From: dave@starfish.net.au
Date: Thu 11 Jun 1998 - 19:59:13 EEST
Charles Domino talks about how Glorantha can be offputting to a new
player.
>HW may skim off players tired of the complexity or
>immaturity of other game worlds/
>systems/players, but I worry about its mass
>acceptance.
I think compared to current favourites like WOD, Hero Wars has the
potential to both have a lot less complexity for the new player to deal
with, and a lot more richness for a beginning GM to draw on. You only need
to know the basics of how your own village works, plus a bit of broad
brushstroke background - as compared to Vampire, for example, where you are
pretty much expected to understand the difference between a dozen different
clans, plus remember a complex set of artificial social rules, just to get
a grasp on what is going on. Yet Hero Wars, for someone who is a GM type
(ie takes the time to read the rulesbook entirely) will give you a fair bit
of richness in terms of world background and plot directions just in the
first book.
I do, however, heartily applaud the idea of creating a quite
separate forum to the digest, so that newbies are not traumatised when
their interesting myth idea is brutally cut down by Peter on the grounds
that it is contradicted by Glorious Reascent, and in any case totally
inconsistent with real Roman agricultural techniques.
>By combining the game
>system with the world, it requires a player to
>know a great deal of the world to play and enjoy
>the game!
In my brief playtest with non-Gloranthans at the con, I found the
reverse - they picked up the game mechanics quickly, and found that finding
things out about Glorantha (even by just asking questions of the GM) was a
significant part of the fun. Most reacted positively to the background,
though reactions where mixed to the mechanics.
I find that its not that hard to get Glorantha across, because you
really only need to tell them what they need to play their characters, and
all other info can be introduced as they go along. Deluging them with
background at play time is bad - but deluging them with background that is
accessable and interesting enough to read between play is good. Most of the
RuneQuest fans I know (and I am not talking Glorantha fanatics like the
digest denizens, just people who like the game) love the complex background
and love things like the history/myth section of Cults of Terror.
Lets face it, we want to emulate the successful model of games like
Shadowrun - which has managed to publish books and books of background, and
sell them in reasonable numbers, despite the fact that the majority of them
are quite mundane. Glorantha is far more interesting - so we can not only
sell sourcebooks, but hopefully make them readable. Even better, we want to
emulate Vampire - and produce not background books for GMs, but books of
backgound that players will also be encouraged to read, and that they will
enjoy reading.
Cheers
David
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