[Glorantha] Power Levels

Wow. I'm slightly shocked by the reaction to my last e-mail. Who'd have thought it was so controversial to suggest that GMs adjust stats to match their PCs and their group's tastes...

Anyway, in the hope that some of this is a huge misunderstanding by someone (maybe me...) I'll try to make my position clearer.

Heroquest assumes (perhaps implicitly) that there is a basic character story that goes something like : minor nobody > locally powerful > regionally powerful > nationally powerful > great hero > demi-god, and beyond... It also assumes a connection between this story and your character's stats - by default, roughly one mastery between each stage. Combined with the experience system, this means that your characters are assumed to move through this story at roughly X sessions per stage - where X is the average number of sessions needed to add a mastery to your PCs significant skills.

Now that's okay if you happen to want to tell that story at that rate. If you want to tell it faster or slower, skip the beginning stages, or never reach the last few, you need to make changes. One of the most obvious is to change the stats of NPCs.

I'd have thought the above was inarguable... I await the inevitable argument that proves me wrong. *grin*

Perhaps more controversially, the stats of NPCs should also, surely, depend on when in this progression they are introduced. The Lunar Field School that acts as a support body for starting PCs and which they will later outgrow would naturally have lower typical stats than the major challenge to be overcome by some of the biggest heroes in Dragon Pass. There's no consistency there, but so what? The two events aren't going to happen in the same campaign anyway.

And for those who seem to be arguing for some sort of statistics as holy writ, and playing with other numbers means you're somehow wrecking Glorantha, well I hope I'm misunderstanding you. If not, I'm very glad that YGWV.

Cheers,
Graham

-- 
Graham Robinson
graham_at_albionsoft.com

Albion Software Engineering Ltd.