Re: feats and descriptions

From: David Dunham <dunham_at_...>
Date: Tue, 20 Jun 2000 13:30:00 -0700


Mikko Rintasaari replied to me:

> > > Lightning sword:
> > >
> > > (What's this supposed to mean... a sword charged with lightning... a
> > > bolt of lightning wielded as a sword... an enchantment that makes the
> > > sword move lightning fast...)
> >
> > All of those sound plausible to me. The first might give an edge (to
> > Close Combat), second would allow direct attacks using the feat, the
> > third gives a bonus.
>
>That sucks. We are not playing scrabble. This is no way to run a
>FRP. Either it's an adjective meaning "swift" or it refers to actual
>crackling stormfire, and I want to know.

Then we're at an impasse. I believe this really is a way to run an FRP, and that it works pretty well.

It's also more literary (and probably more true to Glorantha) -- magic is, well, magic, not just a laundry list of abilities. If a game can present it less deterministically, that's almost certainly a good thing.

It's true that in game mechanical terms, Hero Wars is simpler than RuneQuest -- you effectively have "do damage with magic" skill, where in RQ you had dozens of different ways of doing damage with magic. You had to learn each one, and they didn't scale. And while there were lots of them, there were only so many -- if you wanted something not there, you were out of luck.

Maybe our group took to Hero Wars because we were already trying to improvise things from the limited set of RQ spells. (We were playtesters, so we didn't have the exact same list of feats you don't like -- I agree some could be better-named, but Lightning Sword seems OK.)

All three of the effects are something you can describe, and can justify, with one feat. And maybe in the middle of a sticky situation, you can come up with a new effect to improvise.

David Dunham <mailto:dunham_at_...>
Glorantha/HW/RQ page: <http://www.pensee.com/dunham/glorantha.html> Imagination is more important than knowledge. -- Albert Einstein

Powered by hypermail