did this make anyone else shudder? Not to offend anyone but is there REALLY a difference whether it's "roll high" or "roll low"?
Seriously, there has been a subtext of the HW Wars about the potential for "abuse" by soulless powergamers in the PP debate.
Let me preface my comments with the following: I am going to buy HW. I look forward to seeing it, and the only crying shame is that I'm gonna have to WAIT a year+ to see it.
That said, let me make a small digression about game system design and game philosophies vis a vis powergamers.
It's my belief that the potential for system abuse and the ability for the GM to enact dramatic license on the events they are adjudicating are directly related.
In all role playing games, there is a balance between the abstract and the representational. On the one hand you have a game (Phoenix Command) that simulates the path of every bullet as it passes through different densities of tissue and bone. On the other, you have reality abstracted to a coin flip (a number of quite entertaining pocket games).
The more representational a game is, the LESS ability a player has to twist the system to take advantage of column stepping, etc. Tie a game entirely to reality, and all you have is a simulation of realilty - you can't (really) minmax in life. This was the initial attraction of RQ to me. No more "one guy killing 80 bugbears" nonsense. With a simulation, people are forced to make REALISTIC choices in the unusual circumstances they find their characters in. To use a hackneyed example - in an abstract game we all know, the lone bandit jumping out with a crossbow pointed at you isn't a danger because the system, having to deal with 1 bolt up to many bolts, opted to make the danger of a single shot insignificant. In RQ there is (was?) ALWAYS the chance that you take it in the eye and drop like a stone. Some may like this, some may not. For me, it was an attraction - it FORCED my players to THINK about what they were doing because - as in real life - the consequences of a faulty decision could be quite lethal. In this sense - despite frenzied dice rolling and sheets full of numbers, THE GAME DISAPPEARED. But what we are talking about here is a game, and the fact that it IS a game requires that we divorce it from reality, at least a little. The minute you do this, you have left an avenue in which people will start making decisions based on the GAME SYSTEM, not the events within the game - it is utterly unavoidable.
If Robin and crew can do this - make HW a game where the decisions REMAIN in the world, and the game disappears, then it will be an order-of-magnitude step forward for the gaming industry. That's all I ask. :)
Please forgive the monologue. As this is a rules/philosophy debate, I would ask that people strongly consider sending the responses to me privately. If it will advance the debate, please, "digest" it. Otherwise send it to me direct - I don't know about you but I wade through enough navel-contemplating without adding more....as if this hasn't already!
End of The Glorantha Digest V6 #126
Powered by hypermail