> As I understand it, actual physical changes to the situation (injury,
> loss of weapon, etc.) should only happen if someone crosses 0 AP
> and/or fumbles.
Well, much depends on your house style and portrayal of Glorantha, but your apprach shouldn't be so binary ! This should ideally depend very.much on the nature of the contest (or fight scene) you're running.
In some cases, particular enemies could be characterised IYG as being magically resistant to damage, like say undead monsters such as our vampire friend, rock spirits that you can hack whole slabs off but they just keep coming etc ...
Another thing you could do, if you wanted, is to portray Glorantha very similarly to an RQ environment, so that weapons routinely get stuck in people and much physical damage does actually take place, but characters can pull "Heal 6"es (ie APs) out of their hat at appropriate times ...
(Don't think I'd do this personally, but some people might remain attached to the old way of doing things)
But anyways, the trick is to realise that you're in charge of the narrative, which means that you're in charge of describing what happens IYG. The only important thing is to have creative, inventive, credible, and ideally fun explanations and descriptions of why that guy on the left who was down to negative APs is suddenly charging your character with fire in his eyes, a spark in his sword, and chock full of APs ...
Which means you need to avoid descriptions of AP loss that might detract from the credibility of such sudden reversals ... according to what your player group thinks that credibility demands.
> Am I mistaken? So in this hypothetical Rurik v.
> Dracula fight, if Rurik loses an exchange but doesn't fumble or drop
> below 0 AP, the narrative result should be something like "You almost
> lose your grip on your spear", not "you lose the spear".
As you wish : there aren't any actual rules about that.
> In David's example, I assume he meant something like "Your spear is
> stuck in the vampire but you're still holding on to it", so Rurik's
> next action starts from a disadvantaged position--the loss of 10 AP
> represents the fact that Rurik needs to pull the spear out before he
> can do anything. (Whereas if he'd actually dropped his spear, he'd
> need to either (a) take an 'unrelated action' to get the spear back,
> or (b) switch to some other skill.)
I think David's example is more MGF : I'd personally expect the player to switch to another ability (Run Fast ?).
The spear's obviously just useless junk anyway ...
But really, whatever fits your game and house style ...
Julian Lord
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