> > The above question is a perfectly "legitimate" one in game terms,
> > and one that's indeed quite likely to _arise_, in some sort or
> > another, if you're playing a game set in Glorantha, rather than
> > in a neat little Platonic world of HPs and APs that rarely relates
> > to the same.
>
> The system as writ is designed to prevent it from arising. As had
> been discussed previouasly, "acquiring" these cows is not the end of
> the story. You might have social obligation and debts to pay off
> (reflected in your reklatively low 5W rating). You might increase
> welath more easily by giving the cows to your liege and then basking
> in the largesse of free food and beer on tap for the next year. The
> imponderables are immense, so the system takes a mechanical shortcut,
> opts out of trying to SIMULATE the economy, and instead demands the
> player NARRATE the economy. In other words, the acquisition of cows
> is no more directly related (in a cause and effect sense) to a wealth
> issue than your particular weapon is to a combat task. They are both
> in fact props which allow the player to exert a game mechanical
> change through the expenditure of HP's (or AP's in combat).
That's hand-waving. This has nothing to do with the "system" (other than that the system doesn't handle it at all), this is a "yes, but" narrative device to "explain away" what happens to the wealth in question. If I _want_ to actually answer the question, as opposed to waffling my way around how it's "the wrong question to ask", then with HW as it stands, I'm stuffed.
It's absurd to say that you can only narrate (sorry, NARRATE) wealth by trivialising and negating game-world factors that might lead to increases in wealth by supposing the automatic existence of equal and opposite game-world anti-factors, such that "it only counts if and in so far as you spend the HPs on it". Maybe I actually wanted those original events to matter, and to have the game rules support incorporating them into the mechanical description, eh? You can jump up and down all day and say "bad, bad, simulationist, bad", but it's not addressing the core point.
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