Advancement - how to do it?

[Bareheaded Warrior]

That is a very interesting point around treasure searching.

Under NA rules you are correct, searching for treasure is restricted to rooms only, although once per room per hero, and I'm suggesting reducing that to once per room (don't worry there is a multitude of psychiatrists available to handle the trauma that may be caused by kids being beaten to a treasure search by a sibling)

Under EA rules things are a little more ambiguous but this discussion is covered fully under Search – The Binding Topic and I've just added a summary post on the end of that thread specifically around this point.

But either way my proposal is to restrict treasure search to once per room only and not passageways whatever the original rules may or may not state.

I also like the spell purchasing advancement path option, it has been mentioned on many occasions by many people at the inn over the years and I'm just going through the laborious process of trying to find and draw together all the existing materials before proceeding to develop this further, but whilst the details need to be worked out, I think the principle is a sound one.

No selling of unwanted stuff at all, magic or otherwise, it is an advancement system not a shopping centre, so your consumer rights ARE affected

Prices indicated were just a straw man presented to be challenged, I'm not convinced they are spot on either, at least not yet.

My (current) goal is to produce a working version of the SE with many, hopefully most, of the known issues resolved or at least mitigated, so that any new players that I or others introduce can have a version to play that has been polished into a better version as a result of being extensively played for 3 decades Polishing the Second Edition

[Bareheaded Warrior]

Once upon a time I came across the topic Monster slaying cost, extract below from OP and it got me thinking...

This tool gives you a relative value for the "cost" of monsters in HeroQuest that appears to be worked out via actual blunt force calculations rather than estimated (by which I mean some systems use something like 1AD is worth ½ point, 1 DD is worth 1/6 point to derive a value).

I wonder if anybody else has done anything like this...
So, I wanted a way to compare the strengths of monsters in Hero Quest. What I came up with was a number for each monster, which I call the monster's "slaying cost". This number reflects the average amount of damage a hero in Hero Quest would take in a fight before the monster is killed. The higher the number, the tougher the monster. Two monsters with different stats but with equal slaying costs, would be equally tough to kill.
In order to calculate this number, I needed the stats of an "average hero". Looking at the stats of the four heroes, it was easy to see that 2 dice in attack and 2 in defence were a good choice. To keep things simple, I calculated with only this "average hero" fighting the monster without extra equipment or spells.
Calculation was done by a computer program I made where you input attack and defend dice for hero and monster, as well as the amount of body points the monster has. Then the program simulates 10 million fights (some hero would get a tired arm ) and shows the average amount of damage the hero took before the monster was defeated.
For my choice of "average hero" above, here are some slaying costs I calculated:
Goblin 0.6
Orc 1.3
Fimir 1.4
Skeleton 0.7
Zombie 0.8
Mummy 1.7
Chaos Warrior 1.7
Gargoyle 2.4
Stone Chaos Warrior 1.9
Ulag the Orc Warlord 2.8
Grak 2.4
Skaven Warrior (WD134) 0.7
Rat Ogre (WD134) 1.4
Troll (WD134) 1.7
Ogre Chieftain (WD145) 16.2
Just remember that any magic abilities of special monsters are not counted, so a bit of adjustment might be recommended.
Another interesting use for the slaying cost of a monster would be to multiply the number by ten, and have that be the amount of experience a hero gains by killing that monster. Personally tho, I'm not sure I wanna complicate the game by adding XP.

It was this last paragraph that made me perk my ears up. If the relative "costs" of the monsters have been calculated correctly, and my theory that HeroQuest already has an in-built disguised advancement mechanism (kill monsters, get gold reward, spend gold on equipment = advancement) then you would expect there to be some correlation.

Rather than just “multiply by ten” I decided to actually calculate the ratio:

I had already calculated the total gold yield for the Gathering Storm / Game System Quest Book (SE), shared above at exactly 6833.2gc assuming every searchable area searched, every chest looted, every successful quest reward gained and so on.

So I figured if I added up the total number of each type of monster in the GS Quests, including the Wandering Monsters, and then multiplied each monster type by the values given by the OP, it would give me something useful, the ratio between a theoretical Monster with a "Slaying Cost" = 1 and the amount of gold coins that you should expect to receive on average for slaying it.

My calculations are shown on the link above but to cut a long story short the figure for the total "monster slaying cost" for the GS = 336.66
6833.2/336.66 = 20.297

So this tells me that the OP was correct in his idea, but his guess of x10 was out by a factor of 2, it appears that the original designers used a factor of 20 to work out the gold coin value of each monster.

EDIT: Interesting when I reread this post I noticed the OPs comment "Just remember that any magic abilities of special monsters are not counted, so a bit of adjustment might be recommended." Having read this thread [url]Monster "point values"[/url] there are suggestions in there for adding values to monsters for the spells that they hold so I decided to bump Balur (who in my experience is probably the toughest villain in the GS) from a poor 1.1 original rating to +5 making him a 6.1 overall. I then reran my calculations and discovered this bring the ratio to 20.06:1 very close approximation of 20:1, so close in fact that if I assume a ratio of 20:1 and multiply all the values given by the OP by 20 to give their estimated Gold Coin Value I get a total figure for GS of 6813.2 which is only 20gc short of matching the exact total for the GS. I don't think this is a coincidence.

So I would suggest the following values are the ones used by the designers or at least are damn close to those used by the original designers for the GS under SE.

• Goblin 12gc
• Orc 26gc
• Fimir 28gc
• Skeleton 14gc
• Zombie 16gc
• Mummy 34gc
• Felmarg's Guardian 48gc
• Chaos Warrior 34gc
• Chaos Warrior, Stone 38gc
• Gargoyle 48gc
• Orc Warlord (Grak) 48gc
• Orc Warlord (Ulag) 56gc
• Witch Lord 86gc
• Balur 102gc

[Bareheaded Warrior]

In addition to all the above I have spun off a different thread for the specific challenge of Wizard advancement here Simple advancement mechanism for Wizard

Also I would consider modifying some of the Quest Rewards, as follows.

Bastion of Chaos - Change the Quest Reward for Bastion of Chaos so that they receive 50gc for each Chaos Warrior killed only (200gc in total) rather than the existing reward which amounts to an excessive 410gc.

Other Quest in the Game System with disproportionately large rewards are 7 "The Stone Hunter" and 8 "The Fire Mage" where for some reason the Quest reward offered is per Hero which doesn't make sense, why would a reward for information/rescue or assassination be based on the size of the team that carries it out. The Empire might be willing to offer 150gc for Balur's destruction, but trying to claim 3000gc because you took a party of 20 heroes might be seen to be taking the piss (especially as the rule book states that taking less than 4 heroes increases the difficulty but increases the reward as less heroes to split it between!) I would restore these to a total Quest Reward of 100gc and 150gc respectively.

[burglekutt]

BWarrior , could you summarize your take on Advancement? This discussion is great but I don't have the patience to copy and paste each of yours guys comments individually, they're spread out to much in the convo!:)

So far I've got that "Gold" & allowing purchasabled spells is the easiest and possibly the best way to handle advancement and I think I agree with this. In the end GOLD will define Advancement is your take BW, am I right?

[Bareheaded Warrior]

The post here summarises how I think it works within the original game, if you are after a summary of what I think needs to be changed to improve it, then let me know, otherwise that would be a long post that isn't needed!