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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Autumnal" data-source="post: 9363590" data-attributes="member: 6671663">I like that a lot, [USER=58172]@Yaarel[/USER] .[USER=177]@Umbran[/USER] : that’s actually Greg Stafford’s original purpose for the personality trait pairs that are so important (and great) in Pendragon. The first version was a GM’s tool for running the dragonewts, who aren’t necessarily the most alien race in Glorantha but probably are the most mysterious sentients there. Unlike in Pendrsgon, each pair comes with three numbers that add up to 20, like Proud 12 / neutral 5 / Humble 3 (or Proud 1-12 / neutral 13-17 / Humble 18-20). You’d roll, and if you got high or low weigh enough, the trait at that end would dominate the dragonewt’s actions for that encounter. If you rolled in the middle, neither extreme dominated and you’d make individual choices as you would for other NPCs. You could easily adjust the weight of traits for particular locations, cultures, lineages, and so on. I continue to love the concept and find it a handy way to present priorities that doesn’t get into the swamp of racial attribute scores. In Pendragon, each culture has the same number of valued traits that have to be high (15+ on that trait in a totals-to-20 pair) to get annual glory points for being a proverbial example of the character’s culture, so none are “better” in the sense of earning glory more quickly. Just depends on what you want to emphasize in play. (Also, trivia note for comics fan: Mike Mignola’s first published art is for the article in Wyrm’s Footnotes presenting the dragonewt personality system. He was a teenager and it’s not readily distinguishable from early Erol Otus on a bad day. But there it is.)As for the overall topic…humans are like the plants that flourish first after fires, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, and such. We call ourselves the Inheritors. Other species call us the Successors when they’re being polite to or afraid of us, the Scavengers when not. It’s not that we do noticeably better or even as well as everyone else when times are good. It’s that we keep relatively flourishing when times are bad, and really bad times kick us down too, we return to normal quickly. Which means that when all the sentient species in an area get hammered so badly. That almost everyone is wiped out or have to flee, we’re the ones multiplying in the ruins. As a relative newcomer species, we’ve invented very little of our own. Like James Nicoll’s description of the English language, we pick up what everyone else left lying around and stumble our way into invention by putting ideas and things together in new ways. Sometimes this wipes out the experimenters. Sometimes it works but doesn’t help anything and the combo is discarded (to be invented again and again down the road). Sometimes it’s useful and spreads, and the human reputation for coloring so far outside the lines you have no idea where the lines are anymore is enhanced. We don’t even have many gods all of our own. The pantheons in human-dominated areas are heavy on gods whose original followers all got killed or left their area and worship. Humans will put nearly anything in our mouths, and we do the same with our souls. “That sounds fun” and “Sure” are common things for the first humans speaking with an unfamiliar god to say in response to an offer. If other species learn ways of better nailing down their stuff, we could be in real trouble, innovation-wise.</blockquote>

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