To that end, I'd like to ask those of you who are willing to submit your own examples of situations you found difficult to play out using the HQ rules when you first encountered them—or perhaps still find difficult even now.<<
I am assuming that this is advice on how to handle these situations which I am in favour of and not extra rules, from which I might run in fear.I really wouldn't want to see an 'non-matching contests' rule for example that started handing out penalties. To be honest missile combat came up when we tried to run the game as if it were RuneQuest, not as if it were HeroQuest.
Attacking this from a slighty different angle, the biggest influences on my understanding how to play HeroQuest have been:
Chris Chinn's articles on ways to play (http://www.rpg.net/news+reviews/collists/waystoplay.html) and flag based play. The latter sadly not on the web any more, but made me realize that as heroes have a limited set of abilities you need to structure play to allow them to respond with the abilities they have, rather than the abilities they don't. i.e. a scenario that has the 'now you need to climb the cliff' doesn't really work in HeroQuest as it focuses on scanning the sheet for specific abilities not using the abilities you have to overcome a problem. So 'you need to get to the tower where the princess is being held on time, tell me how you do it' is better because it lets the player deploy the skills they have. In addition relationship-map based scenarios as dfeined by Sorceror and Dogs are big influences here. Both have very clear advice on setting up a community and pushing it into crisis, which works very well for HQ in our experience.
Looking at heroquest contests as conflict not task resolution and how to deal with failure as a spur to new trouble/adventrue (Mike Holmes article on failure on the glorantha web site covers some of this). We found being upfront about what was at hazard(differs from setting the stakes in that we are not pre-narrating the outcome) to be invaluable in getting people to accept losing a contest.
Favouring use of simple contests until we wanted 'the big takedown'. Particularly learning to do combat as one roll. See above as the notion of avoiding failure meaning end-of-story is important here.
Prince Valiant. This has good advice on simple vs extended contests. I really like the one-page episode formats there and the structure around them. Again they work well for HQ.
As for some of the pain points:
The lack of pyrhicc victory mechanics don't really bother us. I'm not looking for that RQ feel of a slowly degrading even though you won. For me the issue with that is that now a marginal defeat can be 'you fought him off, but are injured' but adding a 'wounded' mechanism to undermines that model.
Incompatible abilities in contests: not a problem, though you need to rule what you can resist with has to be has to be appropriate opposed to attack with (or go withd efault 14). Missiles are not really an issue. I'm certain missile combat rules would not help (but I guess the guns issue here is big) once you begin to percieve you are using a conflict resolution mechanic not task based resolution. Its important to define what is at hazard between the two parties.
I would be careful that many of the questions asked about HeroQuest early on proposed solutions that came from trying to make HQ more like RQ. I think we have learned a lot since then from the broader understanding of this style of game by this and other communities.
just my .02c
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