>NO INVESTMENT, NO RETURN.
By coincidence, ran across an interesting bit from Bruce Baugh (he's
talking about RPGs in general, but Glorantha/HQ seems like a perfect
example):
"as the mass of material accumulates, gamers trying to make use it come to feel that there's more and more they have to or ought to hew to. This gets expensive, and it gets brain-loading. Past some threshold, it doesn't matter how much the creators say encouraging things about how players should feel free to mix, match, select, and discard. (We mean it, too, pretty much. Creators are often less dogmatic than their hard-core fans, in any field.) It still feels like work, to more and more potential customers, and after a while, sales goes down. Reinvention and reworking can postpone the slump and even reverse it for a while, but not forever. Sooner or later, something's got to give.
"And so, in the course of the late '90s through mid '00s, things gave." <http://tor.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=blog&id=921>
>If we want to implement KISS thoroughly, may I suggest a few equally
>pertinent issues to consider ... (And I'm hoping, seriously, that some of
>these have been picked up for HQ2).
At least somewhat.
Donald
>The problem is that what interests one person is overly complicated
>for others.
Again, I don't think that's really the point. It's that the entire oeuvre is so large that you can't figure out the parts that interest you. Or that it's all interesting, but too much to manage.
Different people will draw the brain-overload line differently, but anyone is subject to it.
>Gloranthan magic isn't
>simple and needs different terms to reflect the different ways of
>working. If you use the same terms for things which are roughly
>equivelent rather than the same you just generate confusion.
My view (not necessarily shared by anyone working on Moon Design products) is that this isn't true. Magic serves a purpose in the story. Very few stories depend on the specifics of how different magic works differently.
--
David Dunham
Glorantha/HQ/RQ page: www.pensee.com/dunham/glorantha.html
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