Re: Ho Much Rule fiddling Is Tolerable?

From: Dan Guillou <dguillou_at_fQERiUoqAkJJnX7fmHUnq6tsO5QlKbpkVuOldTci24WSFJFKUIMt15he8snJ9lKnO11>
Date: Sun, 29 Jul 2007 03:02:02 +0200


Continuing dialogue with Simon...

Simon:
 >...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.

Well, here is where our opinions differ.

You are saying that all enhancing magic is identical, apart from the number of masteries behind it. Okay, maybe not exactly identical, because there will always be situations where the GM rules that "sorry, that isn't blades" or "they are weak against your fire, I'll give you some extra oumph", or whatever. But still, pretty nearly identical. That is exactly what I'm trying to get away from. To my mind the HQ rules seems to allow you to add some stuff as augments, some other stuff as "edges", some other stuff as bonus to target number, some other stuff as extra action points, and some other stuff as weird "this-magic-only" bonuses. Many of these wouldn't even slow down game play. But as I said, at least in my group, we are prepared to face a little bit of extra fiddling. (I said "little". No-one want to go back to the level of detail where there are special rules for how accumulating gunsmoke can lower target number by 13.75%in prolonged indoor shootouts.)

Why? Well, firstly for amusing variety. Differences of rule mechanics give different flavor. When the game mechanic is exactly identical, no amount of imaginative vivid descriptions are going to hide that what you are doing is, in some sense, identical to all other magic. I stand by my original "Boring". I think that magic should be more varied than that. Particularly when some people get several different but similar feats, it'd be nice if they weren't identical. Example: the humakti affinity "Sword Combat" includes the feats "Cut Deep", "Great Blow", Sword Help" and "Truesword Stroke"... Not that I'm particularly eager to play a Humakti (too specialized for my taste) but if I ever did, I'd kinda like these feats to do different stuff. I would also like the difference between "initiate Goran uses his 19 Combat Affinity" and "devotee Matilda uses her 7W Truesword Feat", to be both greater, and more qualitative, than the difference between a +2 and a +3 augment.

I do think that HQ is a more advanced system than RQ (simpler, faster, more flexible) but I also think that old RQ got some things about Glorantha right. Bladesharp 4 is really less than Crush 4. The armoring magic of the wicked soulless sorcerers might be about as effective as that of the noble praxians, but it feels different because it works different, not just because the GM will give different descriptions of identical mechanics.

Secondly -and this is why I used the Alkoth example- I don't think all Gloranthan magic should be equally powerful. There have been another thread concerning misapplied worship... Well, as far as I understand how Glorantha works, misapplied worship is intrinsically weaker than correctly applied worship. And as far as I understand it, deities of -for instance- violence, aren't necessarily balanced. If you want to get your bureacracy on (to run your empire) Lankor Mhy doesn't have a thing on Buserian. And if you're a follower of Natha or Orlanth adventurous, you should be seriously out of your depth if you go up in a straight fight against someone who follows Babeester or Humakt, not to speak about Shargash. –Assuming of course, that you have the same number of masteries. (Of course, there are compensations. You have lots more flexibility. And as you're neither psychotic nor pathologically morbid, civilians will have more varied reactions to you than stuttering terror, and GM will allow you to have social skills and casual friendships and stuff.)

>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.

Well. If all magic works identically, and all it ever does is augment, then yes, absolutely. Everything is perfectly balanced. But if you allow "Fiery Aura 16W" to automatically attack everyone within its radius with magical fire (which can only be resisted by anti-magical-fire magic) every round, doesn't lose action points by being merely resisted, and also reduce disadvantage of fighting against several opponents in the same way as a follower would, then game balance becomes an issue.
Magic will do whatever the GM allows it to do. And (game balance aside) what I just described sounds about reasonable to me. Hey, come to think of it, everyone who fails to resist the fire should be distracted and blinded as well, and get a -4 penalty to their target numbers.

So, after this over-the-top example, I ask again: how game-unbalanced should special magic be allowed to be?
What kinds of effects are reasonable when you go beyond straight augmenting?

Simons answers seems to be: "Not at all." and "Don't." Any other takers?

All the best,
Dan Guillou            

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