Re: Re: How do you compare published abilities without numbers?

From: Benedict Adamson <yahoo_at_...>
Date: Tue, 24 Feb 2009 21:42:42 +0000

Chris Lemens wrote:
...
> 4. Through play, the community in the supplement comes into a conflict where each side has a champion. Let's assume it is a lawmoot.
...
> 6. The players want to be with the winner. (Or, alternatively, need to figure out whether they need to find a back door and a quick escape route.)
>
> How would you let the players assess who the winner is going to be?
...

The real question is not "Which NPC will win the contest?" It is "Can the PCs accurately predict the winner". The actual abilities of the NPCs   are actually irrelevant, it is a contest of the PCs abilities of "Assess Political Support", "Read Mood of Crowd" and so on against a resistance of... well, "The World" as we used to say in HQ1.

And this is how it should be: we shift the focus from the NPCs to the PCs.

> I think that most new-to-Glorantha narrators would be frustrated at not being able to figure that out from the book

HQ2 provides an explicit mechanism for figuring out what the resistance of the contest would be. This is what the "Pass Fail Cycle" is about.. Your hypothetical novice merely has to use the written rules as is. There is no difficulty here.

The rules can ALWAYS provide a suitable resistance. Without exceptions. There are no corner cases or holes in which it can not provide a resistance.