Enhanced difficulty using Japanese damage rules

[Daedalus]

I like the way the Japanese rule does away with tracking Body Points for monsters, but as Pancho pointed out, it breaks when applied to higher BP monsters of the later expansions. To help fix this, reduce the NA monsters' BP totals to half. If you need to round up, you may even wish to reduce the monster's Defend Dice by one for smoother progression. Named monsters like the Frozen Horror and Chaos Sorerers can optionally keep their full BPs so they can cast more spells.

Since Polar Warbears, NA Ogres, and possibly named monsters are very hard to affect with a single attack, it's a good idea to allow Heroes to combine attacks as described in the OP and by Pancho. Unfortunately, Quests may be designed to isolate a Hero/Heroes, weakening or preventing this sometimes necessary cooperation.

I've got another method that doesn't rely on cooperative attacks but tracks fewer Body Points: For monsters with 2 or more BPs, halve Body Points, but assume one bonus success of their defense roll. (When rounding up, you may wish to reduce the monster's Defend Dice by one.) At Zargon's discretion, named monsters can keep their full Body Points.

The NA Chaos Warrior and Gargole work similarly to the Japanese rule at 2 BP each and one-skull hits won't damage them. Though the NA Fimir and Mummy are reduced to 1 BP, they also ignore one-skull hits, making them tougher than the Japanese game. The NA Ogre is lowered to just 5 BPs, but will still take a beating for a long while like in the vanilla game.

[iKarith]

Personally i'm a huge fan of letting monsters defend with the white shields (especially with the UK BPs, but also with the US ones). Sometimes the heroes get bogged down, but i think it works great. I didnt even know about the Japanese variant, i'm very tempted to give them a try.

I like the idea of monsters defending on white shields too as the players become more experienced. That's the "Monsters defend with blue dice" thing Kurgan does for elite monsters. I think HeroQuest is always going to be somewhat "easy" though because the maps work in such a way that heroes and monsters move around single-file in tight passageways most of the time and the EWP is just hoping to whittle away the heroes' resources.

If you really want the game to be even, you kinda need more RPG than board game, and you probably need the encounters to be UNbalanced in favor of the NPC/critters at least a little.

Example of a RP sort of encounter… There's four of you with 4, 6, 7, and 8 BP. There's six really tough looking critters in there, all with about 6BP each, give or take. They attack for 2-3 CD each and they can absorb 2-3 CD each (on white shields just like you do. The place where they are is fairly open, although there's cover for and from missile fire in the form of crates or something in the room. Not all six of the baddies are likely to be in the room when you go in, but … careful because if they're not, the ones who aren't there might show up behind you and kinda box you in.

They're basically your equals. And there's more of them, though possibly not all at once. A head-on fight might work, if you get the drop on them. March on in and start hacking them to bits! They won't know you're coming until you show up, so they may not have any welcome ready for you, other than the fact that they're the sorts of people and critters that know how to cause and contend with trouble. But it's even odds you'll have six of them coming at you at once. And if you don't, there's gonna be 3-4 of them in there with the rest showing up in ~ 3 turns, coming from any of 3 directions.

Do you fight them? You're as likely to die as they are. Do you try to sneak around them? Something clever with magic? Do you try to go in there and con them? Bribe them? Something else? Those aren't options in a board game. But they make an RPG more interesting because the frontal assault is designed to be risky on purpose. Perhaps it's even unfairly balanced against your players. Which works if they have the resources and a bit of cleverness.

HeroQuest is about the heroes being badasses who can march right in there and just slaughter things. It doesn't require as much cunning or creativity. See monster. Kill monster. Loot the treasure, next! It's supposed to get a little harder, to require more careful investment in equipment and a strategy for fighting things that could genuinely hurt your weaker heroes. But if it ever becomes unbalanced so that the heroes are totally in over their head by any fault but their own, they don't have any mechanic in the game to simply "play better".

