> From: DWRT_at_...
> Alex Ferguson wrote:
>
> > If I were a player in such a game, presented with said guidelines,
> my
> > main reaction would be "What do you mean by "heavy"?; how can we
> reach
> > an empirical definition of "substantial"?"
>
> Hmmmm. I am now convinced that half the people I play RPGs with on a
> regular basis are Alex Ferguson in disguise.
>
> I am really, really not trying to slam you Alex, but that particular
> group of people are not the people I would invite to play Hero Wars
> with me.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not seriously _advocating_ that line of thought: but this is the _rules_ list, after all, not the "all sweetness and light enlightened gamers" group, thus I feel a measure of "how might these rules go awry" is indicated here, as well as "how might they go right".
> I want players who are willing to accept whatever bonus I happen to
> hand out at the time, trusting in my ability to judge what modifier
> the story requires.
Surely, and that's implicit in the "GM social contract" in any system. But beyond the usual judgement of applicability of an ability, it seems to me that you're making some generalised statement here about how you _will_, more or less systematically, treat such abilities, above and beyond the generalised "I'm the GM, I pick the sit-mods".
> But as I reread these comments, they seem unduly harsh. Thank you
> Alex, for replying to my request. In the context of the
> guidelines, "heavy" means -3 to -15, while substantial means +3 to
> +10.
> Again, my personal answer would be to not to play Hero Wars with
> people who are displeased with 'excessive juggling'.
I envy you having that luxury... (Not the luxury of not playing with me -- never mind, I'm sure you know what I mean.)
My central point is a pretty simple one -- and I (and others) have made it before, so I'll try to be brief: if these mods are "capped", even to the rather broad range you mention, then an only-somewhat-cynical player might be tempted to think that _in the long run_, the broader the ability, the better, since if one increases fewer abilities, faster, they'll in due course overtake a large number of narrower abilities being increased more slowly.
Conversely, if they're _not_ capped, and rise in some manner with the level of the ability being used, then I'd be slightly hestitant about doing so as a GM without making this "transparent" to the players, in some manner.
It's a poor role-player that thinks of his character conception principally in such terms, of course. But it's a very rare gamer (and probably a somewhat masochistic one <g>) that doesn't think of them at all. My sympathy is not with the rules-ravishing minimaxer, but with the person who might start out with an especially evocative, well-thought out character description, who ends up feeling subtly chastised by the game mechanics, and accordingly, given a perverse incentive to make his character less "narrow", even despite his Narrator's efforts to mitigate this.
> Doesn't this just play into your argument that 'broad skills' are
> necessary and desireable?
I wouldn't go so far as to say "necessary". And I don't think that the Greg-floated idea is perfect, by any means. If someone had a more elegant, and more particularly a more _flexible_ fix to this, I'd be the first to applaud it. (Polite ripple to B. Adamson, under this head.)
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