I think it flows naturally from the first question. If in situations like the tree-leaping one, you're reallyreally good at it on your own, but mediocre doing so in a contest in with someone, there's a bit of a lacuna in the game-world account of what's going on here that either needs to be "fixed" on the one hand, or rationalised on the other.
> I wasn't refering to third party conflicts, here. I was refering
> to three things competing against each other (which is what my
> post was responding to). So, three racers. In that case, I'd just
> have them all roll once and compare against each other separately.
> A beats B, B beats C , we have the order of finish.
Not sure I follow: you mean have them roll once, and read each roll twice in two separate simple contests? (Or for N participants, oops it's quadratic. <g>) That's _definitely_ not a procedure in the rules, and I can't see how it'd work for extended contests at all. Does A try to 'beat' B and C simultaneously? Alternately? One of them per round as seems good to him? Multiple target mods all round? I don't doubt this is doable, but there are any number of ad hoc ways I can imagine one _might_ go about doing this, and none leap out at me as clearly the best at first wink.
> >It's not in the least clear to me that it's intended to be meta-game.
> > The "14 rules" states, "This is the the resistance to cast magic on
> >one's self, and the passive resistance of the Mortal World to magical
> >change." It doesn't say anything about this having a different
> >narrative status from any other ability use in the game, its phrasing
> >is entirely in terms of game-world effects.
>
> Well, by clear I mean, that it's the only sensible interpretation.
> But I totally agree that the text doesn't make it clear at all.
> Hence the problem here.
Ah, OK, I see what you mean. (I think a lot of the throwings-around of GNS jargon are on a similar premise -- makes no game-world sense, hey, there *must* be a narrativist pony in here someplace...)
> And I do overstate to an extent, because there are the alternate
> readings that I came up with. The simplest of which is that "the
> world" meaning whatever target you aim at with your magic, resists
> with it's highest appropriate ability or it's Resist Magic of 14,
> whichever is best.
Yes, that's more or less what it does say, but the whole 'appropriate ability' thing, there's the rub. I'd have thought that 'tall' was pretty appropriate to resist being jumped over (having a HP or two in that "ability" myself I may be biased, though). Magical or not. The HQ example almost implies that the magic has a 'defined effect', something along the lines of "if successfully 'cast', will jump you over any mundane" -- as of course it would have done, back in the bad old RQ days. Trouble (and liberating opportunity, it must be said) is that there _is_ no such defined effect, other than in the gestalt of a given group, so whether the tree gets its 'saving throw' or not is entirely in the realm of interpretation.
> That seems to work pretty well as a rationale. Basically, when
> you lose to another character with a mundane ability, it's because
> the world is using the metaphysical (in-game) power of that
> ability to cancel most of your magic. Meaning that you actually
> do jump much lower or whatever.
I'd have thought that mundane abilities were necessarily the domain of physics rather than metaphysics -- though good luck making *that* a systematic distinction in Glorantha. But we're back in interpretation-ville here: before I decide how to rationalise the High Leaping 2W2's beating the Tree Jumper 17 in a contest about jumping over trees, I have to decide whether that _is actually what happens_, which frankly I'd be loathe to do if I were playing the example as written. In fact, the example on p98 is in all essential aspects a contest -- it just doesn't appear, reading between the lines, to have been resolved as a contest game-mechanically (between Jane and Oddi, that is).
Cheers,
Alex.
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