A REVIEW I SHALL NOT SUBMIT

From: Michael Cule <mikec_at_...>
Date: Sat, 20 May 2000 02:10:49 +0100


I was planning to send this review off to PYRAMID. I finally decided not to as I didn't want to hurt the sales of the game. (Yes, I am that vain about my writing abilities...) I mean every word I say here but I'm still going to use the system, suitably modified so I suppose that I'm practising intelligent self-interest. This will appear in ALARUMS AND EXCURSIONS but not elsewhere.

HERO WARS: ROLEPLAYING IN GLORANTHA is the game that has been awaited by Glorantha-lovers since Avalon Hill and Chaosium fell out over the fourth edition of RuneQuest, lo these many years ago. It's written by Robin Laws and Greg Stafford and is supposed to be much more in line with how Stafford sees Glorantha. I was one of the playtesters for it and I've been sort of dreading the final version ever since I dropped out of the playtest.

I love Glorantha and I know that this game is a make or break for the world in many ways. It has been living on fan input solely and with no new professionally published material for several years it has been in danger of becoming a cliquish, minority taste instead of the major roleplaying  resource it should be. And I do indeed admire much of what has gone into this game and wish I could recommend it totally. But I can't.

Basically this is because I disagree with some of the fundamental design assumptions that Robin has made, with his philosophy of what roleplaying  is about. This has lead him to make what in my opinion is one
(and only one) major error in the design of the game. Unfortunately this
error is one of the core mechanics of the game system and permeates every part of it. I'm planning on using this game but not without major rejigging.

Let's start with What You Get In The Box, go on with What I Think Is Wonderful and only end with What I Think Is Wrong.

In Deluxe Hero Wars (which I recommend anyone planning on running the game gets: don't be cheap) you get the Players Book, the Referees
(sorry, Narrators) Book and a collection of short fiction pieces some of
which will be familiar to long term Glorantha fans. All of these are in a paperback sized format which feels very odd if you're used to the larger size that is common for RPGs but Issaries (founded by Stafford to publish all the new Gloranthan stuff) believes that this will allow its stuff to go on the shelves of regular bookshops and ease acceptance of it by non-specialist stores. You also get some rather poor quality maps of the world and, of major value, a brochure which provides a Glossary of Game Terms, a summary of the rules and four Hero-Bands, small adventuring communities set in Dragon Pass for the players to be part of along with sample PCs for each band.

What is most striking about the two rule books for me is the simplicity of the basic system and its openness in terms of character generation. The characters are described in terms of Abilities which are rated as scores of 1-20. An Ability could be anything about the character: a skill with a weapon or in social interaction, a style of magic or a personality trait. (You can see clearly here the influence of OVER THE EDGE for which Robin Laws wrote some Good Stuff.) The favoured method of character creation is to write one hundred words about the character and let the referee deduce appropriate traits from that. But the system also support Keywords which are long lists of pregenned traits for each culture and for typical professions and magical styles within each culture. You can use the keywords in your hundred words or just draw up a list of keywords or you can even just start with one or two keywords and say "I'll make up the details here as I go along..." You are positively encouraged to give the character details that will be worked out later (Ambiguous References are what they are called here): if you don't know what the Seventh Sword of Slontos does or why your character has it, don't worry we can work out the details later.

Character advancement is handled by paying the Hero Points the characters earn adventuring to increase scores. It's cheaper to increase scores in Abilities that your character used during a session and also cheaper to gain and increase scores that fit in with your character's chosen social and magical role. And in a neat touch Hero Points are also used to 'confirm' any advantages of wealth or equipment that you may have picked up. If you don't feel like spending points then the Mighty Staff of Commanding The Winds is taken by your chieftain and the gold you picked up gets frittered away on drinks and women. Ever wonder why STAR TREK never seemed to remember the technological advances they made the week before? Clearly, Scotty was unwilling to spend the Hero Points....

You use a skill by rolling against a d20. One is a Critical. Twenty is a Fumble. Under your Ability is a success. There's a table for deciding what happens when skill goes up against skill. The ingenious bits start when you consider what happens when a skill goes over 20. It is then Mastered and the number you need to roll under goes back down to one. But with a Mastered skill your result goes up a level (is 'bumped up' in the terms the game uses) so that Fumbles become Failures, Failures become Successes, Successes become Criticals. You can have more than one level of Mastery and more than one level of bump. You can also spend a Hero Point to bump up one roll. When two people (or forces or whatever) with Masteries face off against each other then Masteries cancel out. This means that the game can theoretically be perfectly scaleable from street urchin level right up to the Gods: you don't want to go up against anyone more than one Mastery superior to you but the same mechanics apply throughout. I'm personally not sure about its ability to capture the lowest levels (the grain seems a little too coarse for that) but I am sure as heck impressed with the basic idea.

There are chapters explaining the four systems of magic that the world contains (finally we get details about Mysticism and very weird they are too) and how they interact. There are chapters about how communities support the Heroes magically and mundanely and the importance of *not* being the rootless wanderer that is standard fare for so many fantasy genres but of having a place to belong to. There is the basic outline
(but none the less impressive for that) of how to run a HeroQuest, a
journey into the Otherworld of Glorantha to interact with the Gods and Powers.

