Possibly, but that's not really a good description of HW. Default HW play level seems to be 'rune level' (ish, at any rate), which is not 'superpowerful', at least by my understanding of that adjective. But HW does no more to prevent play at such 'sub-initiate' levels than RQ did, at worst. (This is praising with faint damns, I know.) Indeed, hopefully it'll put to rights the most conspicuous problem in playing non-initiates, which is a proper description of _initiation_...
Probably there won't be as many of the ever-beloved RQ mid-level romp type adventures published, it's fair to say. Oh well. The downside to scaleability is that there won't be the same depth of coverage at any given point, so if you want to play an entire campaign without ever getting past the 'RQ mid-levels', then you may be out of luck as far as published adventures go, after a certain point. But I have a fair-to-midling confidence that there will be a reasonable level of provision for such play in terms of character gen (little enough required there), and applicability
> Seriously how do you expect new Greggites to imerge from a game system
> where the majority of players dont imerse themselves in the genre...because
> they dont NEED to understand how the culture works to survive? A Rune Level
> character DEFINES how that culture works.
I think this is entirely _not_ the case. If you're a Sword of Humakt, you've already to a large degree defined your social role already (or had it defined for you, but the cult, if you prefer). You get a potted little description of what that keyword means, and it gives pretty strong roleplaying impetus to play it in a way that makes cultural (and cultic!) sense. 'Rune level' characters have a certain amount of _social_ clout, but on the 'cultural' level, they're at the pinprick stage. (Come back in another six levels of mastery, son...)
This is in many ways _harder_ to do with 15 year old characters who are Finding Their Role, since one has to play (and guide the play of) characters trying to work out what to do with their lives, while, alas, the players strive to work out much the same thing. I'm not saying this is in any way an unrewarding or inferior way to play, I just think it's a mistake to believe it's _easier_. An example that springs to mind is Pendragon, where in the 'Basic' character generation and setup one plays a landowning knight, in a period approaching the height of Arthur's reign, whereas if one uses the Advanced character generation system, and especially, an earlier Phase, one would be lucky to end up with two dry rouncies to rub together. ;-) I think this works, because vassal knights are more 'genre-bound' than some low-born Cymric warrior type, which makes the latter a tad more difficult to play while remaining within said genre.
Cheers,
Alex.
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