> [...]
> Just give them big hints (or
> just outright state) what contests are inappropriate. Then offer them
> an appropriate contest, or better yet go along with the contest that
> they attempt to engage in.
Hi everyone,
Thanks for all the great replies this weekend! :-) I've just got back from Dragonmeet, where I bagged both Sartar: Kingdom of Heroes and the Sartar Companion, plus got to meet Jeff and Trotsky at last and also Paul King from these forums. Woo-hoo! Great to meet you guys!
Back on the HQ2 critter abilities thing, the issue that's foremost in my mind is this: I completely grok the idea that you can tailor the *kind* of encounter you have with that Zorak Zorani death lord based on the requirements of (say) the pass/fail cycle, and have (say) an encounter with a wounded or distracted death lord if the pfc calls for an easier encounter, or a massive full on fistfest if the pfc recommends very hard. But, underlying that decision is an implied knowledge of just how difficult an opponent a Zorak Zorani death lord is in the first place. For those of us who've been playing Glorantha a long time, this isn't a problem - everyone knows that death lords outclass trollkin, for example.
But, what if you don"t have that knowledge? How do you describe an "appropriate" Low Resistance encounter with a death lord as opposed to a trollkin? You need some kind of baseline understanding of the "standard power level" of a critter in order to be able to satisfactorily narrate a Resistance "X" conflict with it, even if that baseline understanding is the fruit of many years gaming with explicit stats, or of pages of comparative description saying things like "armwrestling dark trolls is harder than humans". Otherwise there's no foundation for any kind of credibility test. In the real world it's not so much a problem - people don't routinely bench-press a BMW, for example. But what if my great troll tries to bench press an ox-cart? What's the basis for the credibility test there?
I get that there are three implied levels in the HQ2 approach to critter descriptions - Exceptional, Significant, and Everything Else. That gives you some idea of how to judge how to narrate an encoounter - "Hmm... this is High Resistance, so the griffin is using an Exceptional Ability - so maybe that's Grab Victim". I get that bit.
But what happens when your PCs are twice as powerful as when they first started? Griffin Grab Victim attacks aren't any easier to defend against, as they're tied to the base resistance. I get that the GM is supposed to tailor the encounter to the PCs' power level, but this again presupposes a prior knowledge of "reality" which probably comes from a prior acquaintance with Gloranthan critter relative powers derived from other games' stat blocks :-)
Don't get me wrong - I'm genuinely trying to work out how to go with HQ2, as what I'm seeing in the rules is great stuff, and as far as the rules are concerned i'll be using these over HQ1. It's just the "narrative-based resistance" approach appears to have an implicit "world knowledge resistance" behind it informing the decisions you as a narrator have to make, and I'm wondering where the background info supporting that comes from.
Cheers!
Sarah
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