Let me say that I was a playtester for a very short time. Well, two very short times, actually: I tried out both the groups I game with on it for two weeks after which both told me to take it away. This may partly be laid down to me as GM. I went in with a divided heart. There are things which I like very much about Hero Wars but I cringed when I read about the central mechanic and even more when I read the reasoning and philosophy behind it.
What I liked:
The freeform character generation and the way it ties in with the description of the sample Sartarite culture. For me the char-gen can be as fluid and adaptable as OVER THE EDGE's system which it reminds me a good deal of. The religious and magical system, which while it needs working on and a few more examples to provide 'training wheels' for the players not too clued in about Glorantha is both satisfying and flexible and a lot more like I think Greg thinks about Gloranthan magic. The hints about Sorcery in the stuff I've seen make me think that can (At Last!) be made to work properly. The basic resolution system and the idea of Mastery (which is a design stroke of genius). The way the community was built up as background for the characters. I'm not sure you can do Dara Happan cities as easily as you can do Sartarite clans nor on quite compatible scales but the idea is there and well worth pursuing.
What I could put up with:
The fact that the system was geared to high level characters. In HW you are starting at about Rune Level equivalent. You aren't starving peasants trying to get the attention of your clan cheif. You're already his closest advisors. The grain of the system is just too coarse to allow the triumph a RQ character might feel at an increase of a couple of percent. The Plot Points system. For me the thing that this models is the characters' Will (remember that old HQ chesnut?), their ability to bend the universe to their ends. Given that they are also what they spend to advance their characters they are going to treasure these and not throw them around like confetti as they did in the demo I watched at CONVULSION. I would be happier if they were given out for good role-play and stuff like that and not as a result of dice rolls but I would be willing to change that for my own games.
What I hated:
Little Hate first. The idea that PCs start out with a Level of Mastery over the 'average person'. They aren't just more skilled: because they are the chosen children of destiny, they get a bump up over the spear carriers and farmers which means that against a mere mortal their Failures become Sucesses and their Successes Big Successes! The idea that they will maintain a moral connection with their community when the very rules encourage themselves to regard mere mortals as 'sword fodder' is repulsive to me. Big Hate: The Goddamn Action Points System. Robin justifies it by saying that he is trying to model 'adventure fiction' of all kinds both books and movies. In adventure fiction you never see the Hero dying or even being wounded before the final conflict. He either triumphs or is killed and Robin finds ludicrous the normal course of RPGs in which people fight and both sides get hurt. This is at the centre of our disagreement since for me any system which suppresses the fact that fighting is a dangerous thing for everyone is a comforting lie of the kind which kills art stone dead. So in HW you will see people going in swinging swords and there is a *rule* which says you don't tell the players if they have been wounded until the end because the loosing side can always come back from the edge. In the HW universe a person cannot look down on themselves in the middle of a fight and see if they are bleeding. And that is just silly.
For me the Action Point resolution system does not make the flow of things more exciting but bleeds all the detail and reality out of conflict, especially combat. It is (as Robin will tell you) an abstracted system. And as others have noted here it is the concrete that makes the situation real to the player's imagination not the abstract.
Robin and I had to agree to disagree about HW at Convulsion. I am sure that it can be fixed but I fear that it will not be. I don't want to talk down what is going to be the core system for Glorantha for the years to come. But I do want to say that the paradigm shift is not one that I like.
Sorry that this went on so long.
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