> I assume (ack! I hate doing that, especially in this forum) that the
> "WWW" symbol means three levels of Mastery, right?
Indeed yes. Sorry, rune-font has gone to my brain...
> 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?
Not exactly, no. Harrek is an inhabitant of the Mundane, physical world, but I'd give him more than W2. One could argue that Orlanth and the Red Goddess are 'inhabitants the Mundane, physical world' (among others), and they sure as eggs do, though I suspect you didn't have them in mind... Perhaps you should further elucidate where you're imply 'mundane, physical' to max out, in Gloranthocentric terms.
> 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?
No-one I could give you the address and phone number of, but as a hypothetical proposition, it doesn't vex me. But this merely means that such individuals ought to be representable in HW terms, it says nothing about how many double-yoo's they ought to have.
> 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.
Well, that's one way of looking at it; pointlessly small-grained, would be another. It's effectively putting about 50ish 'increments' between Joe Orlanthi and Rune Lord, which is 'worse than' RQ2 (or Pendragon), and 'about as bad as' RQ3. Is the distinction between 13WW and 14WW in such a scale worth caring about any more than the difference between 73% and 74% was?
> 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:
That would be fine, if the categories you identified really were each of a different 'order' from the last. But a scale that has such rivettingly evocative distictions as 'skilled guy' from 'really skilled guy' leaves me cold. Give the 'really' skilled guy a higher target number, sez I, and save a whole level of mastery for something _meaningful_.
> Otherwise the discernable differences between various power levels
> become to close in game terms, and as a consequence cease to make sense
I don't follow this at all. Why should 'power levels' that aren't readily distinguishable in the game world in some fairly explicit way (other than, "Yeah, Snorri and Harvat are both Skilled Weaponthanes, but Harvat is a *Really* Skilled Weaponthane") be hard-coded into the game system as such? Ought not going from 19W to 2WW (or however it works this week) to mean something a bit more than just 'another notch closer to rune lord'?
Here's a somewhat different scale, that makes a lot more intuitive sense to me:
0..W : Joe Orlanthi W..WW : 'ordinary' rune master WW..W3 : tribal champion W3..W4 : local cultural hero w4..W5 : pan-cultural hero
How does that grab you all? (On the basis of off-list email, I hope at least one of you agrees with it. <g>)
Cheers,
Alex.
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