Two-page Dungeon Crawl

[cornixt]

I don't mind you discussing it here, but you'd get more interest in a separate thread.

After reading several threads on character progression, I started to consider how equal each of the character classes were. It was clear that the mage was really hamstrung in that he has so little to buy in comparison. He tops out in equipment well before everyone else. After adding a few enhancements for him, the same issue was with the cleric. As I looked further, I think it is because characters like the Warrior and Ranger have powerful expensive weapons available to them, which the other classes don't. This presents a misleading peak, especially since those weapons are so much more expensive for minor gains. The peaks certainly exist, but probably aren't as significant as they appear. I was thinking of the peak as being the point where a player would see that there is no more enhancement possible for their character and would want to start afresh. This could even be enforced more strongly by rules that add detriments based on the number of quests or value of possessions. But maybe it shouldn't be done that way. Someone has added a "rust" rule that destroys equipment, so that players may lose their best equipment and have to continue questing in order to reach the peak again. It would have to be simple enough to do without having to keep track of things during a quest. Maybe roll a D6 for each item after a quest and a 6 means it is destroyed. A maintenance/insurance fee could be used to reroll or ignore failures for specified equipment. This would mean a rolling income is required to at least stay in the same condition. Hmm..more thinking to do.

[gootchute]

Someone has added a "rust" rule that destroys equipment, so that players may lose their best equipment and have to continue questing in order to reach the peak again. It would have to be simple enough to do without having to keep track of things during a quest. Maybe roll a D6 for each item after a quest and a 6 means it is destroyed. A maintenance/insurance fee could be used to reroll or ignore failures for specified equipment. This would mean a rolling income is required to at least stay in the same condition. Hmm..more thinking to do.

Tracking individual equipment wear (whether before or after quests) and paying costs of living is what I consider beyond the scope HeroQuest, though I can't fault someone for wanting more complexity! Advanced Heroquest has costs of living which abstractly take into account weapon repair, room and board, food, travel ect...

As for taking items away from heroes in HeroQuest to necessitate the climb, I'd lean more towards the Rust Spell, thieving monsters, acid traps melting armor, and other more actionable tactics. Nobody wants to loose their longsword because they couldn't pay their taxes!

Imagine a dungeon room with a sudden cave in trapping a helpless victim. They will suffocate in 3 turns unless the rocks are lifted, but the only thing the heroes have to create leverage on the boulders are their weapons, which will naturally be rendered useless in the process. What a juicy moral dilemma!

[cornixt]

Someone has added a "rust" rule that destroys equipment, so that players may lose their best equipment and have to continue questing in order to reach the peak again. It would have to be simple enough to do without having to keep track of things during a quest. Maybe roll a D6 for each item after a quest and a 6 means it is destroyed. A maintenance/insurance fee could be used to reroll or ignore failures for specified equipment. This would mean a rolling income is required to at least stay in the same condition. Hmm..more thinking to do.

Tracking individual equipment wear (whether before or after quests) and paying costs of living is what I consider beyond the scope HeroQuest, though I can't fault someone for wanting more complexity! Advanced Heroquest has costs of living which abstractly take into account weapon repair, room and board, food, travel ect...

Those rules would only be in the optional Extra Rules section, not the the basic two-page rules. You are right that it's beyond the scope of the project. It's not all that complicated anyway, just a single diceroll for each piece of equipment after the game. I'm trying to avoid it occurring during a game, which would likely add an extra level of confusion in the middle of a fight. I haven't pinned it down yet, still really just an idea.

As for taking items away from heroes in HeroQuest to necessitate the climb, I'd lean more towards the Rust Spell, thieving monsters, acid traps melting armor, and other more actionable tactics. Nobody wants to loose their longsword because they couldn't pay their taxes!

Imagine a dungeon room with a sudden cave in trapping a helpless victim. They will suffocate in 3 turns unless the rocks are lifted, but the only thing the heroes have to create leverage on the boulders are their weapons, which will naturally be rendered useless in the process. What a juicy moral dilemma!

