> > They can do what you want them to do. Seriously, if you have
Dance
> Past Blades, then this can be used to counter a sword attack, to
> dodge thrown daggers, to avoid a scything chariot, to get past a
> swinging blade trap and to do a nifty sword-dance to impress the
> ladies.
>
> Absolutely! All of these (simple contests) are obvious
applications.
> But I'm still not sure how powerful the feat is when it is used in
> conjunction with other abilities.
As powerful as you make it.
> The thing is, I feel that although initiates may just augment their
> mundane swordfighting ability with their Dance Past Blades, for the
old
> +2 (and yes, during play we will imaginatively describe how
magically
> this looks and feels different from another +2, like for instance
Big
> Ugly Stick), on the other hand, I want the full feat to be more
> special-effecty.
If you have Dance Past Blades at +2 then that isn't powerful magic. It's the difference between having Crush 1 and Crush 20 in RQ. Crush 1 is a little spell and Crush 20 is a big spell. Similarly, a +2 augment is a small effect, but a +10 augment is quite a large one. Don't forget that someone with a large augment will probably have other augments as well, so rather than just getting a +10, they probably get a total of +15-20 and if they are in a party that helps each other, they'd get 20-30/40 augments. These are quite possible, in my experience. That's Big Magic. The actual spell/feat/whatever doesn't really matter. If I get a +20 Augment with Dance Past Blades and Sword of Red Death then that is no real difference to +20 from Crushing Blow and Maul From the Depths of Hell. Sure, there's a descriptive difference, one uses a blade forged in the heart of the Red Moon and dances an elegant dance of death, the other whacks you with a lead club taken from the heart of darkness using all the force of the underworld. But, basically, you have two magic weapons with spells/feats cast on them.
So, if you want it special-effecty then your heroine goes into a trance and glides past the swords as if in a dance, moving this way and that, slipping past each blade in turn until she reaches safety. Very impressive, very descriptive and very special effecty. "Well, that's obvious" I hear you ask, but how much more special-effecty do you need? You could spend an hour describing an effect and it would still be the culmination of a simple contest that should take 30 seconds to resolve.
If you want to slow the game down, you can describe all the effects of all the magic and skills you use, every time you use them. We did that. It sucks.
> As we said, HQ is supremely flexible. Magic will do whatever a PC
can
> convince the GM that it ought to do, in any specific situation.
>
> And that brings us to game balance... How "unbalanced" should a
magical
> effect be allowed to be? Significantly more powerful than the
initate
> augment, yes? Qualitatively different? I think so. But not _too_
> powerful, naturally! To some extent it is a question of game play
> versus Gloranthiness. Game designers (and GMs) wants character
design
> and game play choices to be balanced. If a particular strategy is
too
> effective, too cookie cutter, then the game is in some sense broken.
> But in Glorantha, some magic really is more powerful. Don't try to
> storm Alkoth, and then come whining about unfairly overpowered
> opponents.
The magic is not what is powerful, the people and locations are powerful. So, attacking a Shargash initiate outside Alkoth is dangerous, becuase Shargash has weapon-enhancing magic, but no more dangerous than attacking an initiate of the other war gods. Attacking Alkoth itself is dangerous because Alkoth actively augments its defenders, being an otherworldly place, many of its defenders are powerful priests and they have hordes of undead and other goodies to help them.
HeroQuest has its powerplays. Chris Lemens uncorked a spirit in a HQ game at Tentacles and was amazed at how effective it was, something which one of the players in our gaming group could have told him years ago. That can be unbalancing for single combats. Some people say that animists get it easy as they don't have Affinities and can build up single abilities, but it's swings and roundabouts. To become a well-rounded animist you need many such abilities and these cost a lot in the long run. I don't know anout Wizardry, as I've never really used the rules, and nobody knows about Myticism, but it's quite possible that someone will discover a really powerful technique that unbalances play. What to do then? Rebalance by using other tactics against them.
I honestly don't think HeroQuest has any problems at all with game balance. Since everything is based on very wooly ideas backed up with hard and fast numbers, it balances itself out quite nicely. That's one of its strengths. It's weaknesses are many, don't get me wrong, but game balance isn't one of them.
[Rulesy, so Moderators avert your eyes now] If you use a feat for what it is clearly designed to do, then it can be used at its normal rating and is opposed by 14. So, if you Run up Cliffs and want to run up a cliff then your Run Up Cliffs 10W is opposed by Cliff 14. Clearly better than improvising as an initiate. If you want to use it to run up the side of a ship, then it would take a penalty but would be resisted at Ship 14. If you used it to run up the Wall of Alkoth then it would take a penalty and would be opposed by Brass Ring 10W5 or whatever, so you'd better be good.[End of Rulesy, Moderators can look again]
The magic itself isn't what is powerful, it's who uses it, where it is used and how it is used.
> So in the end, all I'm asking for are some examples that gives an
idea
> of about how unfair magic can reasonably be, when it goes beyond
> straight-augment. My difficulty so far has been that, although I
can
> come up with ten neat and reasonable-sounding applications for any
> magical effect (some more un-balancing than others) me and my GM
> haven't used a single one of them, because we don't have the basic
> sense of just how much they should be able to pull off.
At the risk of sounding as though I am saying that you are not playing the game right (which I absolutely hate hearing) perhaps you are trying to think of things in terms of absolute descriptions of spells, in a possibly RQ-style sense. So, you might think "Dance Past Blades allows me to dance past a sword or to make me one with my sword, so how can I use that to dive through the dragon's teeth and force myself down its throat?" whereas I might say "OK, I dance past the dragon's teeth using my Dance Past Blades feat and then jump down it's throat as the culmination of the dance". I use my feat and you don't. Same situation, same feat, different way of thinking.
> For that reason, some of the great flexibility of the HQ rules
remains
> unused, at least in our campaigns. I believe that a few good
examples
> would really help.
Would they help? Even if you had some examples, you might say "That's how those feats are used" and not realise that they can be used in other inventive ways.
Think of all HeroQuest magic and abilities as enablers rather than blockers and all will flow, grasshopper.
See Ya
Simon
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