Ah.... unless specified, I'm only posting here things that are potentially of use to the world-wide Gloranthan tribe. A rather different approach.
> Well, as mentioned, my (previously) local mountains made a lot of the
> UK's look like hillocks. And my current local mountains hardly deserve
> the name..
So you know that they're not mountains. And since you're over 5 years old, and probably haven't spent your life locked in a cellar, you know what "mountains" actually look like, if only from the back of an Alpen packet..
> (And NZ's mountains vary while people are climbing them with
> unfortunate regularity :( )
Not by several thousand feet, I hope? That could get very nasty.
> Oh, don't be daft! So one player's looking at the Alps, another at the Himalayas, and another at a 500-ft hill? While all travelling
> across them at the same speed? And if you're using a pre-written scenario, the writer had another set of assumptions entirely, and
> didn't tell you which ones?
> :(
> If all your players live on different continents
They're spread over three, I think. It varies.
> in that case I would assume that the GM could
> say "imagine these <insertrangehere> when I say mountain".
They could indeed, and I'd hope would anyway. After all, where you live has very little to do with what mountains you've experienced.
> I suppose if you were worried about movement rates being the same
> that'd be really important - but I don't care if my players take three
> days to cross a pass and yours take three weeks.
But if they're looking at the same map, and they all know it's 10 miles from A to B?
Remember I'm looking at writing for "everyone" here, that's the point of this project. We can't write a scenario for general use that depends on the heroically almost-impassable pass if your group strolled over it yesterday afternoon, not if we want you (as a hypothetical end user) to get any use out of it.
Specifically, here, we have Penny Love's "Widow's Tale" as a source, giving a detailed description of that "last pass" over the northern Stormwalks, plus the DP map (with errata) that shows the distance across those mountains. (Incidentally, after Rob's comment, I pulled out RQ2 and checked the scale. It agrees.) Both of these are sources that anyone we write for is likely to have, and use as inspiration.
>> Can you imagine the plans? "So we walk up the valley, we'll be there lunchtime." >> "No, we rope up, and use iceaxes, and take enough food for a week."
>> Or the reactions to bits of scenario plot? >> "A week later, and your scout has not returned." >> "Well, no, it's a long way, might take him ten days." >> "Huh? It's two hours walk!"
> Really I can't imagine that conversation at all; my assumption is that
> the GM's description of the mountain would have solved this problem.
I've had similar conversations about dragons rather than mountains, where people were making different default assumptions. And you still have the problem of different descriptions of the same mountain range in different bits of background source. It shouldn't be the GM's job to shuffle a scenario to fit in a magically shrinking mountain range: "we'll run this other scenario on the way back, only that means that when you wake up this morning the mountains are suddenly three times the size they were yesterday". The writers needed to be consistent with the other sources that GM was probably using in the first place, basic common sense being one of them.
> It is a highly entertaining straw man though!
Oh, good :)
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