> If this is the case, should hail have an implicit weapon rank? The
> player was a little miffed, I think, at the idea that an ordinary
> sword (^3) would cause more damage than the hail he was unleashing in
> the name or Orlanth (^0).
>
> In game balance terms, the armour rank is normally counterbalanced to
> some degree by the attacking weapon rank. If magic has no attacking
> rank but is stopped by the armour rank, that makes it somewhat weak
> for direct attacks. And hail seemed to me like a fairly practical
> direct attack.
We never used weapon ranks here (after all, they're designed to balance out to no effect most of the time), so with that caveat...
Since the design goal of weapon ranks is to have no net edge, an attack by hail should have no net edge. You could say that there's a default rank for hail (which I wouldn't do), or that the magical attack is over the whole body so there's no way a shield and armor can be interposed, or simply by ignoring the whole weapon rank system as unnecessary complexity.
As to the AP bid of inanimate objects, step back and ask yourself if it needs to be an extended contest. (Sometimes it does, but usually "man vs nature" is not a big element.)
David Dunham <mailto:dunham_at_...>
Glorantha/HW/RQ page: <http://www.pensee.com/dunham/glorantha.html>
Imagination is more important than knowledge. -- Albert Einstein
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