game which enabled me to see the stick from both ends.
As a whole the system is very slick. Its easy to use, there is only one
chart
you have to know and characters can be summed up with a few sentences.
I do have some points I'd like to cast though.
at 8/12 available. So you come up with a flange explanation that you
learned
how to swim in armour from a naiad and assign the unused skill to expert
swimming at 8/12 to save yourself. The next adventure the skill returns
to being
unassigned. I don't really like this idea. Also there are no real
examples of what
a value represents in the world. What is a normal strength? How many
action
points are required to teleport a mouse? or a human? What's to stop a
forgetful
GM from changing the value from week to week?
3) In the example adventure there was a situation where the party of
PC's
stage a huge argument with the 6 members of a chieftains clan ring. Each
NPC
was using a different 'point-of-view' argument skill. This strained me
to the limit.
I would say that my GMing skill is fairly good, and that my roleplaying
is not too
bad either (getting a bit long in the tooth!) but I was struggling for
ideas and
story lines for these arguments by the end of the contest(s). I love the
idea of
bidding action points, roleplaying the exchange and the rolling the
resolution d20.
But if you have a lot of rounds of bidding it makes it very difficult to
keep on
roleplaying it. All of my players as soon as they became comfortable
with the
bidding system switched to doing all_or_nothing bids, because they
couldn't
think up any more fresh ideas for each round. Even in combat this would
become a problem if two characters had reserves of hundreds of action
points
(which can happen very quickly). If they were equally matched the
contest could
last for ages whilst they bid in small enough chunks to prevent instant
death if they
failed a roll. And remember that every round should be accompanied with
some
roleplay or description or else it just becomes a dice rolling contest.
4) Which leads me onto young players. I was the person who expressed
some
reservations about more immature roleplayers, unfortunately I didn't
phrase my
question very well. What I meant to point out was if both my play
testers and
I whom are all very experienced and good at roleplaying had difficulties
maintaining descriptions from round to round, then how will 14 year olds
be
able to cope. Without the roleplay the bidding system becomes very
sterile and
boring indeed. I am of the opinion that children have very fertile
imaginations but
they definitely need some help in bringing that imagination out. Rules
help
children play. Lack of rules (or loose rules) leave them feeling a bit
lost and
maybe not happy that they are doing it, or can do it right. Children
don't tend
to play story telling systems (unless the game is run by somebody
mature), they
like hard and fast games like warhammer or D&D, which have boundaries.
5) Although the contest resolution works fine for verbal or
non-dangerous
conflicts I think it fails when it comes to combat. Using this system to
resolve a
combat between two opponents only the person who loses all of their
action
points first would be wounded or killed. I agree with Michael Cule that
this is too
much of an abstraction and I prefer to see the other participant suffer
some injury
(or its equivalent) during the fight too.
6) There was an example table showing what happens to the loser of a
fight
depending upon how negative their action point go. Zero was winded, -10
a
light wound, -20 heavy wound, -30 dying and -40 dead. Now even for
characters with good skills, the best action point totals were 14. In a
fight with
an equally skilled person and consistently rolling successes the best
you could
expect to put your opponent down to was -14ish and to do that you'd need
to
make a large bet which could easily backfire on the player. So it was
impossible
to give the opponent a bad wound or kill them without placing yourself
in danger.
Again this is counter intuitive to me. If Robin is trying to model
TV/book fiction
how could the system handle a disgruntled (inexperienced) wife who
simply
plunges her fish knife into her husbands belly and kills him in one
shot?
7) Plot points can easily be abused, especially in mass conflicts. If a
player
waits several rounds in a conflict till one of the enemy builds up a
large store of
won action points, they can make a stupidly large bet (Player characters
can
bet more points than they actually have remaining) against the enemy and
use
a plot point to almost guaranty winning the roll. Then the player has
all the
action points which the enemy had, and will probably be unassailably
powerful
for the rest of the conflict. This becomes horribly abusive if in a
battle situation
where the PC can bet all or nothing bids to kill each NPC without
worrying
about loosing. Very quickly one character can defeat an entire
regiment...
8) In a similar vein, major NPC's shouldn't bother throwing chaff
(weaker
warriors, debaters etc.) at the players to soften them up, because in
fact all that
they are doing is bumping up the players action points and making them
stronger, rather than weaker.
9) Because every conflict uses the same system resolution I think that
there will
be very little difference in the 'feel' of the magic systems. Although
sorcery will
require enchanting objects, shamanism to summon spirits etc., there is
_no_
difference between them. Its just the same game system with different
words
of description. Ok, once again this comes down to a question of
roleplaying,
but it doesn't seem right to me. Will there be benefits for one type of
magic
over another (e.g. Shamanism is better against sorcery, and sorcery is
better
against theism etc.). I would like to see something to spice up the
magic
types and make them more individualistic.
Right I think that got all my points off my chest. Sorry to take up
digest
space, but I'd like to see other play testers opinions on my queries.
Pete
End of The Glorantha Digest V6 #77
Powered by hypermail