by Kurgan » Wednesday September 6th, 2023 11:59am
Don't get me wrong when I am discussing here the rules as written vs. how people may choose to play, but there are errors in the originals, and some of that betrays some interesting changes in the process of the development of the game. Anyway, without getting too ranty on it...
The NA rules says to be ON the trap square (and you don't trigger it, unless you fail your disarm roll) so I take it the same way with any furniture trap.
So I put the hero on top of the furniture tile (possible to do in the classic set with the Dwarf figure balanced on top of the treasure chest! not an achievable feat in the new one unless you just hold him there with your hand or grab some sticky tack, lol).
The only controversy I see is whether you have to roll for movement and expend actual squares to get to the trap square. This would theoretically allow the hero to land on ANOTHER trap square on the way to the one he was trying to disarm (which requires a sudden memory lapse since the same Trap search would have revealed those already unless they were the undetectable "Wandering Monster Traps" which are never found in rooms and only one time do you ever encounter a chest in a corridor that is actually meant to be treated as a room, so there!). It also presents the absurd situation (in expansions) where there are two trap squares and he can dodge one of them to get to the one that is further out (then again using your imagination you can imagine he auto-jumps one trap to disarm the other).
The original way I played it, which a lot of people online seem to disagree with me on, is that as long as the Trap is in the same corridor or room as the would-be disarming hero, you just warp/teleport on top of that square from wherever you are and then roll you die. Others insist you should roll movement, and walk up to be adjacent to the square that the furniture trap is.
Then again a lot of people insist you should have to walk adjacent to a treasure chest to search it (or to open it, or to get what's inside) expending actual movement squares to get there (and risk falling into trap squares on the way which can only occur in expansions, last I checked, other than the clear error in Lair of the Orc Warlord NA/remake edition where a Pit Trap is next to an unmarked treasure chest) and maybe that goes hand in hand with their "more roleplay" adaptation of the game mechanic?
I can agree with those that say perhaps in the "original version(s)" (prior to release in 1989 in the UK) of HeroQuest, you had to walk adjacent to Treasure Chests to open them "like doors" and in that context, putting trap tiles adjacent to Treasure Chests would have made a certain amount of sense. We never see this mechanic used in the original "game system" (before it was called a "game system" again in 1989, before the 1990 NA edition). You could also search corridors for treasure (hence the boot tile, which appears on the Treasure deck, this was changed in 2nd edition of 1990 in the EU).
The idea of putting trap tiles in front of Treasure chests (instead of the proper way which is to make it a furniture trap, that is the trap is ON the furniture and is triggered by searching for treasure before FIRST searching for and disarming the trap that is on it) gets revived in some of the expansions. Kellar's Keep contains at least one (possible two, I forget) instances of trap tiles being placed next to Treasure Chests, again, forgetting the way the rules had developed. Infamously the 1990 NA edition of Lair of the Orc Warlord (quest 4), places a pit trap next to an unmarked Treasure Chest (this was a clear error, which you can see by comparing the NA version to the EU editions both 1st and second... and yes, the Remake HeroQuest repeats the NA error as it was a straight reprint of that version, warts and all, minus the word substitutions to remove GWS IP).
The Draft Notes for BQP/EQP are even more revealing on this topic, because they show that the designers in 1992 (not the same team who put together the previous quest books of course, but still working at Milton Bradley/Hasbro in the US) understood that the original mechanic prevented them doing funny things like they wanted to do, like tricking heroes into walking up to Chests and falling into traps. They were considering changing the rules, so that you HAD to walk up to individual pieces of furniture to search them individually. This mechanic was to have special importance in the first Elf quest (and you can see traces of it left in the final notes of the released version which say that the chest is empty but the tomb contains the quest goal, spoilers, sorry). Originally of course each room could only be searched ONCE by each hero, but the new mechanic revision was probably supposed to allow a single search for the entire room (probably drawing a card) and then an individual search of each piece of furniture, requiring the hero to be adjacent (which either drew nothing or what the note said). I actually got to play a quest this way at GenCon, and while interesting, it greatly slowed down the quest, because so many rooms have multiple pieces of furniture in them where this could have been implemented. In reality the rule mechanic was abandoned and like many other things left on the cutting room floor due to lack time/budget and manpower, was never fully implemented. Only a few quests would have actually benefited from it (solo quests in particular).
So with that in mind I still say that trap tiles next to a piece of furniture IS an error in the original(s). It's a designer thinking in his or her head that the rules are going to treat Treasure chests like doors, that have to be approached to be opened. A hero is going to search for traps, that doesn't require hopping onto each square to search it individually. They are going to detect the trap and just go around it (if they needed to at all) or in the case of one of the Frozen Horror solo quests which absurdly surrounds a chest with spear traps, which actually makes sense IF they had implemented their proposed rule alteration. Then the hero is going to disarm the trap they wish and that's all. Actually they can just search for treasure, without ever even approaching the chest. HeroQuest is a game that wasn't just created by one man, but passed through many hands, and was a collaboration. Research shows this process took many different turns and later packs re-examined these original ideas and didn't always clean up after itself prior to release.
At one time in my youth I tried playing this way, because walking up to a chest feels like a very "role play" thing to do, acting out what you're doing, much like setting a piece horizontal when it gets killed, balancing a piece on top of a piece of furniture or balancing a chest on top of a figure that is "carrying" it. (all fun things to do, especially as a kid playing the classic set which allowed such things much easier than the new plastics). We figured searching just tells you what's in it, but you have to walk up to actually "pick it up" (which the rules clearly say does not expend an "action"). It simply took longer and was more anticlimactic, and it also allowed someone to find the treasure and then another hero to "steal" it (not so much a problem for us since usually we didn't have 5 players and so controlled multiple heroes almost every time, even 4 to a person). I can imagine this sort of thing being part of Stephen Baker's original "competitive" idea of HeroQuest (he admitted in interviews that he imagined little boys trying to outsmart each other on the board then slowly realizing they had to work together to actually win... before the NA edition basically structured the game to direct this cooperation and make it much more explicit).
Zargon can do what he wants at his own table, so to me, this is much like many other popular "tweaks" and homebrew, custom, houserule, mod changes that people like to talk about or try out, that in my own experience, doesn't really enhance the game so much, but each to their own if you want to put traps next to chests and require walking up to it to search it and/or to get what's inside. Much like nerfing the crossbow in so many ways, or not allowing shopping between quests (due to being "underground" or whatever), people want it to increase the challenge and enhance the realism. To me it just makes the game take longer with very little improvement in other areas, but again, what's fun to one person is boring and tedious to another. Do what you like!
Last edited by
Kurgan on Thursday September 7th, 2023 1:03pm, edited 6 times in total.