Re: HW Mastery from Eric Rowe on 1999-06-10 (Glorantha Digest Vol 06)

From: Eric Rowe <rowe_at_chaosium.com>
Date: Thu, 10 Jun 1999 11:05:54 -0700

>> 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 ... How does that grab you all?
>Looks good to me, and *much* better than the proposal I (mis?)heard from
>Greg at Tentacle-Con ("Anyone with any skill is probably a Master of it, and
>anything which requires any skill to perform probably exerts one Mastery
>level of resistance" -- I loosely paraphrase his "carpenter and table"
>example).

I'd say you heard it right, but Greg probably mis-spoke it. The scale you guys like so much is exactly like the scale I've seen in the latest version of Greg's rules before the convention.

>Well, excuuuuuuse us for taking at face value what Greg said about his own
>system when presented with this argument less than a month ago. ("It takes
>around 60 game sessions to get WWW in one skill? That sounds OK to me.")

Sorry to annoy Nick. I just get tired of people complaining about conclusions they reach to the list first, not to Greg first to find out if their conclusion is correct. In this case, apparently no one asked the follow up question, "Would it also be possible for someone to get there in one session? Which would get, "That sounds OK to me."

Obviously each game group will find the happy medium of advancement they wish to play at. The instructions for this are in the rules.

>> Why can't you assume that the rules will work?
>I had never understood this to be the playtester's role. I thought it was
>our job to toughen the rules up and improve them, not to blandly assume they
>will work. But maybe I am wrong.

I'm in 100% agreement with you on this Nick. My question referred to speculative postings to the list. I do not understand the playtester's role to be to look at the rules, complain publicly about them, then find out if their conclusion was correct. Your version is exactly what I would like to see. I think Alex's comments were fine, if they had been directed at Greg like playtesters ought to be doing.

Eric Rowe