The rust spell feels like a suckerpunch to the face. Comes out of nowhere, nothing you can do about it. It's a big permanent effect that screws you over. I think the players should at least have the option of taking their damaged weapon to the smith to be maintained and avoid the chance that it snaps in half before the next quest. Then the result is on them.

As I see it, there's three choices once a character tops out:
1. Continue questing with no use for future gains
2. Forced retirement/disabling (quests so hard that they die, refusing to allow them in the game, quest events like you suggested, etc)
3. Penalty system
(4. More character advancement - the character hasn't really topped out, so it isn't a real option)

1 can get boring, even though it is the player's own fault.
2 can piss people off. All down to the GM.
3 is what I was thinking, so the player has to continually strive. I don't like the hiring of mercenaries, which some people use.
4 Is more of a sidestep of the issue. Might work in D&D, but a lot more work in HQ. How many dice do you have to roll? How many new items and monsters do you have to make up?

Not sure how much playtesting I'd have to do to even get the players up to the stage where I would try this out. Maybe I'll just add some commentary on this kind of situation and let the GM work it out.

[cornixt]

This is probably the last upload for the rules in their current form. I'm going to change it from now on to have the magic rules more in line with combat (i.e. dice rolls), and the equipment rules will be dumped in favour of skills. Equipment is now far simpler (there's so little of it now), magic is more complicated but consistent with combat. Explanation follows.

I was never truly happy with the equipment rules, neither the original nor my improvements - I tried to make them as generic as possible to allow for you to represent any model, but that was really just pushing people to pick weapons that matched the model. I definitely think that my equipment rule improvements are worthwhile if you aren't concerned about such things though. In the new rules, weapons don't matter - fighting skills are the only combat upgrades. The model can be armed with anything and still be suitable for everything from a novice to an experienced hero. This also simplifies the equipment rules, since there is never any conflict between what is in each hand and how to swap them out. It also means that I can use a single consistent upgrade path for all types of character (albeit shorter for some), without worrying about whether a cleric can use sharp things or if a wizard can use a sword. Certain skills are still restricted to certain classes though.

As for magic, I'm adapting my system that is here: viewtopic.php?f=38&t=2800
Since this game is not tied to HQ, I can do what I like with it rather than fitting it all into an existing system. This allows me to really shake things up if needed.

Funnily enough, a mere month after posting this for the first time, a small gaming company published a game called "2 Hour Dungeon Crawl". Given how most of their games begin with "2 Hour" I can put it down to a funny coincidence. I'd settled on the more generic "Two Page Easy Questing" until recently. The "quest" part just doesn't sound right. I'm thinking more along the lines of "Miniature Missions" right now.

[cornixt]

Done lots of tiny updates over a long time. Now all skills work the same, even trap disarm and magic. No weapons or armour to buy, only skills, so your model can accurately depict the character without anyone wondering where their shield/helmet/axe are.

Could easily squeeze it down to one page, but the two-page format works better.

[cornixt]

Some highlights of the game:
Compatible with most basic HQ quests with few changes/explanations needed.
Only two pages of main rules, two pages of fantasy-specific tables.
No equipment bought or sold, uses skill levels instead. Every adventurer miniature you use is going to still fit after upgrades.
The skill table is progressive, so each successive skill is more expensive than the one before. The levels of skill are restricted depending on class.
All skills work the same way - roll a number of D6 equal to the skill level and count successes (usually 4+). This includes magic and disarming traps.
All spells are reusable, and magic users get better at casting if they buy higher level skills.

Still under consideration:
This was based on HQ, so I kept as much as possible to be very similar. Currently, defense rolls are 5+ (the only roll that isn't 4+) but I might make all rolls as 4+. I would have to adjust health points and defense scores for monsters if that goes ahead. I've already adjusted them a bit to allow for the fact that they use 5+ instead of the 1/6 chance of black shields. The problem with the easier defense is that combat could go on a bit too long and it gets further away from compatibility.

