This is a relief! Our GM was a little unclear on when one could reset the system, and I think that was probably down to ambiguities in his working material, plus the fact this was his first HW scenario as a GM. He wasn't a bad GM! It appeared from all we could glean that one could use "resetting" as a game tool (*shudder*). I'm glad that impression was false.
I do appreciate that we were working with what is essentially a primitive boiled-down version: however, if we're actually meant to playtest the system, it's a Good Thing if what we're playing is canonical -- otherwise, it's less a playtest and more a sneak preview, which is fine if it's presented as such.
However, George W. Harris <gharris_at_mindspring.com> makes some considerably more significant comments:
> One thing that I really like about RuneQuest is that for every
> game-mechanic, there is an analogous concept which the character would
> understand. [...] My main worry here is with action points and the
> wagering of them. What the hell does an action point represent to the
> character? In RQ, magic points, hit points and even fatigue points
> had a direct and obvious correspondence with some Gloranthan concept.
> [...] I find this worrisome, but not so worrisome as Plot Points.
These things were niggling at me at the time of the playtest, and I couldn't put my finger on what was bugging me about it. At the time I put it down to over-intrusive game mechanics, which would become natural given a little familiarity, but George has helped clarify my feelings.
HW, as presented at that playtest (and I have to emphasise that, because, as Alex points out quite correctly, we weren't playing the full or final game), came over less as a role-playing game than as a game involving role-playing. The game mechanics -- the way skills were resolved -- were divorced from the actual role-playing. The mechanism of wagering, trading and accounting for action points became a separate activity from the scenario in progress, so that we were operating on two levels.
When you're playing RQ, there's some accounting, but keeping track of magic points and hit points has meaning within the action: it's a close abstraction of what's happening to the characters. Action points and the gambling game mechanic seem to me such a high-level abstraction that there's little tangible relation to the scene in progress. That's dangerous. People can lose interest in the drama in order to concentrate on the ebb and flow of action points, and in fact that's what happened in our game. Any game mechanic which forces a psychological remove from the scene can't be good.
All this implies heavy criticism of the playtest and of the game itself. That's not entirely fair. I like the keyword mechanism Robin has created. It's good to have a character sheet not over-cluttered with numbers and symbols and needless detail. Overall, it's pretty similar to the diceless RQ variant I'm running. My current feeling is that I'll get HW (hey, who here won't?), but probably make some minor conversions to a diceless system and lose the action point mechanic completely.
(My understanding of plot points, BTW, is that the surplus points can also be cashed in at the end of an adventure for permanent improvements in skills, the equivalent of the old skills checks. This wasn't covered in the playtest, but mentioned in another session. That may affect your view on them, George. My guess is that the use of PPs to bias skills resolutions is a way of limiting the number available at the end of the scenario for character improvement. I still don't like it, though.)
Anyway, enough ramblings.
Jon
End of The Glorantha Digest V6 #71
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