Ye Olde Inn

Hi,

I have not played any of the expansions yet so forgive my ignorance. Do you "reset" your heroes between expansion? I'm not thinking body points or spells here, but equipment and gold. If they are not reset I assume there is a risk of the heroes being too powerful for the quests. Playing order of expansions would also skew the balance. And what about the solo quests?

No you're not meant to reset them. There's a big jump up in difficulty.

WizKid wrote:Hi,

I have not played any of the expansions yet so forgive my ignorance. Do you "reset" your heroes between expansion? I'm not thinking body points or spells here, but equipment and gold. If they are not reset I assume there is a risk of the heroes being too powerful for the quests. Playing order of expansions would also skew the balance. And what about the solo quests?

The Heroes can become "overpowered" after awhile. They do not reset, however. There are threads here in the forum on reducing Heroes gold and stregth, i.e. weapons.

j_dean80 wrote:

WizKid wrote:Hi,

I have not played any of the expansions yet so forgive my ignorance. Do you "reset" your heroes between expansion? I'm not thinking body points or spells here, but equipment and gold. If they are not reset I assume there is a risk of the heroes being too powerful for the quests. Playing order of expansions would also skew the balance. And what about the solo quests?

The Heroes can become "overpowered" after awhile. They do not reset, however. There are threads here in the forum on reducing Heroes gold and stregth, i.e. weapons.

How does a hero become overpowered?

Jafazo wrote:How does a hero become overpowered?

A Hero becomes overpowered by having too many potions and weapons. After playing through lots of Quests and collecting lots of treasures and artifacts, they can be too strong for a Quest. If they have a special artifact weapon for every circumstance...it takes a lot of the challenge and need for teamwork out of the game. The EWP needs to balance this somehow or occassionally kill off a Hero.

Introduce weapon damage... Introduce a carry capacity...

Some add more monsters or increase monsters BP, it does work but all this does is increase play time and dice rolling. Not more variance to the game.

Damage: Discard an equipped bought weapon when rolling Black Shields equal to its Attack or Defence.

I used to play it. "roll all black shields in combat, weapon is damaged" but that had obvious floors revealed in play testing. Rolling 3 black shields is rare, 4 even more so, 5 is practically impossible. A better idea was needed but still extremely simple and as easy to follow.

If a weapon is +1, it's simply 3, the base stat for the characters 2 plus the 1... For example, A shield is +1 Cd6 Defence, A Dwarf is 2Cd6 defence. Roll 3 black shield in defence and the item is damaged, useless. If the dwarf has a helmet (+1Cd6 defence) as well, he'd roll 4 Cd6 in defence, either item would be damaged on rolling 3 black shields.

In attack it gets better... A Broadsword with 3 attack dice is more likely to be damaged in more powerful attacks, from drinking a potion or spell, which makes perfect sense.

Here's the short version of my house rules https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BzUqo ... FhLaG9hS1U

WizKid wrote:Hi,

I have not played any of the expansions yet so forgive my ignorance. Do you "reset" your heroes between expansion? I'm not thinking body points or spells here, but equipment and gold. If they are not reset I assume there is a risk of the heroes being too powerful for the quests. Playing order of expansions would also skew the balance. And what about the solo quests?

Suggestions for expansion order of play can be found here. drathe has probably played the expansions as much as anyone. He suggested this years ago:

Quest Book , Keller's Keep, Return of the Witch Lord, Against the Ogre Horde, Wizards of Morcar, The Mage in the Mirror, The Frozen Horror, The Dark Company.

About the solo Quests, The Frozen Horror of the Barbarian Quest Pack and The Mage of the Mirror of the Elf Quest Pack both start with a series of three solo Quests. They are designed to be played with a starting Barbarian and Elf, respectively. They each could also be played with a Barbarian or Elf fully equipped from the earlier expansions. However, they aren't balanced well for that and the first Quest at least would provide little challenge for the solo Hero.

For HQR, we tested the solo Quests as a series for new Heroes, and as a series where the hero doesn't regain lost BPO/MP/Spells/etc. It ballences really well.

I follow what the rule books say and characters regain their lost BP/MP and spells between quests unless it says otherwise, but they retain any unspent gold, potions, equipment, etc. from before unless they died to lose them.

From what I've read on here and the little I've experienced, I think the EQP/BQP are way too hard as is, so letting the Heroes coast for awhile once they've saved up enough gold seems fine, unless they get bored.

I introduced my own upgrade system (based on # of quests completed), but also wherein the basic GS monsters (except wandering monsters) have a random chance to be upgraded when the entire party of heroes playing are at that level. I'll roll a single white die and if it's a black shield, that newly placed monster is elite. When the heroes get strong enough, the die I roll to determine the monster's level will be a blue one.

So random chance of "elite" monsters that roll black for attack and blue for defense (making orcs and up extremely dangerous, though having them roll normally when defending against magic).