There is a basic introduction to Glorantha (me I'd have put it at the start of the book) and some quite usable scenarios at the back including one HeroQuest. (A quick trip to Hell, anyone?)

And given all that to the good, what do I think is wrong?

Throughout the book Robin Laws draws conscious parallels between RPGs and genre cinema, 'adventure' cinema so called. He assumes that what we are doing is Writing A Story, Creating An Epic or a TV series and keeps pointing out how poorly traditional RPGs with their simulationist baggage from their wargaming origins do this job. He is out to end especially the traditional RPG combat scene in which Our Heroes (so unlike the heroes of fantastic films and fiction) end up cut and bruised and even half of them dead after facing down even quite unimportant enemies. He wants to save the Big Deadly Battle for the end and to save the Heroes for the Big Deadly Battle.

And I can't help thinking of all the times I've looked at Heroic Adventure Films and thought: "God, but that's stupid! Doesn't Arnie know you can't dodge automatic fire?" Perhaps I have been playing traditional RPGs too long. Perhaps I have become a middle aged grouch. Or perhaps it is just stupid.

Anyhoo, what Robin has created from his musings is a game mechanic that I cannot love. He's got a table to simply resolve (in one d20 die roll) most conflicts. He intends it to be used for incidents of 'minor dramatic interest'. I liked it. It's simple. For the Big Scenes and certainly for anything that might cause bodily harm to the Heroes he has The Extended Contest. He thinks that the Extended Contest is exciting and will add interest to the Big Scenes. Robin, it is my place to tell you that you are Wrong.

In an Extended Contest, which is intended for use to resolve anything from opening a gate to the Otherworld, to debating religious doctrine, to fighting a dozen puny trollkin, to fighting a demi-god you take an appropriate Ability for each side and give each side Action Points (APs) equal to their score plus 20 for each Mastery. You then hold a series of rounds in which the contestants in turns choose how many of those APs they are going to wager against the other. (There are rules about how to combine APs from swarms of smaller opponents and from a Hero's sidekicks. The elegance of these is the one thing I like about this system.) Big bets represent risky actions that might bring big payoffs but risk big failure and small bets represent conservative, safe options. Depending on how the dice rolls go APs move from side to side until one side runs out. You then compare how far negative the looser has been driven to decide how badly he's been beaten. In combat a Marginal Defeat might mean you're dazed and taken prisoner and a Complete Defeat means you're out cold and pouring out your life's blood. In a debate a Marginal Defeat means you've failed to convince people and a Complete Defeat means you've made such an idiot of yourself you'd better change your name, shave off your beard and move to the other side of the continent.

Does anyone remember the Spirit Combat mechanic in RuneQuest? Physical combat was well realised in RuneQuest because the stats of the game allowed you to take into account combatant's physical statistics, skill, position, all sorts of stuff. It was heavy work doing the book-keeping but you never failed to have a clear idea of what was going on and you could make it real and clear for the players. In Spirit Combat, by way of contrast, you just had one stat involved. The two contestants faced off against each other and rolled dice until one of them ran out of magic. That was it. Abstract, unreal. And for me APs smell just like RQ Spirit Combat. In fact it's even worse since in Spirit Combat the numbers could only go down. With this system APs switch from side to side with every dice roll. Pray someone gets an advantage early on because once it gets started... The AP pool is supposed to represent skill, physical advantage, psychological advantage, the favour of the gods, everything. And because there is no detail there is no clear realisation of what is going on. Abstract bad. Concrete good.

I might just put up with something that vague to resolve stuff that is of its nature abstract: magical interaction, philosophical debate. Although even there I'd prefer something abstract and brief rather than the longwindedness of all those bets and dice rolls. But when you apply this system to combat you get some very funny results. For instance, since the system is designed to do Last Minute Heroic Reverses and allows people to recover from almost any disaster at the last die roll, you're not supposed to discover if you're wounded or just dazed until the last AP has finally gone. The referee can give you all the descriptive detail you want about swords flashing and swinging from chandeliers but let him not once mention you getting hurt since you might end up unscathed no matter how bad things get. Sort of Schrodinger's Cut.

Now for me, a person is only really a Hero if he can look down at himself, see the wounds he has suffered and know that he risks his own life and still go on. If he can carry on in the face of his own death and even loose his life. But that sort of Heroism isn't likely, it seems to me, with Hero Wars as it stands.

I'm not, let me be clear on this, insisting on a return to simulationist gaming. I loved OVER THE EDGE and never felt once that it's combat system (which is *much* simpler than HERO WARS) was incapable of portraying both 'cinematic' and 'gritty' scenes. But what the AP system seems to me to deliver is something that is both cinematic and tedious, a miracle that I could have done without.

I'm going to tell you at the end to Buy This Game, because all of the other flaws with it can be tolerated or fixed and Glorantha is just the most wonderful place to game and this is the best realisation of it yet. But I'm not going to tell you that I'm going to run this game as is. I'm going to have to fudge things again and devise a substitute system. Oh hell! And I hate being a rules maven. I'm even worse at it than Robin is....  



-- 
Michael Cule

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