>Oh, well said, Benedict! This really hits the nail on the head.
Or, alternatively misses the point entirely.
The praise for Benedict's essay has rather confused me. Sure, its well written, but his arguments are inconsistent and dogmatic. Let me attempt a brief rebuttal :
Role playing, for me, is an exercise in mutual creation, story-telling, occasional problem solving, and amateur dramatics. In HW the players have two major inputs into the creation. They control their characters attempted actions, and how they spend their hero points. The GM controls everything else. This amount of power implies certain responsibilities.
Most importantly, the GM must not mislead the players. (For those who mis-read that, note that I said players. Not characters. Characters should be mislead regularly.) This means that if the players have developed a certain expectation about the world, based on your previous stories, this expectation should not be routinely dismissed. Challenging expectations is the source of good stories, but changing expectations for meta game reasons is not.
To my mind, the core of this is having a consistent world. A mountain should be equally difficult to climb every time - I doubt anyone is arguing otherwise - but so should the abilities of people. Players get a feel for how much better/worse they are than those around them. Glorantha has the happy advantage of naturally having many layers of people - normal, hero, Hero, Super-Hero. This is a great strength. The players, at least in my campaign, want to feel that they are moving through this scale. To do this, they need to have a feel for what that scale is, and the GM must keep it consistent. The entire point of having stats is to aid the GM to maintain that consistency.
Now, an important decision is how fast you wish to progress through this. This isn't a decision for the GM alone - the players must also want to tell the same stories, and where their characters will end on this scale directly impacts on their area of control. Having made this decision, and with some idea of how long the campaign will last, you need to decide how to control the rate of progress. There are a number of issues here. The game is Hero Wars, and I suspect most people are going to want to play a part in that conflict. They want to be Heroes. However, there is probably an upper limit where the stories the group wants to tell break down. It is therefore important not to exceed these limits within the time limit of the campaign.
The combination of the players' choices, and the HW rules provide a default rate of advancement. This might fit in with the progress you (as a group) want to make. If so, great. If not, you have two choices. I've suggested changing the rules so that the HP cost of improving a skill reflects the impact it has on the campaign. To me this is the obvious solution. Benedict has suggested using the game to encourage players to spend their hero points more broadly. I think this is wrong, and I'll try to explain why.
By guiding the players choices through the stories you choose to tell, you are breaking two meta-rules I consider important to good GMing. First, you are choosing stories for meta-game reasons, not for their inherent interest. I suspect that Benedict is really trying to say that "our stories are interesting and varied, and that is part of the reason we haven't seen the problem you wish to solve". Great for him. But choosing stories based solely on the lessons about character management they hold for the player just seems wrong to me. Secondly, you are infringing on the players area of control - their character. Instead of telling a joint story of heroes challenged by their opponents, this is the GM challenging the player because of the player's choices. Again, I suspect Benedict has never done this, but it is the point of his essay.
A final point. Benedict makes two assumptions that aren't true in my campaign, and I suspect many others. Firstly, he assumes that the players measure their characters against each other. In my experience, players are more likely to measure their characters against the world. Secondly, he assumes that each character should be well rounded in isolation, or that a character can be challenged in isolation. Role playing is a group activity, and I find it rare to tell stories where a given character is isolated for long. The party will tend to support each other, with one character's weakness being made up for by another's complimentary strength. Something I suspect will be encouraged by the greater emphasis on hero bands that will apparently be in HQ.
At the end of the day, Benedict finds the rules as written work for the stories his group tells. Great. But I think he has cause and effect backwards here. The meta-game should fit the story, not the other way round, and claiming that changing the story can fix meta-game problems is entirely wrong.
Benedict's group dynamic works for the rules as is, mine doesn't quite. Yours may be different again. I would suggest that for any group with a problem you should first look at the stories. If you are happy with the stories, change the rules. Never change the story because the rules are wrong. That makes no sense.
>I think that this essay should be put into a text format and added to
>the files. Perhaps it should go up on a website or two.... Like,
>say, Issaries.
Issaries would be well advised to stay well away from this one.
-- Graham Robinson graham_at_... Albion Software Engineering Ltd.
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