As the narrator I have to be able to provide effective opposition to the players and so here is what I'm finding happens:
The players when they augment and their enemies don't, are sure fire to win a fight. This plays out in prepartion, planning and rolling other skills (sneaking, ambush etc) that allow them to get to the point where they can use their skills, augmented, while their enemies are unprepared.
When two sides are facing each other in large contests, unusual magics, special tactics and surprise weapons all contribute to the complexity, even if both sides are augmented in close combat, one of the participants may well have a surprise weapon that close combat is ineffective against, so they circumvent the super boosted skills.
When truly huge forces collide, the collateral damage is immense. In one battle the player threw Little Weighty, a Great Weighty style heroweapon at a foe who weilded Lighting Boy. When both of them collided, they cratered a huge area and knocked both armies present off their feet. This is exciting IMO and very cinematic.
So what does this mean for play and narrating? Well the game seems to represent Gloranthan paper, rock, scissor style combat at the heroic level. The Humakti with the mighty close combat will do poorly against an enemy who knows his abilities. A magician with city destroying spells might be very weak against an assassin in his closet who gets in close. This is the beauty of the system. Preparation and planning have a massive effect and can bring down the mightiest.
Therefore, I would like to state that at the higher levels, the game works and in fact ADDS to the narrative focus. It makes the cleverness of the players and the NPCs the issue, not the sheer power they can bring to bear.
I'm looking forward to seeing what happens when theplayers reach 5 masteries. I would think that might happen in around another 100 sessions, so 1645 game time.
Martin Laurie
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