>
>Another part of the design goal was not have to explain an ability, as that
>can take quite a bit of paper.
FWIW, I think this design goal was overoptimistic, and has failed in practice. Part of the reason it has failed in practice has to lie with Greg, who loves to give abilities cool Gloranthan names. Sunset Leap is a particularly good example (at Sunset? Into the Sunset? At any time, and it makes it look like a sunset? Even just adding an extra word would have helped, like 'at' or 'into')
>What does Snarl of Darkness do? I dunno, could be an attack feat that
>obscurs the battlefield ("darkness pours from her mouth and conceals thes
>cene from you"), or destroys your morale or your mind (darkness is
>associated with madness...), or acts to boost her own abilities. It does
>what *you* want it to do, and what you can convince your narrator it does.
In principle, its a good idea, and it potentially helps ease skill dilution problem that affects some other games, like games in which every trained rifleman has a separate gunsmithing and evaluate firearm skill.
Hero Wars definately can suffer from skill dilution, but when it does its mostly due to poor character design rather than the rules. The Buserian Scholar, for example, who has Identify Celestial Phenomena, Scan the Sky, Tell Time from Sky, and Stellar Myths, and then still has Discern Constellation as a separate feat. The essential problem is that in general, having more specific skills for a general area makes you worse at it rather than better, because you spread experience more thinly - someone with Knowledge of the Stars as a single ability will be, in the long run, better at the stuff the Buseri is supposed to be best at.
But Hero Wars needs more definition. One or two sentence descriptions would be fine, or even only one or two sentence definitions of the few feats that are not obviously clear.
RuneQuest probably went too far, in that most spells were fairly rigidly defined, and needed a short paragraph to make them clear. But Hero Wars goes too far back the other direction. Often, the description is quite unclear, and even a single sentence of description would make the difference.
I disagree with this design decision. I think it works for some areas, and works well - when everyone (players and narrator) have a rough idea of what people are capable of, like most everyday mundane skill, it works well. I agree with the abscence of a skill list, for example, though a few detailed examples for common skills would have been useful. But for magic, it still leaves me feeling that we have a rough sketch of a magic system, but details that should be there aren't.
Michael Cule.
>I think that it's fine not having a 'list of skills' as long as the
>skills are things we can know about from general experience ('Ride
>Horse', 'Debate Wittily', 'Close Combat') but if it's 'Dazzle with
>Darkness' or 'Raise the Hidden Wind'..... Oy! Oy! And again Oy!
Exactly. I am very much with you.
FWIW there were strong disagreements with this among playtesters. Some of us have had this debate before, and are still rather bitter about it.
>Look, this has consequences. Amongst other things it's going to mean an
>end to any sort of consistent realising of Glorantha across differing
>campaigns.
Yup. Another reason for it being a big problem. There are very simple and obvious problems with interpretation - ie if you have the Feat 'Leap Over Tree', does that mean you can leap over something as tall as a tree, or only a tree? What about a wooden house?
>And a lot of GMs will throw their hands up in despair at the amount of
>work that this requires. And throw the rule book a good long way away.
I think thats putting it a little harshly - many games have become popular with stranger design decisions that Hero Wars (Amber, for example).
I strongly recommend that something be done to help with this problem - like writing one or two sentence descriptions of all the feats, and putting them on the Glorantha web site. I'll even do it myself, if asked. But then, I strongly recommended that there be more description in the first place.
Cheers David
Powered by hypermail