Runaway Mastery Inflation.

From: Alex Ferguson <abf_at_yeats.ucc.ie>
Date: Tue, 8 Jun 1999 01:48:34 +0100 (BST)


ex-officio Hamiltonian David Scott writes:
> To get into the Hero/God/spirit plane you have to overcome a resistance
> of Mastery3. This means that a Rune Lord or Priest (They have Mastery3 by
> definition) has a 50% chance of getting into the heroplane. On HH days
> etc. They get a support bonus making it near impossible to fail on
> special days.

By completely bogus definition, IMHO. Greg did indeed expound on this topic at Tentacles, but whether he was just whistlin' Dixie or not seems arguable. Since the boni were such that the officiating priest would get at _least_ another WWW, on top of their existing at least WWW, they'd always _crit_ this test, whether in a simple or an extended contest, never mind merely succeeding most of the time.

To regrind an axe from the Tentacles 'game mechanics on the hoof' discussion, I don't see the sense in making priesthood/lord-dom more than about a single level of Mastery over Joe Normal. (That is, minimum would be about 10W, anything up to 10WW would be 'not unusual'.) What does blowing this up to WWW accomplish, aside from making it a very long haul up to Runie, removing any reasonable intuition about what 'Mastery' means, and generally introducing big-number-itis?

> I ran the Hero Wars intro game in Germany (Return to Apple Lane)
> recently. The magic was pretty straight forward, Except for some
> confusion over how healing works and that sorcery was far to leathal to
> the caster. Minor bugs only.

Confusion over healing and self-lethal sorcery seems entirely Authenically Gloranthan to me. ;-)

Cheers,
Alex.


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