Re: Re: Re: Thunderstone

From: Richard Addy <rmaddy_at_...>
Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 15:11:30 -0400


On 10 Aug 00, at 20:41, Christoph Kohring wrote:

> > Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 09:19:03 -0400
> > From: "Richard Addy" <rmaddy_at_...>
> > Subject: Re: Re: Thunderstone
>
> >> HW is a game that depends utterly upon the
> >> Narrator to bring it to life. It's a set of tools for you to use,
> >> not a straitjacket. Don't worry about the type of Glorantha in
> >> everybody else's game, worry about your own True Glorantha.
> >
> > This, unfortunately, leaves me out of HW's target audience. HW -is-
> > liberating, but that liberation comes at a cost. It requires a lot
> > of work out of the GM (especially if you want consistency), which is
> > fine, but I don't have -that- kind of time for rpg's anymore. Not
> > for determining how the rules should work, anyway.
>
> What work ? It doesn't require any, it requires only to be *played* !
> Nothing less, nothing more.

hmmm, I like consistent and at least somewhat developed campaign settings and game worlds. I don't want to have to figure out things like horse archery on the fly - and I don't particularly want to have to remember how I did it the *last* time it came up.

Basically, I don't want a game world that plays like a Star Trek or Xena episode; I don't want a world where the rules change week by week. You can get around that in HW, but it essentially you have to create a *lot* of house rules. If I'm going to do that, it's usually just easier to use another system - where I can spend more time on things like setting, character development, and interaction, rather than having to spend a lot of in-game time deciding how to model what, to a character, is a common action.

I'm fine with ambiguous feats (mostly - it bothers me that sorcerous feats can't be improvised - and then they aren't described). But, really, when a game system is so abstract that actions like climbing a cliff wall or shooting an arrow at a moving target have to be discussed on a mailing list (and often times, the rulebook offers no basis for an immediate consensus), well, that's not the system for me.

>
> What does require work is if, like me, you have to convert your
> player's RQ characters to HW & you don't have the relevant keywords...
> (A Yelmalion from the praxian Sun Dome, an Eurmalite from
> Pavis-Outside-the-Walls, an Orleving Donandari/Drogarsite, a Vronkali
> High King Elf Wood Lord from the Stinking Forest. The Humakti from
> Volsaxiland & the exiled Gorde Orlanth Thunderous god-talker as well
> as Humakti initiate didn't pose a lot of problems.)

Hmmm I've usually found it easier to convert old charcaters than to create new ones - the old characters have breadth and depth - a familiarity that make sit easier to describe their concept.

Richard

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