Went away and read again. The mastery bonus for the pyrrhic victory is for the whole of a contest (be it simple or extended). I was thinking of this being used for a one-off exchange within an extended contest.
I guess for a simple contest you might want to use the pyrrhic victory but I think I might use this more forgiving system for contests that are not quite important enough to risk death for.
>
> The rules already give a mastery bonus for attempting a pyrrhic victory. If
> you go for one of those the best you're going to come off is "impaired" so
> your idea is a lot more forgiving.
>
> Another way to simulate a "running out of resources" story is to have more
> contests and don't expect the adventurers to win every one of them. Using
> the pass/fail cycle can end up with a tension between penalties of failure
> and rewards of success that works quite well in my experience.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Ash
>
> --------------------------------------------------
> From: "Stephen" <stephenmcg_at_...>
> Sent: Sunday, December 06, 2009 6:36 PM
> To: <HeroQuest-rules_at_yahoogroups.com>
> Subject: [HeroQuest-rules] Hurts and bumping contests
>
> > 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
> >
> >
> >
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