It’s good to see that you’ve already arrived at some of the same conclusions that I’ve been trying to promote. I apologise for the brevity of this acknowledgement but it’s really late here.
But to respond directly to the end of your post: the kind of information you desire will only be available from written accounts of stories with the characters/places/entities in them. This is the way that I’m sure it’s wanted to be by Greg Stafford – for one good reason: this is the way Gloranthans understand their world. This means that he can write things that you can use in your games. There will be no need for someone else to come along and translate everything into the ‘universal model of gloranthan target numbers’.
Please note: These days it’s not just Greg doing the writing of Gloranthan material so I really should have put a more collective term for how it’s getting written. Lets just say I’m using his name in one of it’s aspects: the Grand Figurehead. No offense intended Greg :P
On a practical note: whilst I’m sure that this topic is still a good way to learn about the up and coming game and a good way for us to learn how to look at role playing from a narrative, non-scientific perspective I want to say that the decision not to print numbers has been made already. The design of the game doesn’t suit it and (apart from that troubling Griffin on page 110 – which I understand will have no numbers in the final draft) does not contain them. Please excuse bad English: whisky and the lateness of the hour and all.
Love and peace
M
From: HeroQuest-rules_at_yahoogroups.com
[mailto:HeroQuest-rules_at_yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Eetu Mäkelä
Yet, none of this negates my desire for a clear scale. But it demonstrates that the issues may be better separated. In order to situate the NPCs or PCs to the world I don't need to know their exact numbers. I only need to know the ballpark. Maybe just how many masteries the NPCs have would be enough. Adding a low/high description to that would certainly be. I only need to know Harrek is W6. I only need to know that the better of our weaponthanes is low W2 and the next best is high W1. Hell, if you really hate giving numbers even as wide as mastery ranges, I'd be fine with just making sure every character description textually refers to the world scale: Orlmath is as a cook "crap/an amateur/a professional/best in clan/best in tribe/best in kingdom/heroic/superheroic/godly/..".
So, in the end I personally (as a narrative-oriented yet verisimilitude-seeking player) would probably be completely satisfied with just adding mastery-ballpark benchmarks to adventures and separate NPC descriptions.
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