This is a very good summary of the main difference between HW and most roleplaying games, by the way, something that might need to appear in bold at the start of the HW books : HW basically reverses the standard thought process, making it anti-analytical.
While I agree that it is a good source of a story (and one which I've been doing for years playing Amber), is is something pretty difficult to understand for most people, and especially long-time "classical" roleplayers like myself.
As an anecdote, are you aware that this is more or less what Sherlock Holmes explains to Watson in a "Study in Scarlet", that most people are able to reason deductively (i.e. from causes to results) but that going from the results up to the sources is much more difficult and that few people are able to do it properly ?
So this game system expects us to be all Sherlock Holmes instead of poor Watsons, which might be fine if it had only to do it with ONE story in mind. Unfortunately, this is not a story that the Narrators are just telling (like what Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was able to do), it is a story shared with the players, and to be able to tell a story that pleases everybody, some common ground must first be established about what the world is like.
Because if that was in the mundane world, it would be OK, as we all have a reasonnably good idea as to how it works (although there might be some discrepancies here and there).
But with such a magical world as Glorantha, it is much more difficult to do, and the actual source of most of the problems that people seem to have with the game : the world is not defined enough by the rules and people don't know if it is easy or not, dangerous or not, risky or not, to do some actions.
And, moreover, thaty have absolutely no garantee that if it was easy one time, it will be easy the next time because there are no rules to insure this consitency (more about that below), only (theoretically) a Narrator's appreciation of whether it might be fun to make it difficult or not...
> Similarly, the contest system gives you the result of
> an action, and then calls on the Narrator and players to
> describe the reasons for that result. Most games proceed
> from cause to effect. HW establishes the effect, then
> intuits its cause.
That's the problem : intuit. Because intuition is seldom consistent from one event to the next. and while consistency is not a major objective per se, it is nonetheless the support for part of our belief or, to be more exact, one of the main support for our suspension of disbelief.
Remove too much of the consistency, and the suspension of disbelief comes crashing down and the spirit of the game dies with it...
> At present, then, your suggestions seem way too detailed
> and rules-heavy. If the Narrator feels he has to look up
> these rules in order in order to have Tracking scenes in
> his game, they're too much. They also dictate too much to
> the Narrator: he should decide the results of the various
> levels of success as each situation warrants, not through
> consultation of a fixed, predetermined chart.
And please, how do you judge what the situation warrants ? As far as I know, there is no "judging" here, at least not in terms of tracking, but only in terms of "Will the story be more fun if the tracks are difficult or easy to follow ?"
So, while I agree that the concept of the game is incredible because it more or less forces everybody around the table to create a story around the results rolled, it is also very frustrating in the long term unless every narrator basically creates his own set of rules for modelling "their" world. Whether these are written somewhere or left floating in his head does not matter, by the way, the rules are still there.
And It seems to me that this is what most of the people are trying to do, trying to make these rules consistent. Andreas went a bit further than the others, maybe, but was on the same track, I think.
I am fascinated by the concept, by the way, but find it very difficult to apply without defining at least in a small measure what the world is like, that's all. If you take it to the extreme, it seems quite a bit like : "let's not worry about what you exactly do, OK, just roll the dice to see whether you roll high or low and then we'll interpret then together..." Interesting of course, but hardly encouraging about planning what you are going to do, or even describing them in a role-playing way, because you might have to backtrack on that just to get the explanation for it.
Philippe
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