Hero Wars Questions

From: Roger McCarthy <rogermccarthy_at_hotmail.com>
Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2000 21:55:36 GMT

I wouldn't ask this if it didn't appear that we are going to have to wait another month or so before we can buy Hero Wars in the shops but even after the clarifications posted a few digests back I'm still puzzled at several points by the rules summary at Glorantha.com (which even with the character generation rules still isn't really detailed enough to be a playable Hero Wars Lite - which is a shame as this appears to be an effective way to get people interested enough to buy the full game - or at least it seems to work for GURPS)

1. If a 10w4 character fights a 5w2 character then the contest is resolved as 10w2 vs 5 - but does the 10w4 start off with 90 or 50 action points?
2. In a melee where several characters are fighting each other are action points returned to base level every time a character switches opponent - if they are then what about feats or spells that augment his abilities - do they have to be recast anew with every new contest or do they carry on indefinitely ?

I suspect the answer to this is that you run a multi-character melee as a single group contest but while this may be preferable to rolling attacks and parries for every single Trollkin with 25% club this seems a rather abstract and boring way to run a combat.

3) How exactly do you calculate the effect of combat after the contest (i.e whether a character is OK, dazed, hurt, injured, dying or dead) - it's not clear at all which if any of the various tables in the summary apply.

4) What in game terms is the difference between lay members, initiates and devotees - do they all have access to a deity keyword's affinities but at different levels?

5) While I expected HW to have 'pantheon initiation' as the default it is not at all clear from the character generation rules how this works - if you start out as a default Orlanth Adventurous initiate (that's what the rules say - which brings us full circle all the way back to RQ2) and later become an initiate of Issaries do you still have Orlanth Adv's affinities?

6)What scenarios are going to be supplied with the box? and what about getting scenarios from the various playtests and demo's (or for that matter new ones and conversions of old classics like Apple Lane) up on Glorantha.com as a way to keep interest going in what from Martin's post a longish gap between the HW release and that of Sartar Rising/Thunder Rebels/She Guards Us

As a general comment the one thing that I do miss in these rules is any element of random character generation - HW looks like it will be great if you either know at the start exactly what your character is going to look like and can do (which genuine Gloranthan neophytes on the whole won't)or if you're happy playing one of a limited number of archetypes but I don't think I'm alone in seeing the way an interesting new character can spring up fully fleshed out of a few random dice rolls as one of the really magical elements of RuneQuest and Pendragon.

However I suppose HW is flexible enough to allow us to set up random ability generation tables and to allow us to roll starting ability levels with 2d6+6 if that's what we want to do...

Roger

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