How are they competing with "high-end" heroes as it is? Are you saying that in your Glorantha, Harrek earns no HP from anything he does in the Hero Wars? As usual in RPGs, it's not the PCs I worry about so much as the NPCs -- given how many centuries Ethilrist and Cragspider have been movers and shakers, why are their best abilities only 10w3, if they get to use the same rules as player heroes? And if you do nail down the NPCs, there's the continued rate of advancement problem: under standard rules, it should take about the same amount of time to advance from 5w3 to 5w5 as it does from 5w to 5w3 -- perhaps *less*, given the added access to the power of heroquest challenges!
> We found that disallowing anything that has a _high_ improv penalty
> (say, -20) at all seems to work the trick.
That ought to help, but it's hard for me to tell exactly how much; again, it probably depends on the players in the group. Sadly, it doesn't seem to fix the 'why spend 3 HP to increase a Combat affinity by 1 when you could increase Close Combat by 3 instead' problem.
> Remember that you can only use one mundane augment on a skill
> without narrator's approval.
Indeed! My point was that this is a rather important rule to *not* change, though ISTR some discussion of groups that allowed it.
> And there's a finite limit of magical ones. (I generally won't
> allow an affity to augment any single ability more than once
> (though +edge and +augment from a single affinity are okay).
I think this is an excellent house rule, but the fact remains that it is a house rule. In HW as written, you get one augment per *feat*, and can improvise as many feats as you like. Also, what do you do about people augmenting each other? How do you feel about four different gods' Combat affinities used to augment a single champion?
> And, of course, one can't augment magical abilities without rituals
> (though I will allow magical items to do so).
Yes, I'm working up to a post about rituals. =)
> We have found that augments are not quite the botomless abyss you
> seem to advocate they are.
I admit that I am something of a prophet of gloom and doom when it comes to game rules, but that's because I'd like to identify any bottomless abysses that might be out there as far in advance of falling down them as I can. Also, I find that trying to stretch a system until it breaks is one of the best paths to understanding it.
> In the end, I want my player characters to be Heroes, not bean
> counters. I guess that's my main beef with the current threads.
Sure. But IMO that imposes a certain burden on the Narrator to do some bean counting for them -- in movie terms, it takes immense effort to produce special effects that are easy to appreciate -- or at least make sure that heroes are not unduly punished by the game system for choosing to roleplay, including dealing as far as possible in terms their characters would use, like "how wide in *feet* is the river?"
Ryan Caveney
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