My apologies, I made the obviously incorrect assumption that when
playing in most of the west you'd be required to start as farmers and
work your way up. Narrators have the freedom to define their setting
how they want, so of course could have the heroes start off as
knights or sorcerors.
>
> >In HW they
> >generally seem to have no personal magic at all. From a maximum
game
> >fun point of view, I have to admit playing in the west didn't
appeal
> >under RQ, and appeals even less under HW.
>
> That's not how MGF works. MGF states if you have two alternatives,
> you should adopt the one which leads to greater fun. Accepting
> that the West is no fun to play in is an complete abnegation of MGF.
I hadn't realized that there was a formal theory of maximum game fun-- in fact I'd been under the impression that it was whatever created the most fun for the people playing the game.
However, even with your definition, I would tend to stand by what I said: given a choice between being able to mix magic with combat, social, and other skills freely, or having a fairly clean seperation of magic from most of the other parts of life, I find the the former to be more fun.
I recognize that a society that can support specialists will almost always develop greater wealth and power than one that produces mostly generalists. In fact I live and work in a highly specialized culture, and have chosen to become very specialized in my professional life. Perhaps that is why, for _my_ games, I prefer to play characters with broad competencies. Perhaps even hero parties would benefit from high levels of specialization, so that your best magician can cast truly mighty spells, your best fighter can go toe- -toe with almost anyone, etc. However personally I find it more fun when everyone can get in on everything.
I'm not trying to say that everyone feels the same way. Perhaps I wasn't clear enough in my original post about that. Merely that for me, flexibility is fun than focus, even if it may be less powerful.
One final note, I did indicate that I could imagine having fun playing in the west....but that it would be my second choice, to be saved, prefererably, until I'd done a lot more gaming elsewhere in Glorantha.
--Bryan
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