>While anyone who understands mythology and what Mercury is all
about would know he can >outrun a horse, it presumes, as does Ian's
system that everyone has detailed knowledge of >what they are
talking about. This means a much higher learning curve. Glorantha
already >suffers too much from learning curve Syndrome to add more
in for "incomparable abilities".
Not really. I do not think that this is a realistic example.
You are running an HW game in which you want to introduce Mercury. I think it unlikely that you are going to be thinking - I know nothing about Mercury apart from these stats: Speedy 8W6 and Healer 10W6, which I just made up and I don't want to know anything more about him. Hey, I know nothing about him, let us make him the central figure to the story in a race scene.
Hopefully if you did not want a dull game you would only add Mercury to your story knowing that he had a role to fulfill in that story. Prsumably that would be based on what you knew about his characteristics.
As before if Mercury appears in the story do not roll for a horse race, as a speedy god Mercury would beat all horses, unless the player had some magic to affect the outcome.
In most cases all that narrative games call for is an understanding of real-world outcomes. This is something we do all know. Very few people are here arguing that a horse is much faster than a man, they are arguing how to represent that. The narrative game says that if you already know that, why spend pages telling you, and giving you a system whose most perfect result is to generate an outcome, you already know. If the system works the horse will always win - so don't bother to roll it - get on with the story.
>So much for appealing to new gamers then. The idea that Hero Wars
will only appeal to and/or work for sophisticated and experienced
roleplayers pretty much puts it into a ghetto guaranteeing low sales.
No. Gamers without the baggage of 'wanting it to be RQ' that a lot of people carry here find the system strightforward. Go over to the Forge. Many of the people there who are attracted to Hero Wars are attracted by the system itself and have no played a previous Gloranthan game. They are new Gloranthan gamers.
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