What's it all for?
This whole thing really caused me to question the aim of HQ. Is it a test of skill, or mostly a luckfest? There is a little strategy involved, but not much. It is really a narrative that gives you the option to make decisions that may affect how it plays out. With that in mind, a series of quests should really accompany the rules. I've made a couple of sample quests already, but with no real narrative yet.

Here's a link to it, since I can't seem to use any functions other than quick reply to post on this forum, even with other browsers.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B09VxL ... sp=sharing

[Daedalus]

cornixt, your work has been developing nicely. I have a few more points:

1) About turn order under How to Run a Quest on p. 1:

"Players take turns to perform actions...."

Though the later GM's turn is detailed well, the preceding turn description above covering everything else is a bit too sparse, in my opinion. I'd say expand this with info about who goes first, second, etc. Do players dice for initiative, or is turn order set by player seating around the table? Does the GM always go last?

2)

...
As for magic, I'm adapting my system that is here: http://forum.yeoldeinn.icom/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=2800
Since this game is not tied to HQ, I can do what I like with it rather than fitting it all into an existing system. This allows me to really shake things up if needed....

I may have found a glitch between developing sections. On page 1 under Magic Rules:

"...Spells that last until the end of the target's next turn will only last until the end of the magic user's current turn if they use it on themselves."

A later spell entry on page 4 offers an applicable duration:

"Flaming Sword For each success, the target rolls one extra die when attacking in their next turn."

While these two entries aren't necessarily incompatible, the first, p. 1 entry precludes the magic user from benefiting from the spell as he can't attack in his current turn after casting the spell.

I don't see the need to retain the p. 1 rule restricting next-turn spell duration for a magic user. Your spell descriptions already cover durations well.

On a separate note concerning spells, I found a minor error in the Shift Stone spell. I' d change "...For each success, caster may move through..." > ...For each success, the caster may move through...

3) Is there an unnecessary section left in during development on p. 6?

Page 5, titled Two-Page Extra Rules and Notes--DRAFT ONLY! finishes with a complete section headed Things that aren't rules. However, the top of the next page begins with the title Fantasy Extra Rules and Notes, under which is found an undeveloped section subtitled Things That Aren't Rules. It briefly begins incongruently, "Yes, we begin the rules section with more things that aren't rules, but will hopefully help you to understand more about the rules and game in general." It finishes, "Might have something to put here."

Seeing how these sections are still under draft status, I'd say you need to cut out the material at the top of p. 6. It appears to be erroneously left over from an earlier stage of writing.

[cornixt]

Thanks for your input. I'll reconsider the wordings for those areas. As for the last section, there used to be several things there, but they were slowly peeled off into other sections or removed when they became irrelevant. I kept it there in case I ever needed to add something that fit, which may happen one day.

[cornixt]

It looks like I never showed off the final version of this (from 2015), so here it is. This is the final version before I went off on a different tangent making it simpler (and less flavourful) but also not so HQ. I'm not sure how relevant it is to this site, but it's certainly recognisably descended from HQ.

The first two pages are basically HQ rules with a few minor changes. I don't know how understandable they would be to someone who hasn't played HQ, I worry that I condensed everything too much. I made it all D6-based because getting hold of HQ dice is so difficult.

The next two pages is a more generic fantasy setting for everything, the idea being that you could switch out only these two pages to make a completely different setting - sci-fi, rainbow ponies, wild west, etc. I made the characters more generic and added a cleric in the gap between the wizard and elf. I also cleared up the equipment to make two-handed weapons cheaper overall than the more flexible dual-wield weapons. Spells got worked over so you never completely run out.

The next pages are extra optional rules. I never actually tested any of those.

[Bareheaded Warrior]

Generic rules and mechanisms that are separate from the setting, D6 based - sounds like you are re-inventing GURPS!