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

From: neil_smithuk <n.smith_at_...>
Date: Thu, 29 Jul 2004 08:00:18 -0000

wrote:
> 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).
>

A little late to the party, but I'd vote for a return to Robin Laws's original notation, which is simply to have one 'M' for each mastery, such as 18 or 7M or 12MMM. If you get more than three masteries, use a separator, such as a space or a comma. This gives expressions like 8MMM MM for 8M5. This should be fairly easy to read for everything up to nine masteries (17MMM MMM MMM), but now often will you come across things with 10 or more masteries?  

This works perfectly well for numbers (e.g. 76,000), has a nice 'mastery = order of magnitude' feel, and means that big scores _look_ big.  

Neil.