Yes, I'll show it in practice, it will be more explainatory.

I want to download all articles
(http://www.cracked.com/funny-articles.html?date=12.2007) that are from 2007.
The structure of article URL is that they all start with
<http://www.cracked.com/article>_* regardless of the year written. And every
article has a category Recommended for Your Pleasure, which has 4 more
randomly posted articles from 2010. So I figured it would be easiest to
specify all articles I want to download, and exclude the rest with -*.
Here comes in the limitation od 380 lines for Scan Rules.

I hope I made it more clear what I want to do. I am also new to Httrack so
forgive me if I don't know all the quirks and strategies. 

Would URL list option do the trick? And do I write URL text file with the same
options as Scan Rules (using +, *, and other options?).

Thank you for your answer!