Alex F's objection. from Doyle Wayne Ramos-Tavener on 1999-06-09 (Glorantha Digest Vol 06)

From: Doyle Wayne Ramos-Tavener <dwtavener_at_mail.esc4.com>
Date: Tue, 08 Jun 1999 23:12:11 -0500

At some point in the past the erudite Alex F. wrote:
>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 one of the HW demos at the LA con last year, but I still can't make complete sense of what exactly you just said, Alex. (N.B. The tone in my voice is currently "I'm thick, please help me.")

At the dire risk of making you seem redundant, can I ask you to go into more detail about your specific objections?

I assume (ack! I hate doing that, especially in this forum) that the "WWW" symbol means three levels of Mastery, right?

I also assume that your objection in the last paragraph has to do with scaling; or, the nearly perennial discussion about the differing levels of power in both Mundane and Otherworld Glorantha.

If I understand you correctly, you are objecting to making the scale of inhabitants the Mundane, physical world more vast than two levels of Mastery. Correct?

The following bits run with this assumption.

There were several Mundane entities in RQ Glorantha that were always recognized as being beyond stats. Gonn Orta leaps to mind. Yet we also knew that there were people, described as Rune Lords or Priests or RLP, etc. who could put up a fight with this scale of entity. Right?

If you match the Chaos horror Cwim against a gross Storm Bull with 200+ skills and lots of retainers, doesn't something like Cwim still win?

As I understand it there _are_ individuals who should be able to take Cwim (or defeat entities in the Cwim class) but still be of Mundane (non-Otherworld) Glorantha. Correct?

Because of the inherent limitations of RQ, it was nearly impossible to describe such individuals in game mechanics, much less aspire to becoming something close to such an individual.

Having three levels of Mastery to qualify as Rune level seems to me to mean that the possible scale in HW to be more Finely Tuned then I would have initially thought. That is, the scale should not be thought of in terms of a 1-20 sort of thing, but rather in terms of Level of Mastery:

No mastery: Normal Guy
W: Skilled Guy (or good initiate)
WW: Really skilled (nearly priest)
WWW: Rune lord or priest
WWWW: Rune Lord-Priest
WWWWW: Anyone from Sartar High Council Except Kallyr WWWWWW: Kallyr, or Argrath, Cwim, Hungry Jack, etc.

Though the using of RQ terminology is probably deceptive. The difference between "WWW: Rune lord or priest" and "WWWW: Rune Lord-Priest" in RQ terms does not seem that great to me, especially as compared to the differences between "WWWWW: Anyone from Sartar High Council Except Kallyr" and WWWWWW: Kallyr, or Argrath, Cwim, Hungry Jack, etc. as described in narrative other than RQ rules. And I should also point out that my guesses about the possible holders of levels of Mastery above three to be completely conjectural. But you get the point, right?

In this context, you have to have multiple levels in Mastery for the inhabitants of the Mundane World. Otherwise the discernable differences between various power levels become to close in game terms, and as a consequence cease to make sense, in terms of the Target Narrative that Greg seems to want to have set in the game.

Does that make any sense? Does it address your final question?

DWRT