[Pancho]

iKarith, i find that the Evil Wizard Card deck goes a long way to ironing out most of the problems you highlighted. It makes the game much more interesting for Morcar and really keeps the Heroes on their toes. Morcar gets one card on each of his turns in which there are no monsters on the game board, so the other players have to think about moving quicker than they usually would, opening doors they wouldn’t normally open, and planning for events they wouldn’t normally encounter.

[TVC-15]

Personally i'm a huge fan of letting monsters defend with the white shields (especially with the UK BPs, but also with the US ones). Sometimes the heroes get bogged down, but i think it works great. I didnt even know about the Japanese variant, i'm very tempted to give them a try.

I like the idea of monsters defending on white shields too as the players become more experienced. That's the "Monsters defend with blue dice" thing Kurgan does for elite monsters. I think HeroQuest is always going to be somewhat "easy" though because the maps work in such a way that heroes and monsters move around single-file in tight passageways most of the time and the EWP is just hoping to whittle away the heroes' resources.

If you really want the game to be even, you kinda need more RPG than board game, and you probably need the encounters to be UNbalanced in favor of the NPC/critters at least a little.

Example of a RP sort of encounter… There's four of you with 4, 6, 7, and 8 BP. There's six really tough looking critters in there, all with about 6BP each, give or take. They attack for 2-3 CD each and they can absorb 2-3 CD each (on white shields just like you do. The place where they are is fairly open, although there's cover for and from missile fire in the form of crates or something in the room. Not all six of the baddies are likely to be in the room when you go in, but … careful because if they're not, the ones who aren't there might show up behind you and kinda box you in.

They're basically your equals. And there's more of them, though possibly not all at once. A head-on fight might work, if you get the drop on them. March on in and start hacking them to bits! They won't know you're coming until you show up, so they may not have any welcome ready for you, other than the fact that they're the sorts of people and critters that know how to cause and contend with trouble. But it's even odds you'll have six of them coming at you at once. And if you don't, there's gonna be 3-4 of them in there with the rest showing up in ~ 3 turns, coming from any of 3 directions.

Do you fight them? You're as likely to die as they are. Do you try to sneak around them? Something clever with magic? Do you try to go in there and con them? Bribe them? Something else? Those aren't options in a board game. But they make an RPG more interesting because the frontal assault is designed to be risky on purpose. Perhaps it's even unfairly balanced against your players. Which works if they have the resources and a bit of cleverness.

HeroQuest is about the heroes being badasses who can march right in there and just slaughter things. It doesn't require as much cunning or creativity. See monster. Kill monster. Loot the treasure, next! It's supposed to get a little harder, to require more careful investment in equipment and a strategy for fighting things that could genuinely hurt your weaker heroes. But if it ever becomes unbalanced so that the heroes are totally in over their head by any fault but their own, they don't have any mechanic in the game to simply "play better".

I've not played all the expansions with the "monster white shield" with US rules, only about quarter of them. And that was a long time ago. I remember the base game was really fun, but it was alot harder in Kellars Keep. Situations with enemies in the numbers you described was a headache. But i think we had lifted in the rule from Advanced Hero Quest where players and monsters must stop when entering melee range with an enemy, that was a double edged sword for sure but it made it a bit easier to tie up monsters with a "tank" character. I remember that was the time Rock Skin went from a very good spell to an amazing spell in my eyes.

I'm in the progress of starting a new playthrough with the white shield rule, and i must confess that i'm afraid. Very afraid.

[iKarith]

iKarith, i find that the Evil Wizard Card deck goes a long way to ironing out most of the problems you highlighted. It makes the game much more interesting for Morcar and really keeps the Heroes on their toes. Morcar gets one card on each of his turns in which there are no monsters on the game board, so the other players have to think about moving quicker than they usually would, opening doors they wouldn’t normally open, and planning for events they wouldn’t normally encounter.

I've played with Kurgan using these … it does a lot for keeping players moving, that's for sure. Some of the quests are still just not as fun as others. Prince Magnus's Gold was obnoxious and probably will be no motter what rules mod you play with. It was designed to be one where the EWP can tempt the heroes to do something villainous.

It's also kind of funny that those chests are SOOOO heavy your players can't carry that much … already walking around with twice that on their person.

