The Narrator's Book p.31 says you need a Complete or Major Victory to enter the Other Side.
With all of his boosts from sanctuary, holy day, ritual paraphernalia and community support,an average priest can be boosted until he's assured of *some* kind of victory in a simple contest to enter the Other Side. But a Major Victory is *never* a sure thing: no matter how many masteries you have, you can't bump your result to better than a Critical Success, and if the opposition rolls a mere Success, then you can only score a Minor Victory at best. (NB p.31: "the Other Side does not materialize"). Against a 10w3 resistance, that means there's at least a 50% chance of any worship service failing (d20 roll of 1-10, before mastery boosts are taken into account, and remembering that w3 is pretty stiff opposition normally).
Worship on holy days really should succeed something like 90-95% of the time (I understood from Greg at the last German Con that this was the reason for all those +20 boosts for temples/holy days). This means the published rules don't fit the intended paradigm.
Jonas also pointed out that the example heroquest in the Narrator's Book ignores this rule. On p.48 Rurik explicitly crosses over with "just" a minor victory, while the chart on p.49 implies that you can make it with as little as a tied result. (Carryover '0' rather than 'X' at this critical stage of the quest).
I think the chart on p.31 should be formally errata'd so that a Minor Victory (and indeed perhaps a Marginal Victory too) can also get you onto the Other Side. If the threshold is deliberately being set really high (so high that normal worship will frequently fail), then the rules example needs to be changed: give Rurik a major victory, and add a few more 'X's to the first line of the chart on p.49. I wouldn't have any trouble replacing the '0' with an 'X' in the first line of that chart, BTW...
:::: Email: <mailto:Nick_Brooke_at_...>
Nick
:::: Website: <http://www.btinternet.com/~Nick_Brooke/>
Powered by hypermail