> It's the implementation of the feat in a contest. The problem boils
> down to in extended contests, everything is supposed to boil down to
> APs, and it's hard to fit that in sometimes.
Er, right.
That's actually not quite true.
In fact, everything boils down to the Narrator's bidding strategies.
The Narrator (and to a lesser extent the players) control the ebb and flow of the action by making larger or smaller bids.
You as Narrator are having a problem with running a contest ? Especially a boring one ?
No problem : just bid as many APs as you have next time 'round : contest ended, problem solved.
The whole point of the AP extended contest mechanism is to give you a non-arbitrary* means of controlling gameplay so as to prevent it becoming boring.
> I have been able to work
> it in once, but that was a creature requiring decapitation to kill (it
> was used as a final action). I don't see this as a problem, really.
> It's just a matter of my picking out the right mechanical way of
> handling it.
HQ AFAIK will have advice for handling this.
In a nutshell, attempting to decapitate a foe requires an appropriate AP bid.
> Well, I've read the myth about Orlanth rescuing Heler from the Blue
> Dragon, so I wind up looking at Wind Above and Wind Below and asking
> "how the hell was I supposed to know that?"
Hrm.
Heler mythology and Aroka mythology are both insanely complicated.
Fact is, no you're not really supposed to know that.
You are supposed to discover these things through intensive transcendental medita^h^h^h roleplaying experiences or active participation to the GD and/or fanzines.
> Yes, yes, I KNOW I can can just make this crap up, but the whole
> reason I spend money on someone else's world is so that I don't have
> to make this crap up. And I am quite comfortable to make things up,
> but I'm finding myself having to make up more and more.
But, that's the whole point of this game : it's recreational mythology and storytelling. You are given core elements and procedures to encourage your independent use and development of them IYG.
Another point of this game is to take us back into the mindframe we had back in the late 70s when RPGs were new and fresh.
Anyway, Gloranthan knowledge is growing at an exponential rate, so I hardly think it's fair to complain of a dearth of it.
> I'm not
> having trouble grasping it, I'm simply not finding it to my liking for
> a casual game.
I don't understand. You obviously have a completely non-casual approach to playing Hero Wars, seeing that you wish Feats etc. and their use in the game to be quite rigidly defined.
OTOH I sympathise, because you seem to be having the usual sort of trouble accepting the system that most roleplayers used to more conventional systems have had.
And really, the solution is quite simple : just relax, let the game play itself, and go with the flow.
A lot like the good/bad old days of 1st edition AD&D dungeon crawling, but with extra added brains ...
> This is very much my problem. There are times that I feel that the
> more I learn about Glorantha, the muddier it gets.
Haven't reached critical mass yet ?
:-)
(isn't there some John Hughes prose about this issue floating about the net somewhere ?)
> While this
> property makes for interesting mythmaking, I find it less than ideal
> for a game that I'm trying to play for fun.
Trying to mix the two activities can be a very bad idea.
Depends how you do it. Just remember that every RPG scenario you've ever played in was an exercise in mythmaking as it should be done in a HW game.
Very many people think that Gloranthan roleplaying should somehow be qualitatively different to other forms.
Actually, that's not true. It's just another RPG.
> This is fine if what I'm looking for is to define my own truth. I'm
> not. I'm looking for a good, well-thought-out setting that hangs
> together well so I don't have to make one. The more undefined
> Glorantha gets, the less utility I find it having in this area.
Glorantha is in fact the most detailed and highly defined RPG setting ever designed. You are confusing world design issues with game design issues.
A common statement made by many people is YGMV.
Well, another statement that could be made is YHWMV. The game can be adapted very easily to a wide variety of house styles. But it's each individual group's responsibility to do the adapting, not the game company's.
Their responsibility lies in providing the widest possible usefulness for the widest target audience possible.
This logically precludes the kind of hardness or crunchiness that you appear to be asking for. A highly detailed rules system would alienate more people than it satisfied.
If most people wanted what you're asking for, well, we'd probably have Glorantha D20 being released soon instead of HQ.
And anyway, I'm a member of a minority that believes that the HW/HQ system is actually more realistic than other RPG systems ...
HW/HQ actually can be run as a more or less simulationist paradigm, provided you realise that the level of representation is actually a degree of magnitude higher than in a "standard" RPG.
Ob-RQ, all those MP storage devices and Heal 4 spells and localised HPs etc still exist in Glorantha : it's just that at the Heroic levels of play that HW/HQ emulates, that level of reality is simply subsumed into a D20 that you roll.
Julian Lord
Powered by hypermail