>> 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.
Other than their RW expectations/experiences which I think are nothing like HW, though that's true of any non-modern system. What you say may be true but you'd probably have to be a newbie to prove it. But the rules are still pretty poorly written for easy comprehension, otherwise people wouldn't be arguing about them so much.
>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.
Yet when people wonder about how to add four cows they're told, "Well your character would probably give them away to gain favour/pay the chief/pay back a debt, etc." Those aren't necessarily very helpful answers as they're not quantifiable.
>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).
Thunder Rebels isn't the Hero Wars rules. Cultural variation example/wealth lists are fine but let's try and avoid the assumption that HW=Heortling Wars. The Hero Wars rules have to be able to stand by themselves. Hopefully they can avoid the RQ syndrome where rules are scattered throughout the rules. (Though I know they can't because the only place where the Humakti magical advantage over undead is mentioned is in Anaxial's Roster-and nowhere is the inferred magical disadvantage other people have in the case of undead explained).
Oliver
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