<< A while ago somebody asked if he could get an explanation of the HW
mechanics
since it was referred to and he and everyone else probably was going to buy
it anyway.>>
There's *plenty* of this in the Digest archives, as it has been discussed at some length before. Perhaps people are reluctant to go through it all again, just over a month (allegedly) before everyone can see for themselves. Note that not only do GTA members already have access to the rules, but Greg has said that some sort of summary will be appearing on the Issaries website before too long. Even if 'everyone is probably going to buy it anyway', there are copyright and other legal considerations which make the amount of discussion so far pretty generous, IMHO.
<< Now people are once again juggling these funny 'www' stats around and not explaining them.>>
In brief - the higher the number the better the skill. You roll equal to or under the number of a d20 to succeed. Each 'W' increases your level of success by +1; thus if you have 10W skill, all rolls of 'success' or better (i.e. 1-10) become criticals, all rolls of 'fail' (11-19) become successes, and all 'fumbles' (20) become normal failures. Ws cancel out in a contest; if I have 10WW and you have 15W, the actual fight is conducted as if I had 10W and you had 15 - this is why skills of 1WWW and up are still meaningful.
In a contest, you start off with a number of action points equal to your skill (+20 per W that you have). Both sides bid a number of action points each round, then roll simultaneously. The results (I critical and you fail, or whatever) are cross-referenced on a table to see how many APs each person actually loses or gains (e.g. you might lose twice your bid in APs, etc.). When one person runs out of APs, he or she has lost.
Obviously there's a lot more to the actual game than that, but that's how the core mechanic works. The Ws are really mastery runes, which are a tad difficult to do in ASCII.
<>
Would it not have been simpler to explain it yourself then, instead of complaining that nobody else had done so?
Forward the glorious Red Army!
Trotsky
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