A Case Against Leveling Systems

[burglekutt]

There are four types of Tokens: Combat, Search, Movement & Furniture.
These Tokens should be given out per X amount of quests completed & or could cost $ too per quest.
Only Furniture Tokens count as an action.
Only one Token may be used per room/corridor.
Later hero's can pay $300/400? to upgrade to TWO Tokens per room/corridor.

I figure players should not exceed more than 4 TOKENS usable per room/corridor from any one category. So they max out at a +1CD for four different Attacks & four different Defends in that room.
Four TOKENS per room sounds OP but consider that that costs a lot of cash & time to get up to & that they might want to spend one or two of those Tokens on something else besides just attacking & defending.

COMBAT TOKENS-(Color Red)- One Token gives you a +1CD to a single Attack or a +1CD to a single Defense roll. They could also help you to do something extraordinary like assisting an adjacent hero with an Attack or Defense roll by giving him the +1CD. Or a special move of some sort.

SEARCH TOKENS-(color Green), With one Token you may hear the speech/noise pattern of ONE of the lowest powered enemies in that next room without opening the door. ie, place one Goblin\skeleton in the room.
You can never "hear" inanimate things such as traps, secret doors, treasure or furniture.

Two Tokens will describe ONE of the NEXT lowest powered races in that room (Orc/Zombie). on n on with 3 & 4 Tokens. Yes a hero might know which types of races are in the room but not how many of each.

A Search Token can also reveal where a single Trap or Secret Door is once the Hero enters, but must still waste a turn disarming it. These do not cost an action.

MOVE TOKENS-(blue) Adds +3 to movement per Token or MAM.

Move Tokens might also allow you to push passed a single enemy as long as you have enough Tokens to reach an empty square. Possibly allow you to move diagonally or through/over furniture during your movement?

FURNITURE TOKENS-(yellow) These are meant more for hilarity and would be to long of a post to go over here but they involve the moving, tipping & throwing of furniture:)


Remember that even if a player had 50 damn Tokens, the cap of just four allowed per room should keep it not to OP.

I haven't tested any of this by the way:)

[Tott]

I'm for leveling systems in general but i think you have to be careful with a game like HQ because its simplicity is one of its main features. i do think you need it though, you have to progress the story, you have to increase the challenge in any game or it evetually gets stale. i also think players need something to work towards as a soft reward as well as the hard reward of completeing a quest.
my idea would be to give each character 6 skill slots, there would be about half a dozen skill types: Strength, combat, finesse, cunning, defense, magic and a Hero skill slot.
The barabarian would have 3 strength skill slots, 2 combat skill slots and a hero, the other heroes different combinations.
each hero gains one skill point per succefully completed quest and each skill costs a different numbr of skill points
Im generally against flat out adding 1 extra dice/body point skills UNLESS a certain criteria is met, for instance a 3 point strength skill could be: Charge - if you move at least 6 spaces this turn you may add one combat dice to your next attack.
however, most of my skills would be aimed a modifiying dice or providing passive buffs. e.g. a 3 point defence skill could be: Shield wall - any friendly character adjacent to you may change up to 1 skull to a white shield when defending.

I think a skill system like this combinied with weapon upgrades would give a gradual leveling curve that would stop heros getting too powerful too quickly.

[j_dean80]

Or keep HQ vanilla and kill off Heroes every so often to keep them from overpowered.

[knightkrawler]

...and yet, it depends on your group when and if they are bored.
If they can exchange heroes, how often they individually die, how often they fail as a group, how ... when... if...
As an EWP, you have to play along to a certain extent. Do you wanna make quests more and more difficult? Then you have to let heroes progress and maybe throw them a little something. Do you wanna play various quests of the same difficulty level? Then kill the heroes off more often.

Meaning, every Evil Wizard Player should offer measurements as they see fit. Planning this out ahead makes less sense than we all want it to be true as we really have to cater to our groups' needs and wants.

[torilen]

Reading through the latest bout of comments...I'm not sure if I have anything to say specifically
TOWARD any of those, but some "new" thoughts come to mind.

