Re: Playing Powerful Characters (from HeroWars Digest)

From: Kevin P. McDonald <paul_mcdonald_at_...>
Date: Mon, 02 Dec 2002 19:52:53 -0500


Norbert asks,

> Just a careful question from me: How often do you people actually play?
>

We play once per week, but the sessions are fairly short - about three hours.

My goal as narrator is to do the whole Hero Wars bit, so I am trying to limit the flow of events to one "episode" (of 5 long scenes) per game year. In between episodes I fast foward through the seasons using simple contests. I would gloss over it even more, but my players won't let me. :)

Even so, our rate of advancement is too fast to go the distance. I therefore plan to slow things down once we get to 1w4. How I plan to do this I am not sure. My current best idea is to treat any ability over 20w3 as an affinity, costing tripple HP to raise. I might decide to say that that you can't spend HP on heroic/godlike abilities at all, and use heroquesting as the only mechanism for improvemnt.

This raises an interesting question for me - How would you run heroquests (out of an episode) as simple contests? I might be able to run them as a series of simple contests, but I really need to resolve this sort of thing quickly so that we can focus on actual episode play. Heroquests that occur during an episode would be handled normally.

High character abilities might not have been a problem if I had not previously run the same characters through a series that lasted one season and allowed the players to raise their best mundane ability by some 25 points. Hindsight is 20/20... <laugh> If I could start over, I would probably use masteries as a cost multiplier, as has been discussed on the lists before. I.E. The cost of improving a mundane ability from 5w to 6w would cost 1HP (1x1). The cost of improving from 5w2 to 6w2 would be 2HP (1x2). This has the added "benefit" of making multiple advances at high ability levels prohibitavely expensive.

~Kevin

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