>Personally, I think the mechanical aspects of the game are piss-easy
As do I.
>(and it seems like they will get a little easier once HQ2 hits the
>shelves) but how you translate those mechanical aspects into a plausible
>rendering of the game universe were less well explained (especially so
>in the case of the magic chapter). Although I have high hopes of HQ2
>based on the ToC I saw in the preview.
Since 1 - It's not a Gloranthan game anymore and so isn't bogged down by that and 2 - the book seems far more dedicated to explaining how to judge these kinds of things, I have high hopes as well.
>My (largely evidence-free) suspicion is that HQ is/was a great game in
>the hands of ref who is thoroughly versed in the 'matter' of a game
>universe.
I think that's a large part of it. I used to complain it abstracted
contests out too much, but I think a lot of that boiled down to what was
or wasn't reasonable in universe.
Just the removal of the implied (even if it wasn't quite true)
"all-or-nothing victory" seems a huge improvement as well. I think that
was something I never could quite get around.
>Take common magic frex,
<hilarious conversation snipped>
But that's partly the problem of the horrendous way Gloranthan magic was
presented.
This being a generic game, that's utterly no longer an issue. Even if
Gloranthan magic is still disastrous in the appendix (my understanding
is that it isn't) - it has no bearing on how easy HQ2 is to play.
>If my suspicion is correct then the flexibility and simplicity of the
>game actually counted as a negative when old-school refs (or at least
>refs with old-school reflexes) sat down and tried to use the crunch as a
>framework for getting a handle on Glorantha.
I'm inclined to agree. Now that it is a specifically generic game, that whole problem is removed. Or at least mitigated in that people go in knowing that they need to define the world, since it is a generic game. (Obviously, something like the Sartar book works to do that for them.)
LC
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