Mastery notation -- from the Continuum list, was: MG's Thoughts on Continuum 2004

From: Alex Ferguson <abf_at_...>
Date: Tue, 27 Jul 2004 18:59:05 +0100


On Tue, Jul 27, 2004 at 11:40:56AM +0100, Mark Galeotti wrote:
> However, my Mythic Russia panel proved unexpectedly
> well-attended and encouragingly enthusiastic -- many thanks to those of you
> who came along and contributed your thoughts and ideas, to several of which
> I am going to have to give serious thought, from fairy tale roleplaying
> options for the very young novitiate gamer through to flipping round the
> notation so that 1w2 is rendered as a rather more intuitive 2m1 (m?
> masterstvo).

While it is objectively more intuitive (or if not truly 'objectively', then at least "in the context of the arabic numeral system"), trouble is it's going to be disasterously confusing to anyone who's trained their brain to HQ's "backwards" notation. I'd suggest that if you do reverse the positions of the TN and the masteries, you do it with as much notational difference as possible, rather than simply making it look like what'd be a quite different rating in HQ. (The different 'rune' is something of a clue, but I'm not at all sure it's sufficient.)

If masterstva (?) are relatively uncommon, one might go with the old idea of listing out all of them as suffixes (i.e., instead of 1w2, 1mm). Obviously not an attractive plan if you have rating likes 10w15 dotting about, of course. Alternatively, one might indicate the duplication of masteries (in general, or beyond say the first 3) by some notation such as 1mx4, or indeed a superscript "power" notation (1m^4, in LaTeX-speak). Or indeed with the masteries written first in such a style (mmmm1, or {m^4}1). In either case, I think there's sufficient visual clue that what's meant definitely is _not_ HQ-style 4W1, so there's little danger of confusion (or general melting down of brains of people playing both games).

Cheers,
Alex.

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