Variable Body Points

[lucasdp]

As my group prepares to go Against the Ogre Horde, I'll probably be blowing up threads in the AtOH room over the next couple weeks.
We've been playing NA rules the whole time, so I've decided to use Phoenix's body points for the Ogres. But I can see how the variable points would be interesting and probably work well within the EU rule-set. In fact, I'm actually quite curious to see how that would play out.
Have any of you EU folks played AtOH with the variable points? I can imagine a situation where heroes have a (relatively) long, epic battle with one ogre, and then the next one to come along is defeated with very little effort. Anyone have any good stories from a game like this?

[clmckay]

We played one game that way last year when we went through AtOH.

I think it's an interesting concept. We didn't feel like it played well in practice though. Some of the charm was in the unpredictable nature for the Heroes (Hmmmm do I fire this thing or see what happens), but at the same time the reduction in predictability and timing of the battles was a bit of a let-down.

So we stopped after only using it for one quest.

[slev]

It actually reduces difficulty, as excess BP damage is never wasted. This can lead to a situation where each person is fighting an Ogre in a different room, and a single battleaxe strike take all four of them out, as the large number of wandering Monsters has lead to them all having 1BP each!

I adjusted the Ogres to be munti-BP monsters when I created HQR, and this worked MUCH better.

[knightkrawler]

Aren't you supposed to stop ticking boxes after arriving at a skull even if you had more hits?

[slev]

Perhaps. It has been a while, but that was how we understood it as kids and thus played it.
The point was that, if the WM is an Ogre, then it neds either e REALLY long line of boxes, or some other system!

[Gav_el]

I have never been able to figure out the body points For ogres and the instructions at the beginning of the quest book don’t make much sense either. Can anyone explain it to me?

[Maurice76]

Basically, you cross off each box in succession whenever an Ogre is hit for damage, at a rate of one box for each body point damage dealt - any Ogre. At any time you have to cross off a box that contains a skull, the Ogre against whom the hit was scored is killed (at which point you stop crossing off boxes for that Ogre, of course). There's a skull for every Ogre in the mission, so once you've crossed off all boxes, all Ogres in the mission should be dead too.

It's a rather convoluted way to go about it; it's almost as if they were afraid that people would consider it too hard to keep track of individual monster hitpoints instead of this system.

[Jalapenotrellis]

I'm sure I've asked this before, but if I am playing the American version of HeroQuest and then get to the Against the Ogre Horde Quest pack, do I continue playing with American rules, or do I have to learn the European rules in order to play that particular pack?

[Pancho]

I'm sure I've asked this before, but if I am playing the American version of HeroQuest and then get to the Against the Ogre Horde Quest pack, do I continue playing with American rules, or do I have to learn the European rules in order to play that particular pack?

I would continue playing with the rules that your players have been using. Just give Ogre warriors 4 body points each (and 5 BP for the other Ogre types), and forget that variable body points nonsense.

Of course you could combine the best of the two rule systems, and add in other improvements to the game via house rules here and there as you go, but I think I heard you say somewhere that you really want to follow the expansions as they are written.

[The Admiral]

We had great fun back in the day when we played this with EU rules. I don't remember any problems with the variable BP's, but it was clearly an attempt at bringing BP's into the game without having to track them on individual monsters. Comparing it to the NA system it sucks. In theory, one ogre in a multi ogre room could take massive damage until it dies, while all the others die when losing only 1BP. BP's worked fine in WoM because the monsters with BP's were distinct individual figures and they could therefore assign them set BP's.

We played AtOH recently for our new Heroes with set BP's. It will work perfectly fine with either system, but variable BP's just aren't realistic.