Tell ya what, Magnus, those chests are yours? Gold is fungible. We're gonna go down there, murderhobo the lemony goodness out of everything that moves, smash open the chests, take what we find out of them, and we will return every gold piece of the value found therein, plus a little extra to cover the replacement boxes which will be creating jobs to help ensure the stability of the imperial economy? You good? Cool, then tell the carpenter to start makin' some boxes because we'll be back in a few hours. In the meantime, we have some greenskins to paté.

The expansions, particularly the US-exclusives … probably don't need any help to make more challenging. At all.

[Count Mohawk]

I'm not terribly familiar with the Japanese Hero Quest rules, but I am intrigued by their "all at once" rules for damage. From previous readings I thought that rule was only for the final boss (the Chaos God or whatever he is), who I remember as needing to be hit for 2+ damage multiple times in a row (by a set of specific artifact weapons, no less!) to be put back into the ground.

I have a little experience with playing monsters this way, however - there are a handful of monsters in my first fan Quest Pack "Heralds of Chaos" with an ability I keyworded as "Hellbent", which does basically exactly this, although damage from spells and magic effects work normally to reduce the monsters' Body Points and make it easier to kill them. While it's not too difficult to deal 2 Body Points of damage in a single blow, especially for Heroes with Battle Axes and other similar attack options, going to 3 or higher is asking for trouble, which is why I do it only sparingly. According to my maths, the odds of a Battle Axe-wielding Hero oneshotting a Chaos Warrior with the standard 4 defense / 3 Body is about 17%, which means it would take about 6 tries on average to down one if it has JP defense. That's a lot! Generally the number one rule of Hero Quest survival is "if you let the monsters live too long, sooner or later they will kill you".

[Kurgan]

iKarith, i find that the Evil Wizard Card deck goes a long way to ironing out most of the problems you highlighted. It makes the game much more interesting for Morcar and really keeps the Heroes on their toes. Morcar gets one card on each of his turns in which there are no monsters on the game board, so the other players have to think about moving quicker than they usually would, opening doors they wouldn’t normally open, and planning for events they wouldn’t normally encounter.

I've played with Kurgan using these … it does a lot for keeping players moving, that's for sure. Some of the quests are still just not as fun as others. Prince Magnus's Gold was obnoxious and probably will be no motter what rules mod you play with. It was designed to be one where the EWP can tempt the heroes to do something villainous.

It's also kind of funny that those chests are SOOOO heavy your players can't carry that much … already walking around with twice that on their person.

Tell ya what, Magnus, those chests are yours? Gold is fungible. We're gonna go down there, murderhobo the lemony goodness out of everything that moves, smash open the chests, take what we find out of them, and we will return every gold piece of the value found therein, plus a little extra to cover the replacement boxes which will be creating jobs to help ensure the stability of the imperial economy? You good? Cool, then tell the carpenter to start makin' some boxes because we'll be back in a few hours. In the meantime, we have some greenskins to paté.

The expansions, particularly the US-exclusives … probably don't need any help to make more challenging. At all.

Prince Magnus is a real stickler for details... he doesn't want those locks tampered with and those chests have been in his family for generations, pardon the heavy construction!

When we were kids, the final part of that quest was a big victory lap, carrying the gold to the door, dreaming about all of the cool stuff we'd buy with the REWARD given for completing this task according to what our client/patron demanded. For impatient adults who just want to click the "win" button and get to the next adventure, it feels annoying, absolutely. So toss some threat cards at 'em or rig up some reinforcements to chase them to the door... (assuming they don't decide to stand and fight... forever).

I have played four of the Japanese quests, it was a fun way to test out my four new legacy of sorasil inspired heroes, but I haven't tried playing according to the actual rules of that format. It really eases you into the game. The mechanic of "have to do 2 damage at once or it doesn't count" is pretty cool, and it means if you've only got a 1 BP weapon, you better run!

[iKarith]

Having to do 2BP of damage at once sounds like even further nerfing of the wizard who basically is intended to have two spells that can ever do that, once only, per quest. But I assume Japan's rules are more creative than that.