I have a great deal of affection for Hero Wars/HeroQuest/Questworlds. I think the unified resolution system has got a number of things right but always find that putting it into use runs into cases where it either doesn’t work very well at all (which is much of combat) or works very strangely.
As with all of Robin Laws’ designs, the system tries to focus in like a very, very focused thing on the bits of the sort of story Robin thinks is going on that Robin is really interested in telling and handwaves over what Robin thinks is not interesting, giving it no mechanical support to speak of. Sometimes this works really well but in role-gaming you are always dealing with nerds and geeks and they (we) like to say “But hang on what about…” Sometimes they have a very good point and care about things that the story should have at least glimpsed at. And sometimes they want to argue about the precise date that vanilla was introduced to Europe and delay your story until this is resolved.
What’s the state of mind Socrates is supposed to have reduced people to? The complete crogglement that comes after Socrates demonstrates that you didn’t know what you were talking about? That’s how Questworlds (as I suppose we must now call it) affects me sometimes.
But I don’t always find this a Bad Thing. The focus of FENG SHUI is recreating the action sequences of Hong Kong Kung Fu dramas and analagous Western genres. If that isn’t your idea of fun don’t pick it up.
On the whole though I do think you often (if not always) need a generic system that can suddenly shift focus from Naval Battles to High Romance to Court Intrigue and do them with characters continuing from their core genre.
And my attitude to RQ: G is: “C’est manifique but it hasn’t been properly playtested let alone proofread.” There are just too many places where the writers are assuming that what they are saying is plain and simple and it’s not. Look at the overlap between Rune Priests and Shamans in the cults of Daka Fal and Waha. Do you need to qualify as a Priest before you become a Shaman or the other way round? Is one of the qualifications waived? The developers tend to answer “It means what it says” which isn’t helpful.
But I am currently running my second RQ:G game so I can’t hate it that much. I’m also scrapping parts of the game system and rewriting others and my players are telling me that I’m not communicating as clearly as I think I am so I probably have more in common with Chaosium than I think.