[Glorantha] Re: Power Levels

A few quick replies :

Trotsky :

>If my hero is 10w2, is that good, or not? Is it just as good as a typical fyrdsman, or as good as the tribal champion? This tells me what sort of challenges I will face.

Absolutely. I'd expect that answer to differ between groups, based on player tastes, the length of the campaign, and the stories they've told. In some groups the difference will be large, but small differences are inevitable, I'd have thought. And - this is the significant point - those differences will inevitably require the GM to adjust some numbers in published works in order for the *story* to work as intended.

>You seemed to be suggesting that a clan champion might be 5w in his best ability one day, and 10w3 the next, depending on the player characters.

No - I'm suggesting that a clan champion might be 5W in one CAMPAIGN and 10W3 in the next, depending on the groups. I've never mentioned making stats inconsistent within a game...

>there you go - there's your misunderstanding.

Seems like it.

Jane :

>Look, if you want powerful PCs, surely what you mean
>is that they're powerful compared with the world
>they're living in? So you either shift their stats
>from beginner-level, or you adjust the entire rest of
>the universe: NPCs, difficulty in getting to the Other
>Side, difficulty in climbing a wall, or Kero Fin - the
>lot. Shifting your PCs is usually regarded as easier.

I disagree (obviously). Shifting PC stats involves headaches like cancelling masteries and exponential augmentation. Heroquest works best when there are few masteries around (which is why cancelling masteries happens in the first place). If your campaign lasts long enough you'll run into these problems anyway, but not while your players are still sitting around going "is high or low good?" and "what's this funny W do again?"

On the other hand, statting NPCs (especially when you have a keyword or three available) and setting resistances is the work of moments. A GM will do that on the fly all the time as the PCs talk to people you hadn't planned for them to talk to, or try and do things you hadn't expected.

And anyway, your solution only works at one end. What if you're five years into a campaign, and you suddenly realise that your PCs could kick JarEel's ass (based on her published stats), but nobody wants the campaign to end? If everyone is happy playing clan-level movers and shakers with 10W4 stats, surely there is nothing wrong with inflating the high-end NPC stats so that the campaign can keep going?

Jane again, possibly jumping to a military rather than community meaning of "support" in my sentence :

>> The Lunar Field
>> School that acts as a support body for starting PCs
>
>Why? PCs who use them that way obviously have higher
>stats than the beginner level anyway. Er, that is
>obvious, isn't it? Or is that another assumption
>that's so obvious we weren't stating it?

And, rather more extremely, Donald on the same subject :

>Who the hell are these starting PCs who have the political influence
>to get one of the six Lunar Field Schools allocated as a support
>body? The Red Emperor's offspring?
>
>Typical starting PCs get magical support from the NPC drunkard who
>was thrown out of university for shagging his tutor's wife.

The last sentence is just rubbish. The typical starting Heroquest PC gets magical, material, and emotional support from the community, unit, college, church, whatever that he's a member of. A campaign which begins with a group of students being assigned to a Lunar Field College seems perfectly valid to me.

Jane :

>look up the
>stats for a Lunar Field School, and base your PCs'
>starting stats on that. Now compare with the stats of
>the Orlanthi clan they've gone to visit, and (without
>having to do any more alterations), laugh
>hysterically, beat up the champion, and start claiming
>taxes.

Just to be clear, a Lunar Field College is eight powerful magicians, and a bunch of students providing total support. Any of those students trying to beat up an Orlanthi clan champion are unlikely to be laughing, hysterically or otherwise... *grin*

And to finish by returning to the original point, here's Trotsky again :

>it's useful, at least to me, to know whether a particular opponent is meant to be tough or not.

Originally this started with the statement in ILH2 that the Lunar Field Colleges were "powerful". In fact the description makes clear that the tribunes are amongst the finest magicians in an empire noted for its fine magicians. Mikko claimed this isn't enough for him to use them in a game. I disagree - there are plenty of suitable keywords in the cults section, and the descriptions of the magics each path studies are practically keywords themselves. A few more pointers to which keywords are particularly appropriate would have helped, but even so finding keywords would only take a few minutes. Adding the numbers is a matter of moments, assuming you know what "powerful" means in your game - and frankly I have a hard time believing that any GM doesn't.

Bottom line - I can imagine using ILH2 to create thousands of Lunar NPCs on the fly, and I find the argument that it needs some 10W3s scattered around before it is usable to be very, very strange.

Cheers,
Graham

-- 
Graham Robinson
graham_at_albionsoft.com

Albion Software Engineering Ltd.