WWW Ultimate Championship Fight

From: simon_hibbs_at_lycosmail.com
Date: Wed, 16 Jun 1999 12:36:44 -0400 (EDT)


From: Eric Rowe <rowe_at_chaosium.com>

>>> But what really concerns me is I wonder if what I perceive as a big
>>>flaw, and a major departure from my view of Glorantha (ie every village
>>>tough guy is a superhumanly powerful WWW) may actually be intentional on
>>>Gregs part (every villages toughest guy is able to incarnate heroes, chop
>>>through stone, and perform similar outrageous things). Any comments?
>>
>>Yup. WWW ain't superhuman, not even close.

Although that's not to say that the clan thug is WWW in thuggery. However the Tribal Champion might be WWW in Tribal Championing, but then this guy is a major factor in inter-tribal power plays, so you'd expect that.

>Suddenly I'm concerned. Did I miss something, or is WWW equivalent to
>60 in Pendragon (and 300% in RQ)?

I don't think it is. In RQ, or Pendragon, if you score a success with a sword versus an unarmoured opponent who scored a fail, you'd expect to do them some realy serious grief. The same result in Hero Wars is usualy not so serious for the looser. The Hero Wars abilities scale and Pendragon or RQ skills scale do not match up one-for-one.

The second point is that Plot Points can give an apparently inferior opponent a real edge in combat. A character with 10W and no plot points is in serious peril from a rank 10 character with three spare plot points. A character with 10W and 3 plot points he knows he will need later, versus a character with 10 and 3 plot points to burn, is also in a risky situation. If you don't know how many plot points the characters in a contest have, or are willing to lose in that particular contest, then you only know half of the story - if that much!

These two factors flatten out the power structure quite a bit, bluring the boundaries between levels of mastery in a way that is not possible in games such as RQ3 and Pendragon.

>And people called my group powergamers?

The third point is that whereas the RQ3 and Pendragon game systems break down in playability at high power levels, HW apparently doesn't. This is perhaps the major point. HW will allow you to actualy run a playable hero level game. Comparisons with games which don't let you do that are therefore obviously, er, less than usefull.

Simon Hibbs


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