>>Well, I am very interested in storytelling. I like to
>>play my games pretty loose. My D&D games are loosely
>>told as well. But if you're going to have a system,
>>it should mean something.
...
>>I am finding
>>that for the most part I'd rather just not use the
>>system at all... I end up rolling dice just to look
>>busy and just narrate what I think would happen.
...
>>It seems like the system is too simple or too
>>complicated. If your players can handle a completely
>>arbitrary GM style or need just a little illusion to
>>feel like they have some control, this is a good, but
>>not the best, way to do it.
OK I see where you're coming from here I think and to a large extent I agree. The rules, particularly the core rules, are very much about YGWV and empowering the GM to take the mechanics and run with them - which plays very well into the loosy-goosy, narrative playstyle Issaries appear to favour for HQ but it can be distinctly underwhelming when it comes to a group who want a little more simmy traction and a sense that there is a 'real', internally self-consistent world that they are interacting with. I think you can play 'simmy' HQ, but there's little support in the rules as written and I can understand Issaries being a bit gun-shy about publishing something that applied the HQ rules in a more simmy fashion, given the potential for it to undermine all those MGF and YGWV messages they are trying to put over.
Having said that I think you can get a lot of mileage out of gutting published scenarios for pointers towards a more simmy approach and there's definitely a niche for a 'worked example' setting to demonstrate that sort of thing more explicitly. Maybe Ian's 'Red Cow' stuff could lean in that direction - I dunno.
>>I always thought that it was a good thing
>>to become a Wind Lord. In this system, it's better to be some
>>guy who kinda worships Orlanth and concentrates on his talents.
Again it comes down to that GM-empowering 'take glorantha and run' approach of the rules - the mechanics don't *enforce* the cosmology so on the face of things 'focus on CM and get all these nifty different powers with no real drawback' is a good life-strategy for a Hero and for a group whose GM made no qualitative distinction between an inner world feat and a godworld FEAT that would, indeed, be a valid conclusion. There's plenty of stuff in Generally Accepted Glorantha to indicate that most divine FEATs operate at a much higher power baseline than most innerworld feats, but if the GM doesn't enforce that impression by ruling most of the CM stuff low power and intimate in scale then it won't emerge from applying the mechanical crunch. Again, this is something a 'worked example' setting could address. Having said all that there are some depth/breadth tradeoffs present in the mechanics and mechanical considerations do change the in-game flavour of the three magic systems somewhat.
>>Having a fight where you can't tell if someone is
>>wounded is strange. And what about permanent damage?
>>How do you determine if someone has lost something
>>permanently?
Others have commented on the "can't tell if you're wounded" thing and I agree with them. Its mostly down to the narrator keeping away from specifics until the contest has been completed. This is easy for simple contests of course, but harder for extended contests - part of the problem here is having our expectations trained by D&D-esque games where the simple-minded visualisation of attritional hitpoints is of characters gradually getting pounded into hamburger. Recasting things in a more swashbuckler-ey fashion so that you don't take an unambiguously manstopping wound until tipped into -ve APs (which is actually how D&D should be played IMO) resolves this issue I think.
Regarding the permanent damage comment - I think the defeat and wound mechanics help here. I try and think in terms of abilities at stake and frame things along those lines to the players as they go into the contest, that way the level of defeat they suffer from a contest feeds pretty directly into stuff being damaged. Total defeat (or Major Defeat for a follower) can result in a permanent loss of whatever was staked on the contest.
>>Do you give them back a hero point if
>>they lose their relationship with their father? How
>>do you determine if they have, indeed, lost that
>>relationship.
No they don't get HP back (although of course they always get HP for playing). They lose the relationship with their father if they suffer a Total Defeat in an appropriately framed contest - although it's quite possible that the relationship won't be lost, just altered to something that has fewer positive aspects to it.
>>If your players want to be able to count on their
>>abilities being able to do things in a semi-quantifiable
>>way, I just don't see HQ having any chance of
>>making that happen.
Here I'm less in agreement. Certainly the group needs to agree on what abilities are capable of doing and where they are applicable, the rules give some guidelines on this but leaves the specifics to individual groups (all part of that YGWV MGF stuff again) rather than attempting to rule on what is appropriate on a case by case basis - given the absence of a set skill list and the rulebook's bias in favour of validating individual creation the latter approach would have been utterly misguided IMO. Once you've got a reasonable consensus worked out however then the players have a very quantified idea of what they can achieve - much more so than a player who can't (or won't) devote themselves to mastering all of the mechanical crunch presented in (for instance) the D&D books.
There's always the issue of an oppositional GM hosing the players with arbitrary rulings of course (which is where a large part of the drive to formalise things in D&D comes from I think) but if you didn't sign up for oppositional play and yet you've ended up with a dickhead for a GM, there isn't a whole lot that the mechanics can do to reign them in.
Regards
Luke
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