> I consider myself to be experienced. I've been role-playing for
twenty years
> and running campaigns for at 15 or so and I find HW to be incredibly
> frustrating to run because of the lack of structure and examples.
Cultural
> determinism's all good and fine but I'm curious if the rules will
start
> needing patches when their used for other locales.
I suspect newbies will have much less difficulty realising that their Wealth is no more explicitly detailed than their Strength than establish RPers. After all, they will have no prior expectation that the game should treat this category of the characters power over then world any differently to the way it treats the rest.
And incidentally, I don;t think it is true that the response here has just been "wing it" or "we can't say because its cultural relativity". Those are the reasons for not having a DETERMINISTIC system, not for having NO system. And there is a system in place - HP cementing, of the gold block, of "too many" cows, of whatever. And your basic proportions are observable by comparison to the weregilds of socially significant ranks.
For example, we know from page 43 of TR that a cow is a "milk cow that has succesfully given birth to two calves". We know a horse is worth about 4 cows, but that these proportions are not fixed. We know the penalty for slaying a cottar is 10 cows, and we know that the weregild of a thane is approximately 63 cows, taking the sacrifices into account. We also now that the penalty for consorting with darkness is 2 cows (page 84).
This gives you a pretty decent framework from which to calculate "what to do" if the characters suddenly acquire vast wealth, because you can see from the weregilds. A normal warrior has a Wealth of 15 and a cottars weregild of 10 cows. A weaponthane has a Wealth of 5W and the above weregild of 50+ cows (60+ after "godtax"). And of course, if you had a physical cow in your herd which had not yet had 2 calves, it would not count. Assuming that the warrior above acquires 20 cows, and wishes to cements them, how much should that cost? Well, they now have about half the herd of full thane, which is a jump in Wealth of about 5 points, so that might be an appropriate charge. Might be - thats where the judgement comes in and why it should not be a mechanically consistent system; applying this calculation consistently up and down the scale will produce hopelessly crazy results.
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