> I've never been comfortable with the
> duration/range charts, in that I have
> little feel for whether a section of
> the story is taking one minute, ten
> minutes, or whatever. I don't use
> figures either, so I have little idea
> of distances involved. On the whole
> we use two time periods - the action
> and the contest, and that's pretty
> much it.
>
> However, I do have a *very* good idea
> of what a day is - days and nights
> come and go for solid, story reasons,
> so the Shaman's three times a day
> fetish is limited by when night falls
> in a (to me) fairly obvious way.
I agree. At the micro level, these things are best done ad hoc during a contest. Once we go up to the chunkier macro scales, (days, weeks, miles/kilometers etc), these are things that "everyone" is comfortable with as they make appearances as story elements.
For example, say that a magician wants to cast a long-duration enhancement on a warband. We know how many members the warband has. We know how long a duration is wanted. Also, this would usually be done as part of a ritual, so we know how much support he gets.
The real variables to consider (if this is an important event, of course) are the storytelling elements of whether events conspire to stop the ritual taking place on the right day or in the right place thus greatly reducing the bonus.
It is at the mid levels, between the level of the "usual" contest that we play and the chunkier scales that I see problems. What is an hour in game-play terms? This is, for me, a fundamentally unanswerable question because the Hero Wars system allows us not to have to do this kind of book-keeping - so we do not know.
Similarly with range. In game, we know what face to face is. And "everyone" knows what a mile/kilometer is. It is the transition between the two where ambiguity creeps in.
regards,
Charles
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