII book used very unpretentious language (in contrast with anything Gary Gygax wrote), and a simple and fairly large serif fount (yes "fount" - - we British dip babies in a "font" in a church). It had everything I needed to start playing: monsters, a couple of cults, maps, all the rules, all the spells. If it had had a short scenario too, it would have been near perfect. This is the sort of book I would buy. The sort I would not buy is the one which does not allow me to start playing right away. I hope that Herowars does not require me to buy a supplement before I can set things in the world. I know Glorantha, but a new potential player may not, and might be put off if the rulebook requires a Gloranthan setting, while giving no help with creating one.
The only big criticism I have of the RQII book is the encounter tables, which are rubbish, and ruined a few early games when I was an inexperienced GM (stay any length of time in a town and you'd meet a vampire). The rules left the GM free to get on with the game. The climbing skill was defined as how good a character was at climbing. In RQIII, the climbing rules told me how many metres (metres in Glorantha? No one has to suffer the ghastliness of metric there, surely? In Sartar, beer is sold in PINTS as it should be) my character could climb over a given surface, per melee round. Such detail is silly: it slows the game down, restricts the freedom of GMs, and will never cover all circumstances anyway.
TTrotsky wrote:
> << Do people in Glorantha believe in luck?>>
>
> Presumably they do, or else gambling would be rather pointless - it
> would just depend on who had the best god.
I don't think that this works. Gambling depends on the unpredictability of the future. The gods of Glorantha do not know the future. If they did, they would know how/whether they would defeat their divine enemies. A genuinely random die roll or shuffle of cards could be regarded as just that: random. I do not believe in the Christian (or any other) god, and yet I believe in the ability of a die to generate random numbers, and I have some idea of the odds of certain numbers coming up, so I can gamble in a world without luck. "Luck" here is a word describing a mystical force which influences what numbers I might roll. "Luck" could of course refer to any unpredictable result, but that's not how I'm using the word. Gods act through their worshippers, and seldom directly, I would say. Orlanthi do not win all their fights with Orlanth turning up in person to help them. An Orlanth worshipper might get killed by the worshipper of a small god. So too might an Orlanth gambler lose in a game of chance.
> >Do people in Glorantha believe in luck?
>
Peter Metcalfe replied
> Yes. In Jolar, there is even a plant called 'Damn-my-luck'.
Proving that the word exists, but not defining the concept. I remember meeting someone who kept saying that "There is no such thing as luck". We had a conversation about golf. He said that if a man hits the ball in a certain way, then it will, under the prevailing conditions, certainly go into the hole, and that there was therefore no involvement of luck. I put it to him that the degree of luck refers to the predictability. A brilliant golfer who has holed the last 27 shots first time, might predict that he will hole the next one, a bad golfer hitting a hole in one would be amazed and perhaps call this "luck". In my life I notice that I sometimes have to make a choice based on little information, and sometimes I pick badly, and suffer the consequences. I may say "damn-my-luck", but this doesn't mean that a rune determined the outcome.
> And quite a few of those spells are generalized luck spells. I
> imagine there are quite a few gloranthans who have luck totems.
Name a generalised luck spell. Are you suggesting that Speedart makes an archer luckier? Surely it is a mental focussing technique which makes him more skilful, or a way of manifesting energy which noticeably aids the arrow in flight, or a summoning of a spirit which is able to help the arrow find its mark. A Gloranthan using Speedart would predict that he is more likely to hit the target, and, according to the RQ rules, indeed he will. He is not merely hoping to hit the target, he is actually influencing his chances in a predictable way.
I prefer a Glorantha without luck, because it means that people will judge the man, the character, as worthy or otherwise, not put it down to mystical influence. An RPG is all about character.
> >If fate is unalterable destiny, then what is a heroquest?
>
> An attempt to alter alterable destiny.
Fair enough, but this still introduces the concept of unalterable destiny. Major future events are likely to have vast consequences for the present. I prefer there to be no such unalterable destiny (though a cult with a Hindu-like belief in pre-destiny might be fun). For a start, it makes the actions of the PCs of greater significance, and the contests between the religions important rather than petty and trifling.
On the subject of troll pornography: presumbly it is 3D and tactile. While I'm on about senses, can anyone tell me where I can recover the stuff I lost (I think Sandy P wrote it) on dwarf senses?
I bought "Dragon Pass" at a show on Saturday for twenty-five quid. Good price? I wonder how much of the Gloranthan information in it has since been Gregged.
On tables: the RQII system was nicely table-free (my players joked endlessly about the "dropped lamp table"). I hope HW is too.
Lloyd
Dept. Psychology
Newcastle University
Nikolas.Lloyd_at_NCL.AC.UK
End of The Glorantha Digest V6 #67
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