Playing as the Bad Guys

[Shadzar]

how would you math it?

EU version all monsters have 1 BP.. NA they differ.

Reverse Dungeon from AD&D might give help in how to construct the idea for the players playing the monsters and GM invading.

It was basically one player playing against 4~6 GMs, and the monsters were ran by committee. I recall when done each player just decided to control 1 room each and the "GM" that was playing the "adventurers" played as normal It could work for HQ. let the "players" design the quest, and the "GM" just play all the heroes.

[Davane]

So using the HQ board for two team CTF (and some random mooks wandering around), how would you do it? I was thinking maybe the entire board is used, and the rooms have items that respawn, maybe on a timer or something... number of turns? So you might find something useful, like a piece of equipment or a Spell scroll or potion?

I don't know much about the blood bowl rules, but would it work better with two flags or one? The default board has that central room... or maybe the room would change every capture, to a random location?

Pretty much. Blood Bowl works a lot like American Football or Rugby, so it works by trying to get some objective into a team's goal zone. Of course, many teams in BB simply go for beating up their opponents and winning by default. SH actually features quite a few missions which are Take and Hold objectives, so might be more adaptable to classic CTF scenarios.

HQ already has a great means of finding useful objects - searching for Treasure. If you limit searching for treasure to once per turn, per room, then teams have a reason to explore the entire board. You can adapt the Treasure Deck to include more goodies, or maybe make a combined Treasure/EW Deck, and force anyone NOT in a room with an opponent to have to draw a card. Alternatively, draw and preplace some cards/tokens, and have them be revealed whenever the first person gets to the the room.

The key things would be designing the map layout for the arena, and choosing the objectives for the actual game. For maps, you may want to choose either a "Meat Grinder" or a "Multiple Paths" style arena, pretty much as you would if designing a quest. A "Meat Grinder" has only one path between the teams, so they are determined to meet each other, and duke it out, whereas "multiple path" maps have multiple routes between teams, enabling a more tactical style of play. Finally, you could simply use the HQ board as an open map (ignoring all walls) and use tokens to determine where people can look for items (if desired). The objectives can be a fight to the death, score as many points/gold as possible, or play for a certain amount of turns.

I don't know so much in terms of "mathing in out" for teams, but you can consider that there are already four basic teams in HQ: Heroes, Orcs, Undead, and Chaos. I'd definitely use the NA versions as the base for the Monsters, as varying BPs means varying degrees of survivability.

The Heroes are your "All-Stars" - they are the fewest in number, but have unique abilities and powerful stats. They should most definitely be "the best" individual players in the game, and their versatility and power is key to their success.

Chaos are your "Tanks" - mostly highly defensive Chaos Warriors, with the Chaos Sorcerer for magical support, and the Gargoyle as a hard hitter. This is the team that should given even the Heroes pause to go toe-to-toe with, but because the majority of their Team are defensive, their key weaknesses are getting around the Tanks and taking out the Chaos Sorcerer and/or the Gargoyle. You can probably get away with one or two CWs per Hero (depending upon the BPs and Def of the CWs), along with one Chaos Sorcerer and one Gargoyle.

Orcs are your "Blitzers" - they consist of Orcs, Goblins, and Fimir. As a team, they are fairly fast, but their main advantage should be numbers. Goblins should be fast and weak, used as cannon-fodder, speed bumps, bait, or as break aways for scoring the win. Orcs should be your main line, though I'd recommend giving them at least 2 BP so they don't necessarily crumple as soon as they are attacked, like Goblins. The Fimir are used to give a bit of weight to your main line or to add that bit of punch for an attacking game. I'd recommend at least two Fimir per Hero, with 1 Fimir = 2 Orcs = 4 Goblins as a rough guide.

The Undead are your "Drivers" - they consist of Skeletons, Zombies, and Mummies. As a team, they should be slow, but relentless. You can use a similar team structure to the Orcs (1 Mummy = 2 Zombies = 4 Skeletons), but I'd give them all +1 BP, so they have some staying power for those slow drives across the arena.

These are some "off the cuff" ideas that I would use to serve as a basic for such games. You can refine them with testing, testing, and more testing...

[Kurgan]

I'd love to see some of those ideas mocked up. My main request would be for a system that can be used with the game assets as is, apart from a rule card or two I suppose.

I guess what I was thinking about was less some version of football and more like a first person shooter... except the players are miniatures in a dungeon crawler environment. Many possibilities exist!

[Davane]

I'd love to see some of those ideas mocked up. My main request would be for a system that can be used with the game assets as is, apart from a rule card or two I suppose.

I guess what I was thinking about was less some version of football and more like a first person shooter... except the players are miniatures in a dungeon crawler environment. Many possibilities exist!

I get you. Space Hulk uses the two player format with lopsided teams approach - in that you have the Space Marine player controlling one or two squads of Space Marines, that are powerful and tough, but limited in number; playing against the Genestealer player who controls a numerous horde of weak critters trying to overwhelm and stop the Space Marines.

On the other hand, there's also a number of gladiator-style games which play more like Battle Royale modes, such as PUBG or Fortnite.

Then you have numerous skirmish games like Mordheim and Necromunda, which are like mini wargames. For some of the more brutal games of Blood Bowl, they would also fall under this category. After all, Blood Bowl might have some of the trappings of American Football, but when the ball has spikes and can be used as a deadly weapon, it's little more than an excuse to pit two teams against each other in a bit of a ruck.

Note none of these formats are necessarily unique to GW, but I find them useful as go-to examples because of the sheer range of the GW catalogue.

It really all depends upon what you are aiming to achieve with the game and designing accordingly.

Sounds to me like what you want is a reason for two or more teams to fight in a dungeon. Forget trying to score goals with a football, you could go with either a fight to the death, or trying to gain as much gold as possible within a time limit.

For the latter, I'd recommend incorporating the AHQ rule that a character can only carry as maximum amount of gold (say 50 or 100 gc), and that gold only counts when it is at that team's "stockpile" - i.e. an area by the team's entry point that works like a goal zone. Teams go in, grab gold, and get out. However, teams can fight each other for gold, and could even launch raids on each other's stockpiles to "steal gold." You can get gold by searching dungeon rooms (searching for treasure), by killing critters (AKA Bounty), or stealing it from each other (use tokens for gold, such as the fallen rock counters, to mark where players drop gold, either voluntarily or because the team member is downed. You might even want to use the rules from Prince Magnus' Gold where carrying gold halves your movement.

The UK version of HQ covered PvP combat, which is identical to PvE combat, so really, any game of HQ where you abandon the Heroes vs. Evil Wizard set up works fine. However, without an EW, you either need a random generation system for dungeon exploration, or a revealed dungeon. The EW essentially becomes a neutral referee if you retain them. The UK version of The Maze works relatively well as an arena, although you might want to swap a few things around since the quest is done to death, and correct some of the imbalances - for example, there's only a single route for the Hero in the Lower Left to get to the centre exit, and is largely isolated from the other heroes for most of the dungeon...