One of the selling points of HW, to me at least, was the possibilities it offered for high power heroes. RQ clearly went a bit pear shaped at the higher end of the Hero scale, as a simulation of Glorantha at least, if not as a game system. It got harder and harder to increase your 89% sword attack. This did mean(still does I guess?) that the skills of opponents and allies in published adventures could be set and everyone in the entire world could use the rules to see how powerful they were. 10% sing clearly meant that he did, in fact, sing, but that he was terribly bad at it. As a simulation, the system wasn't consistent - he would have tried to sing until he got a tick and then gone up in skill. It still worked for a certain range of people. It did not really work (I would argue) for the Crimson Bat or Ralzakark.
So, Hero Wars was sold as a scaleable system, that could handle big stuff, small stuff and inbetween stuff with equal aplomb. It worked for me, as long as I only ever referred to the rules summary sheet that came in the deluxe box set, and used a few house rules. Hero Wars was notas flawed as people seem to make out. Sure, there were some "refer to page X" typos, and mysticism didn't work, and other stuff, but on the whole I still like it. I still think that I could use the HW resolution system for the board game Dragon Pass - it is scaleable more than Runequest, and more than HQ1.
Heroquest, OTOH, has a complicated magic system that rather takes over the whole book in the same way that combat systems used to take over RPG rules. I don't like the limitless auto augments or inelegant keywords, or the more complicated character generation, or the fact that your keyword skills are more important that the interesting things about you. These are mostly minor quibbles but, for example, in HW one could successfully give a single number to an opponent (eg Troll 2W) without it being silly. In HQ1, the sheer quantity of augments means that a 2W troll is really mincemeat if everyone trawls through their character sheet for every skill that they can use to augment their main ability, leading to either too many abilities being required for NPCs, or making stuff up on the fly to match the augmentation frenzy of the player characters. My feeling is that HW still has the core mechanisms that I would want but that it was poorly presented. HQ1 tried to fix that presentation, but just added complexity. My hope is that HQ2 will be a return to the more basic ideas of HW.
Keith
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