I understand the reasoning - that gaining a new Feat is like gaining a new ability, but at the level of an existing one rather than at 14, which is very attractive.
In practice, it doesn't often work like that - most Affinities are restricted enough that they are still useful only in a relatively limited number of situations. In practice, a simple ability that is useful in many situations (like, say, quick as lightning) is more useful than most affinities. No matter how good your command of lightning, not many narrators are going to let you use it for parliamentary debate or calming the horses.
I think we could lose it without problems.
> Not as weird as
>furriners' sorcerous Grimoires being *even more expensive* (with all
>that implies: one of Glorantha's magic systems is noticeably weaker than
>the other three), but nevertheless a weird stumbling-block.
Sorcery certainly is weird. I think I understand the reasoning. The idea is that sorceryis, compared to the others, hard work. Sorcerers need a lot of study, etc.
The problem is that its a rule that is intended to have a simulationist outcome, but is applied in a purely gamist (its only people involved in the narrative like PCs and major NPCs who have HPs to worry about) context. So the result is simply that playing a sorcerer is a losers choice, the equivalent of choosing to play a beggar.
>I'd be glad
>to see this go in HeroQuest: let's see 1 HP raise any ability by 1.
I'm coming round to that opinion.
>(That said, if we're going back towards a formal skill tree of defined
>broad and narrow abilities, this is probably a doomed cause).
Yep. Broad and narrow abilities seems very much a drift back from the brave narrative experiment of classic HW, towards the half-arsed alleged simulationism of the classic age of rpgs.
>Mind you, we don't play with HW magic as she is spoke, anyway. Way too
>boring for initiates to miss out on all those exotic feats, but far too
>fanatical-seeming to "upgrade" our perfectly normal PCs from initiates
>to devotees. So I'm not sure I could tell you the difference, in the
>Greydog Game, between initiates and devotees.
Initiates always seemed a bit wrong headed to me. The rules were constructed so that not having access to feats was made to be a minor disadvantage, and then what was supposed to be major distinction hung on it. But what Feats really are is description - description of what your character is supposed to do, that helps define their abilities in a way that is appropriate. Why you want to put mechanisms in play that make that game enhancing, character defining description hard to get is beyond me.
Even simply artificially restricting the number of feats might be better.
Cheers David
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