Re: Re: Character Creation Questions

From: David Dunham <david_at_...>
Date: Thu, 23 Sep 2010 08:28:00 -0700


On 23 Sep 2010, at 08:11, Ryan wrote:

> Sometimes its hard to shake my simulationist and modeling rpg background. :-) I like to have benchmark abilities so I can compare and think about the relative capabilities of PCs and NPCs.

Which isn't really the point, of course. Sure, your golden-tongued hero could easily debate rings around the clan chief. But that's not the contest. The chief is sitting in his throne, surrounded by his advisors. From the point of view of the contest, it doesn't matter what his Witty Comeback rating is, what matters is how easy it is for you to convince everyone to take in the refugees.

And that's best modeled by story concerns. Is failure interesting? Is this the climax of the session, or just a setup?

On another day, on another issue, debating the chief will have a different resistance. Same chief, different context.

As for benchmarks, it's often more interesting to compare characters. Do they differ wildly in combat abilities? Do they have high ratings in personality traits (which suggests you should come up with scenarios which test the abilities they care about)?

> I do understand the utilization of the narrative model for selecting resistances, however, I will point out that in the book they give a moderate resistance a numeric value of that scales from 14-18 or so based upon how many sessions you've ran. So an 18W will easily succeed at a moderate difficulty challeng, while a 17 will have difficulty. As it should be modeled in my opinion.

Everyone seems to forget that the book says: you (the GM) decide. The book is full of good advice to help you pick a reasonable target number, but it never says you look up the resistance from a chart.

David Dunham
Glorantha/HQ/RQ page: www.pensee.com/dunham/glorantha.html Imagination is more important than knowledge. -- Albert Einstein

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