Legends: Relam variants From: griffith@dweeb.fx.com (Jim Griffith) Date: Tue, 27 Jul 1993 02:16:08 +0000 As you may have read, I posted an article where I blast someone for suggesting that players should run influencers in realm variant games. I also loudly extolled the virtues of buying statuses. It seriously tweaked me that my experience could be so different with the other poster's. It turns out that in the early Realm variant games, players could buy "major Titles", which bestowed serious amounts of prestige. I would guess that these are equivalent to the Elven "Lord of the Woods", which gives some 30 or 40 prestige. What happened is that these titles and other considerations made the game strongly favor influencing as a route to power, and factions would launch "influence wars" on other factions, achieving victory by influencing major factional characters away. This caused a lot of problems, and MG quickly changed things, removing "major Titles" as a bonus point purchase option. Starting with Realm 7 (I think), players can only buy maybe 10 points worth of prestige on startup, and that would require the purchasing of marks. As such, the variant games no longer favor influence, and, in fact, influence is largely worthless in the current variant games, due to the difficulty in getting prestige combined with the natural speed of the game. So getting back to the original poster's question, if your variant game offers "major Titles" (this is Australia, right?), then by all means, go the influence route. If not, then don't bother, and go for a status or something else instead. And there is a caveat to the status claim. If you work closely with a factional senior, you can *probably* get a powerful status given to you, through a commune (although I haven't seen the new commune rules) or some other factional power. But if you're working alone, and if you don't want to go the vampyre route, then a status is a good thing, especially if you want to bash ruins or lairs or train troops. And if you plan to be a major factional troop trainer, then don't bother, because you'll want to be a Lord of the Dead (which afflicts vamp lord troops), and you'll need help from your senior to get there. Jim -- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Jim Griffith /--OO--\ | Two great powers are on our side: the power of griffith@dweeb.fx.com | Love and the power of Arithmetic. These two are BEWARE BATS WITHOUT NOSES! | stronger than anything else in the world. Up