Eetu Mäkelä wrote:
>This is an understandable reason. I just liked how HQ1 forced
>supplement writers to think about this. I also very much understand
>that it was a hard job trying to get the numbers right and maybe well
>get more supplements this way.
Perhaps. DnD has no trouble producing supplements filled with numbers,
but then it is a game about numbers.
I would think it vastly easier to produce something in the HQ2 mode.
I've long been convinced that the main stumbling block to getting
Glorantha products out though, is that there is this huge esoteric
history that you can't touch, and can't get at unless you have oodles of
old books.
Adventures, hidden away from anything world changing, should be pretty easy, though.
>I guess we won't really find out until we see enough texts in the HQ2
>vein.
I think text would be perfectly fine for verisimilitude. Numbers are ok, but as had been discussed ad nauseum in the past, they aren't a fixed scale anyway. (Are you faster than a horse? What does Large mean? Can you get smaller if you spend HP on Small? Is "In Love with X" 17 proof that you don't care about someone as much as if you have "Friend of X" 10W? Etc. etc.
> Eetu wrote: Which in the end takes me back to the question the absolute
> resistance people have been asking: why can't you have both?
Unless there is something in the HQ2 design that radically makes it
weird to, I don't see why you couldn't. I just don't see the point in it.
Since you constantly have to shift the numbers around anyway, why not
just have no numbers and do the shifting from there?
If you have no numbers, then everyone has to spin the numbers off that
textual canvas.
If you have numbers, you have to take them and recalculate them as
appropriate for your game.
I personally think undoing the numbers there and adjusting them is
harder, but that might just be me.
<aside> Creative Agenda
OK. I vaguely remember GNS from my Forge days, but what is the "Big Model"? And what's GDS (presumably Gamist/Dramatist/Simulationist?)?
I will agree that verisimilitude isn't intrinsically tied to any agenda.
I think you can get that from pure text. In fact, I've been having
trouble figuring out why you couldn't.
Major God is tougher than Minor God, but how much is no longer defined
by fixed numbers in advance.
Clan Champion is probably not as good a fighter than the Tribal one. Maybe.
>Here I was talking of published adventures. Do they not need a
>baseline that tells to what kind of heroes the adventure can be
>easily applied to?
And I think Matthew's answer was along the lines of "if the story fits
your heroes, then it applies".
I agree a published adventure has an assumed baseline. If I recall
correctly, none of the ones published for HQ1 ever specified what this
baseline was.
As for your specific example... if your players are slaughtering armies
and such, an adventure about a cattle raid probably wouldn't make sense,
as it would break verisimilitude, even if you could use the system to
make all the challenges line up numerically. But again, I don't see the
HQ2 system as somehow requiring you to do that. I just wouldn't run an
adventure that seems out of whack with my players' expectations of what
is difficult or easy for their PCs.
Like the castle-storming example given earlier. On the one hand, you can adjust the difficulty of storming the castle. On the other, you can just say "it is damn near impossible" and if they go do it they are going to lose. If they come up with interesting strategies, you can face them with lower resistance by putting a more apt ability in play, or maybe you give them a bonus. (I've always thought HQ was interesting in that the odd die curve meant that adding a bonus to the PC was not exactly the same as applying a penalty to the resistance. (i.e. 17 v 10W -- adding +6 to the 17 is not the same as applying a -6 penalty to the 10W) Higher is always better, but exactly how it plays out is not obvious. So there is (I presume) nothing in HQ2 that says you can't keep a given resistance fixed for a game and apply situational bonuses according to what your players do.
LC
(who should be asleep)
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