As someone else (sorry, I deleted the mail already) pointed out, this is a problem with AR, which seems to generally under value its subjects (no finger pointing; it made sense at the time, I am sure). If a dog and a human have the same Small, they should be about the same size or be able to use their smallness to the same effect. The small dog should probably have a Small bigger than 12, but it's possible that a human in Glorantha could be smaller than a small dog (Tom Thumb, anyone?).
>Anyway, the point of this thread is which weapons (since that's where it
>started) should give bonuses to CC (or RC) if the weapon and armor rank are
>dropped in favor of modifiers. So:
>
>If I play a Heortling game, the vast majority of people the characters are
>going to meet have some sort of basic weapon (spear, shield, you name it)
>and some sort of basic armor. Right?
I would think the vast majority of regular encounters would be with relatively unarmed people -- even the weaponthanes don't wear armor everywhere. Even in a battle situation, the equipment is going to vary with weaponthanes as well equipped as the clan can manage down to the fyrdmen who might be wearing grandad's chain mail or only a thick leather hat. Raiding makes things even more variable.
>Then what is best, having to modify this vast majority of people's
>abilities, or just modify the abilities of people who don't have basic
>weapons and armor (that are basic in a Heortling game, that is)?
>
>Just for the record, I don't use weapon ranks anyway. It's far important to
>know if your weapon is Good, Made of Iron, or of the Hellsfire Forge 12w,
>than to know if it's a sword or whatever.
It seems to me that habitually unarmed people probably have low combat scores to begin with. A Humakti swordmaster deprived of his sword is going to take hefty penalties on his Sword-based Close Combat, for that matter. If the Narrator wants to say "the napping soldiers are dazed and unprepared; normally the Red Feather Guard would have Close Combat 10W, but this bunch are at 15," that is totally fine. But creating a sliding scale seems overly complex -- why say "the villagers should be Close Combat 17, but because they cannot afford good arms, they are all at -5?" Why not say "the villagers have Close Combat of 12?"
The only place where it seems like a problem is if you were running a largely non-human game. If all your characters are Uz, you might get tired of adding augments for Big and Strong to every physical action, and decide to change the scale from "human-centered" to "Uz-centered," but, even in this case, the benefits would be so slight that it's probably not worth the trouble (for me; you seem to feel differently).
I have no problem with doing away with edges, though -- they seem best for "special situations" rather than regular use.
Peter Larsen
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