1 - As far as leveling to make the heroes more powerful? Pertaining to HQ itself, I think I might tend to
agree with some others that HQ is unique in its simplicity. There are a ton of homebrew quests here...I
know I've made a few myself...and while that adds a lot to the game, I don't know if many of them really
up the ante of the game. It is more that they simply add more paths for the heroes to follow at their various
power levels (or as Anderas terms it, and I love the term, x-die equipment).

2 - That said, perhaps an idea is to allow leveling to let the heroes do MORE. Give the Wizard more spells.
Not necessarily more powerful spells, and not necessarily more offensive or defensive spells. If you go through
my homebrew spell list, there are quite a few that are there simply to add character and flavor. The Evil Wizard,
or the group as a whole, would work to find ways for the Wizard or Elf to use these spells to allow them to have
fun building their character. Would this be possible for the other characters. The dwarf can pick locks, disable
traps...as someone else said, build ballista...build traps and siege engines. Between quests...blacksmithing
and forging new equipment.

3 - Last thought for my tired brain this morning - it is SUCH A SHAME that those colored dice are not more
readily available, even customizable (is that a word?). Sure, there are places to custom order dice, but
they get expensive. It could be a ton of fun to move a method of leveling into using the specialized
combat dice. Instead of simply getting more and more powerful weapons and more attacks, maybe the
barbarian and dwarf specialize in their weapons and become more deadly, and so can roll the dice that
allow for the possibility of 2 or 3 skulls with one roll. It seems more powerful...but I am not really sure.
You're not adding more dice and more skulls...are you? I'm not doing the math right now...sorry.

[Tott]

only thing id say against deliberatly killing off heroes, if someone has been playing a hero for a long time, got decent gear on them etc, then killing that hero can often be a massive disensentive for that player to continue to play. people become attached to their characters!

[torilen]

I would go more with just giving great harm and make them buy more healing potions.
Killing characters off just to keep them from getting powerful only causes the issue
of having to "find and recruit" new characters and having the party get used to them
and trust them. (I mean, how do the players know the new character is not a spy?)

But hey, characters die. Bad rolls, bad choices, doing stupid things...it happens. I wouldn't
worry so much about characters dying in HQ. I can't imagine there would be THAT much
attachment, and it doesn't usually take 20-30 minutes to make a new one, as it might
with D&D or other full rpg.

[mitchiemasha]

Killing heroes isn't as big issue if you have a simple Character Creation. The last group i was in, each player had a few Heroes. They made different ones for different occasions, depending on who had turned up that day. They enjoyed the process of creating new characters and seeing how they'd play. Discussing ideas and themeing new mechanics was often the start of the night.

We always believe the story has to follow the same 4 Heroes... But different members can quite easily come and go. I was impressed by the different stories the players made up for this.

[Anderas]

That's a group thing again. Know your heroes.

Do you have RPG people who would get out of the game with their character?
Your group mitchie looks perfect for having someone dying sometimes. Your character generation system is a good incentive to make such a player group.

Sotiris did something similar. Each character was unique, so if someone died you couldn't replace that one, you had to choose a different one. That was nice for trying things, too. But it was not possible in his system to make your own hero.

[Count Mohawk]

3 - Last thought for my tired brain this morning - it is SUCH A SHAME that those colored dice are not more
readily available, even customizable (is that a word?).

I agree wholeheartedly - which is why I decided to make some "cheap Chinese knockoff" colored dice by taking ordinary, garden-variety 10-cents-per-each d6es and applying stickers to their faces. Presto-change-o, a whole bucket of colored dice!

Since I print these things on Avery sticker paper, I can make any distribution of faces I please. For example, you may notice one of the dice on the left has a "wild face" on it (skull, shield AND walrus all at once).

Here's a couple of uncut sheets of die faces I made this week, in preparation for some potential Questing on the weekend. Many of these distributions are unique to me; you won't find them on spielwarensaloon! (yet)

Anyway, if someone wants to try their hand at this sort of thing, I'm willing to share the Word document I used to make it.