From: Jon S Green (jonsg@harlequin.co.uk)
Date: Tue 04 Aug 1998 - 15:51:15 EEST
In 6.67, Simon Hibbs <simonh@msi-uk.com> writes, in reply to:
> Jon S Green :
>
> >Worse still, if you
> >had two debating-related skills at different skill/points levels, you
> >could switch skills to "reset" your score if things were going badly --
> >playing the system, not the game.
>
> You may be able to do this in the cut-down version, but in the current
> draft you can't. You can change abilities but this only changes your
> target number (and the effects you can achieve due to the different
> ability), the action points total stays the same.
This is a relief! Our GM was a little unclear on when one could reset
the system, and I think that was probably down to ambiguities in his
working material, plus the fact this was his first HW scenario as a GM.
He wasn't a bad GM! It appeared from all we could glean that one could
use "resetting" as a game tool (*shudder*). I'm glad that impression
was false.
I do appreciate that we were working with what is essentially a
primitive boiled-down version: however, if we're actually meant to
playtest the system, it's a Good Thing if what we're playing is
canonical -- otherwise, it's less a playtest and more a sneak preview,
which is fine if it's presented as such.
However, George W. Harris <gharris@mindspring.com> makes some
considerably more significant comments:
> One thing that I really like about RuneQuest is that for every
> game-mechanic, there is an analogous concept which the character would
> understand. [...] My main worry here is with action points and the
> wagering of them. What the hell does an action point represent to the
> character? In RQ, magic points, hit points and even fatigue points
> had a direct and obvious correspondence with some Gloranthan concept.
> [...] I find this worrisome, but not so worrisome as Plot Points.
These things were niggling at me at the time of the playtest, and I
couldn't put my finger on what was bugging me about it. At the time I
put it down to over-intrusive game mechanics, which would become natural
given a little familiarity, but George has helped clarify my feelings.
HW, as presented at that playtest (and I have to emphasise that,
because, as Alex points out quite correctly, we weren't playing the full
or final game), came over less as a role-playing game than as a game
involving role-playing. The game mechanics -- the way skills were
resolved -- were divorced from the actual role-playing. The mechanism
of wagering, trading and accounting for action points became a separate
activity from the scenario in progress, so that we were operating on two
levels.
When you're playing RQ, there's some accounting, but keeping track of
magic points and hit points has meaning within the action: it's a close
abstraction of what's happening to the characters. Action points and
the gambling game mechanic seem to me such a high-level abstraction that
there's little tangible relation to the scene in progress. That's
dangerous. People can lose interest in the drama in order to
concentrate on the ebb and flow of action points, and in fact that's
what happened in our game. Any game mechanic which forces a
psychological remove from the scene can't be good.
All this implies heavy criticism of the playtest and of the game itself.
That's not entirely fair. I like the keyword mechanism Robin has
created. It's good to have a character sheet not over-cluttered with
numbers and symbols and needless detail. Overall, it's pretty similar
to the diceless RQ variant I'm running. My current feeling is that I'll
get HW (hey, who here won't?), but probably make some minor conversions
to a diceless system and lose the action point mechanic completely.
(My understanding of plot points, BTW, is that the surplus points can
also be cashed in at the end of an adventure for permanent improvements
in skills, the equivalent of the old skills checks. This wasn't covered
in the playtest, but mentioned in another session. That may affect your
view on them, George. My guess is that the use of PPs to bias skills
resolutions is a way of limiting the number available at the end of the
scenario for character improvement. I still don't like it, though.)
Anyway, enough ramblings.
Jon
------------------------------
End of The Glorantha Digest V6 #71
**********************************
To unsubscribe from the Glorantha Digest, send an "unsubscribe"
command to glorantha-digest-request@chaosium.com. Glorantha is a
Trademark of Issaries Inc. With the exception of previously
copyrighted material, unless specified otherwise all text in this
digest is copyright by the author or authors, with rights granted to
copy for personal use, to excerpt in reviews and replies, and to
archive unchanged for electronic retrieval.
Official WWW at http://www.glorantha.com
Archives at http://rider.wharton.upenn.edu/~loren/rolegame.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.7 : Fri 13 Jun 2003 - 17:15:44 EEST