Hurts and bumping contests

From: Stephen <stephenmcg_at_...>
Date: Sun, 06 Dec 2009 18:36:51 -0000

There were two things that I always hard to work round using Hero Wars and HeroQuest.

One was the fact that the winners of a contest were almost always unhurt and so it was difficult to do the long term running out of resources type story.

One is the basic variability of results and the need to use hero points to get results which means you are spending your experience points. That is the same problem I had in TORG.

However, I was re-reading the contest rules and may have had an epiphany.

In the first edition HQ you could, in an extended contest, exchange 7 AP taken for a hurt. Now a hurt in 2nd edition gives -3 rather than -1 to related abilities and so is, in essence, equivalent to 21 AP which is close to a mastery worth of AP. What about, when you resolve a contest, you are able to bump the result at the expense of taking a hurt?

That would make sense to me, being so engaged in getting the result that you push it such that you come out of the exchange hurt. That would also provide the player with more control in the game without having to spend experience.

Stephen