Reading your answer I feel that I have expressed myself badly and come across as more radical than I intended.
> HeroQuest is a very simple system at heart. You have abilities that
are very flexible and a simple method of resolving contests.
I love HQ. I'd say that it is a simple and flexible system at heart.
> They can do what you want them to do. Seriously, if you have Dance
Past Blades, then this can be used to counter a sword attack, to
dodge thrown daggers, to avoid a scything chariot, to get past a
swinging blade trap and to do a nifty sword-dance to impress the
ladies.
Absolutely! All of these (simple contests) are obvious applications.
But I'm still not sure how powerful the feat is when it is used in
conjunction with other abilities.
The thing is, I feel that although initiates may just augment their
mundane swordfighting ability with their Dance Past Blades, for the old
+2 (and yes, during play we will imaginatively describe how magically
this looks and feels different from another +2, like for instance Big
Ugly Stick), on the other hand, I want the full feat to be more
special-effecty.
As we said, HQ is supremely flexible. Magic will do whatever a PC can convince the GM that it ought to do, in any specific situation.
And that brings us to game balance... How "unbalanced" should a magical effect be allowed to be? Significantly more powerful than the initate augment, yes? Qualitatively different? I think so. But not _too_ powerful, naturally! To some extent it is a question of game play versus Gloranthiness. Game designers (and GMs) wants character design and game play choices to be balanced. If a particular strategy is too effective, too cookie cutter, then the game is in some sense broken. But in Glorantha, some magic really is more powerful. Don't try to storm Alkoth, and then come whining about unfairly overpowered opponents.
So in the end, all I'm asking for are some examples that gives an idea of about how unfair magic can reasonably be, when it goes beyond straight-augment. My difficulty so far has been that, although I can come up with ten neat and reasonable-sounding applications for any magical effect (some more un-balancing than others) me and my GM haven't used a single one of them, because we don't have the basic sense of just how much they should be able to pull off.
For that reason, some of the great flexibility of the HQ rules remains unused, at least in our campaigns. I believe that a few good examples would really help.
Best regards
Dan Guillou
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