Jeff wrote:
>
> > While there are some things a I greatly appreciate in HQ 2.0 - the
> Victory
> > Track, the much much much better Extended Contest Mechanic - I think
> going
> > the way of scaling everything so that's its challenging to the
> Heroes and
> > not trying to even vaguely simulate/model a world was sort of a
> cop-out. To
> > each their own, I suppose.
>
> OK, I try to avoid these edition wars arguments but let me explain
> from the perspective of the writing team. In a nutshell, HW/HQ1
> attempts to "simulate/model a world" simply did not work in any sort
> of internally consistent manner - numbers were simply thrown out
> without reference to other numbers that had been thrown out.
>
> To resolve this (which, along with the Augment Quest problem and the
> Action Point mechanism, ranked as one of the big three structural
> problems we wanted to fix with the new edition of HQ), Robin Laws went
> back to his original drafts and oriented the resistance levels to the
> characters themselves. We found his solution to be far more elegant,
> simple, and internally consistent than the bastard hybrid that was
> (mis)used in the previous systems. You might prefer we adopted another
> solution, but it was certainly not a "sort of cop-out" (which I
> frankly find offensive).
>
Yeah, I'm inclined to agree with Jeff on this. "Cop out" isn't really
the right expression since HQ2 does work very well on its own terms, and
is, as he says, internally consistent. I have played HQ2 a couple of
times and unquestionably prefer HQ1 - for all its faults, it was easily
the better system for me. But that doesn't mean its short-changing
anyone; it does what it does pretty well, I think.
--
Trotsky
Gamer and Skeptic
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Trotsky's RPG website: http://www.ttrotsky.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/
Not a Dead Communist: http://jrevell.blogspot.com/
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