>I take your point, but if you really wanted the breaking and
>entering to be crucial to your story then surely you should use an
>extended contest. You might not want to focus on the lockpicking
>though. The contest would be the heroes vs the security of the
>house.
<snip example>
The beauty of Hero Wars/Quest is that you can do it any level appropriate to your game/group - If you want to concentrate on roleplaying out the debates at the Tribal moot then you can dispense with the breaking and entering in a simple contest (ranging from "Complete Success:- You get away with the theft and no one notices until they go to look for whatever you stole" to "Complete Failure:- You are caught redhanded before you even manage to get inside the house")
Or you can do it as a series of (unrelated) Simple contests ("Sneak/Hide vs Awareness of Guards", "Pick Lock/Strength vs the lock on the door", "Search vs the resistance of the hidden target", "Run Away vs the pursuit of the Guards" etc etc.)
Or a series of related simple contests, where the results of the previous contest "carry over" to the next one (so the party that gain a Complete Success in sneaking past the guards should have a much easier job breaking in and searching without disturbing them than the party that scraped in with a marginal victory)
Or a single extended contest as you describe (I have visions of an entire scenario broken given as a massive pool of AP's broken down into "scenes" like this - presumably if the "security of the house" criticals and transfers AP's from the PC's the previously defeated guards suddenly become suspiscous and are re-activated).
Or a set of simple contests with a single extended contest as the climax, or central contest to the episode.
or a set of simple contests, with a couple of extended contests for the scenes that make the most "sense" as dramatically extended scenes (probably sneaking past the guards and searching the house in this example)
or a series of extended contests with the PC's APs not resetting between each one (the party that goes straight to the objective (loses no AP's on the search) will be in a better position to flee when they are discovered than the party that have spent some time searching, giving the defenders more time to prepare...)
None of these are necessarily the "right" or "wrong" way to approach things, and not all of them will work for all groups, but all can be supported by the rules, which is, IMO, a good thing!
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