On boringness of just playing the 1/10 augment game. I agree this is
boring, especially for a game which is supposed to be heroic. You
read off a bunch of combat augments, and Truesword is pretty much
equivalent to Sword Help. Big bummer. However, one thing I discovered
over the course of 1+ year of email play is that at the end of the
day the numbers really don't matter: what stays in everyone's mind is
the description that you used for your actions. Our players in the
Legion of Death campaign are not powerful (maybe 10W best skill, with
most PCs around 7W and pretty unrounded characters), but because they
succeeded in their contests and did so in an entertainingly-described
way, they feel like heroes. So I would encourage you to focus on
description, and to let the numbers follow from there. You will
probably find that the gamesmanship that you used to use on mechanics
gets transferred to clever description.
Example. In an another email game which unfortunately died a
premature death, Graham once gave a threat that went something like
this. "I, Lightning-Hand Skerri (+1 augment for speed), son of Jarl
who strangled a bear (+1 augment from strength), grandson of Jim the
Lunar-Slayer (+1 against Lunars), call on my ancestors to witness
this fight and aid me against the unjust oppressors." [a long list of
ancestors and kin with heroic feats follows] Even if some of the
augments get turned down by the narrator, you can imagine how
powerful he would have been at the end of that recitation!
Admittedly, this type of description works best for email rather than
face to face play. Hope this helps.
<flynnkd_at_p...> wrote:
> > we are not that poetic (well I'm not anyway). But generally
> Swordhelp > > of Shield Destroyer is just 'I use X' feat of Y for a
+z augment' > and > > if we are feeling creative 'my blade grows
black and huge as I > > use...'. We only need to get creative for the
more esoteric ones.
>
> The HW book implies in its descriptions, and several have expressed
> it, that feats can be replications of the gods actions, at some
> level.
>
> At the simplest level, it is +1/10th augment. But at several times
> it has also been described as a heroic action beyond mortal
physical > abilities. Sunset Leap (for eg) has been expressed as a
capacity to > make larger jumps, up to making godly jumps.
[snip}
> HW can be played as a simple augment game, but i feel that is a bit
> of a waste.