>Personally I can't see how this adds to the experience... even
>dramatically/narratively it tends to be the details that make things
>intensive. I wonder... how does HW handle it, if an archer is fasing
>somebody with a sword, and has just one or two arrows left. In a
>simulationist approach this is easy (for instance RQ), but am I right
in
>thinking that in HW nobody is interested about such detail as how many
>arrows an archer has?
Well I have not seen the rules, or played the game, but being a good American I have an opinion anyway....
Why does the archer have only two arrows left?
Clearly he has been harrying the patrol for a while
and has shot most of them. The loss of
arrows should be reflected by a loss of SP.
The only problem with that is that if you are sitting
there shooting, and the target has no way to
defend himself then there is no way for you to lose SP.
Well, I of course already have a house rule to work
around that. All skills have three numbers.
(skill)/(SP)/(cost).
Skill and SP are the two numbers you're already
familiar with, cost is subtracted from your SP for
each round you use the skill. Thus it represents
fatigue in close combat, number of arrows in
archery, and the number of arguments you have
studied, or maybe your voice giving out in debate
or bargaining.
The cost number can be then tuned. If your character concept is that the person wears heavy armor (or carries a big pack of gold for dungeon crawls) then the cost might be 3. If the character is one of the three musketeers, then he can fight forever and has a cost of 0.
If your debater has only one argument
( "my father is Yelm, so I am just and correct")
then he might be 4/16/8. Meaning that
the argument is pretty much useless if
people didn't find it convincing the first
time, and that he must stake his whole
argument on that.
Likewise If your death magic is big and flashy, and you want to say that it can only be used once per combat ( or it destroys it's spell components) then it is "kill with a glance 6/14/14"
This has the additional advantage that it is now advantageous to throw wave after wave of trollkin at a humackti sword, who will kill them all, but when the ZZ death lord finally gets into the fight he'll kill him with one blow. (which is as it should be, ZZ aren't stoopid)
Of course, as I currently understand it, between
scenes your SP go back up to full, which means
that given a half an hour the archer has
either recovered or made a quiver full of arrows.
This might be considered unrealistic.
Well just add a fourth number, the number of
SP you recover per day. So our sun lord above
might have
"Cite Parentage to justify arguments: 4/16/8/160"
(see isn't that mush simpler, now instead of just keeping track of pow recovery I'm keeping track of 10 different numbers for all of my skills. That must be why they don't pay me the big bucks as a game designer)
End of The Glorantha Digest V6 #239
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