Re: broad abilities

From: Nick Brooke <Nick_at_...>
Date: Tue, 19 Jun 2001 19:47:26 -0000


Alex gets back to me:

>> Hate Black Oaks is pretty "broad"

> I suppose this depends on the "prevalence" of said Black Oaks

We don't exactly have an issue with "too narrow" abilities, do we now?

I'd have assumed "Hate Black Oaks" is one of those freebies Narrators hand out at the start of campaigns, anyway. Rather like "Hate Saxons" in Pendragon.

> I hope this isn't "High Philosophy of Glorantha" again...

Certainly not! I dodged that particular panel...

>> A cheap Close Combat skill with Narrated improvisational penalties >> for any weird-ass stuff still works well enough for me.  

> On what basis to you determine imp-mods, if the ability covers "by
> definition" all of Close Combat?

Nope, I think you'll find it covers all those Close Combat styles parenthesised thereafter. Or what do you think the bits in brackets represent?

> Here are some of my concerns:

I'll gaily romp through these, if that's OK by everyone.

> Character generation. I'd like to encourage players to use a bit
> of imagination when describing their combat abilities: I got some
> peevish looks when I told my bunch that whatever they wrote on the
> topic, it all came out as "Close Combat: 12", regardless.

That's a hundred-word-essays-are-boring and insufficient-use-of- innovative-parenthesised-qualifiers problem, not so much a Close- -covers-everything problem, it seems to me. Anyway, who's saying the secret of Six Cuts Silk isn't a valuable Close Combat augmentation?

> Cross-cultural differentiation. Several advocates of CC have
> claimed or implied that some CC abilities are "different" from
> others.

I'd inflict an improv. mod. on a Heortling trying to CC in a phalanx with Close Combat (fyrd combat), likewise on a Sun Domer trying to CC in a fyrd with Close Combat (phalanx). Wouldn't you? If not, what do you think the bit in brackets is for?

> Wouldn't it be more logical, convenient, and evocative to describe
> different abilities differently?

Maybe so, and YGMV (Game, not Glorantha, this time).

> Martial arts. This is an instance of the previous item, to a large
> degree. If one wants to run a game focussing on (Eastern, most
> obviously) martial artists, or develop more detailed rules for
> "mystical martial arts" schools, the dead hand of "Close Combat" is
> not a help.

Surely these should be an utterly special case with a dedicated subset of Mysticism rules devoted to making them interesting and colourful. The Lunar Taraltaran Mystics get the Whirling Blades Martial Arts technique without channeling everything through CC. Can't we come up with similar more interesting variants for HW2 MA?

> Trivialisation of learning utterly different combat skills.

Always a problem with Hero Wars' enabling style, I agree. You have to look like a heavy-handed GM to stop players 'fixing' inappropriate stuff they just *shouldn't* be able to buy.

> Evidently the Five Dragon Warriors need a whole 4HP to complete
> their training, after having done the hard bit of learning just
> one martial style.

Again, I'm *sure* there is more to Eastern martial arts styles than Close Combat skill. C'mon, Robin wrote Feng Shui, didn't he? The man knows what he's doing... it's just there was no need to explore the Exotic East in the basic rules, surely?

Cheers, Nick

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