Re: Alex F's objection. take 2

From: Eric Rowe <rowe_at_chaosium.com>
Date: Thu, 10 Jun 1999 10:50:53 -0700


>Alex voiced his objection:
>>>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?
>Not having played the game more than twice, I still tend to side with
>Alex on this issue. Statistic-wise, a level of mastery makes more
>difference than a 50% bump up for rune levels over ordinary ("initiate")
>characters in RQ.

Alex's problems come from trying to match HW to RQ. People need to stop thinking in terms of lay/initiate/rune, and think in terms of a level of mastery better than.

There is no equivalent in HW for lay/initiate/rune. Those are social positions, not skill rankings. The problem in RQ was people played as if they had their 90% skill listed on their shoulder for everyone to see. The thing is, even in RQ it was more important to be a good member of the cult than to have five 90% skills. In Pavis, you could be a Rule Lord as a starting player because they needed bodies. Society makes the positions, not the arbitrary skill levels.

Once again to drive the point in further. Say, your clan's magical leader (priest) has one level of mastery. If you are a member of that clan and get a level of mastery in that same worship skill you don't automatically become the priest. There already is one. You need to find a clan needing one, be an assistant to the current one, wait until the current one dies, or get another level of mastery so that the clan proclaims you so superior that the other guy must step down and become your assistant.

Those of you who want your RQ version of 5000 experience points to get to level 3 can put it in your game, HW is flexible enough to do that. Just understand that it is not the game's intent to model that, so complaining that it doesn't isn't useful.

>Not exactly what Alex was aiming at. There is no problem with a select
>few mundane people tossing several masteries around. The objection was
>that every clan had a WWW person officiating at their services, because
>every such person would need one to three successors in training at at
>least WW or in case of casualty there could be no more worship services.
>These WW people would need a huge pool of W people to draw from, etc...
>Compare the difficulties of small nations to assemble first grade sports
>teams against huge nations or nations with a huge potential of dedicated
>practitioners, like Norway in skiing.

This is just wrong for the reasons given above. Your clan priest can have one mastery, or four, it is a social position.

Alex often equates priest=WWW. That is just flat out wrong and I hope he eventually stops.

>If you want to play a character starting out in 1621 and participating
>in the big events by 1625, you will have to start out with a level of
>mastery (at least) to reach the required level. I guess this is the
>dreaded "one level bump up" problem which caused much non-discussion
>earlier...

No, you won't. As I have pointed out before, this is only true if you are assuming a RQ experience system. HW is a different game. The experience system works differently.

Eric Rowe


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