Ye Olde Inn

I'm currently playing a game of the (re-release) HeroQuest as Zargon* with my young son and wife. I've added a few custom cards, have some 3D printed board elements (walls, secret doors) and am playing with various house rules that I've designed to make the game more fun and 'balanced'.

I give the heroes a hard time but I'm also actively trying not to kill them as I know my son would be pretty sad if his Barbarian or Dwarf got killed off for good.

But I've now got two problems:
1. We've almost finished the core book and despite me adding a rule to moderate the amount of treasure the heroes find (each room can only be searched for treasure once), the heroes at this point have pretty much all the armour and equipment they're ever going to want. In other words: there's nothing left for the heroes to buy except (boring) potions. That means that if we move onto the expansion content, there won't be any real sense of progression anymore.
2. I've got a bunch of cool new expansion heroes that might be fun to try, but since I never kill off the heroes they're not likely to see any play.

Do you guys have any ideas of how to handle this?
Do you force heroes or even a whole party to retire when they max themselves out? What excuse do you use for this?
Do you depower existing heroes somehow?
Do you just let the full-powered heroes run amok and stomp all monsters all the time? (seems boring?)
Just add more monsters to the missions to make up for how powerful the heroes are now? (also seems boring?)
Something else?

I was thinking of contriving reasons for one or two of the heroes having to return to their homelands to take care of personal business (taking their equipment with them) but then any newcomer heroes would be weak in comparison to the remaining old guard and thus maybe not as much fun to play. I'm feeling a bit stuck here, so would like to hear your ideas and/or what you've done with your groups!

*Wish they'd gone with 'Morcar' but oh well...

Yes, character progression comes to a relatively early finish in HQ, after 10-20 quests or so, as you said, beyond which the heroes are fully equipped except for novel artifacts. This is a known issue but there are even several solutions contained in the original material, e.g, the rust spell and quests that rob heroes of their gold. But these things need to be used with caution in order not to ruin the fun.

Also, if you play a well designed series of adventures, players can have a lot of fun just by going through the adventure and being part of the cool story without much character progression. Back in the 90s, we played the base game, Kellar’s Keep, Witchlord, and Ogre Hordes, ... expansions as written by the rules and had a lot of fun. If you play bad quest series, though, then the fun will be gone quickly anyway, of course.

Now, if you still want to get more out of your HQ game and are not afraid of using alternative rules, check out this thread:

https://forum.yeoldeinn.com/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=6622 ,

where you’ll find my own reworked HQ rules which I see as a more modern way of playing HQ. That set of rules, called Tactical Heroquest (THQ), is designed to solve a number of issues of HQ, including the poor character progression system. THQ heroes progess a bit more slowly when buying equipment and they may also increase their main attributes continuously. There are also regular ways (combat against fimirs and mummies) threatening with moderate setbacks in character development by destroying weapons and reducing attribute points. However, major hero improvements like acquired artifacts and a special legendary hero skill (gained later in the game) cannot be taken away, so my expectation is that the THQ rule system can maintain a decent progression of characters for about 50-80 quests or so, while also keeping the game balanced in all aspects. The retirement of heroes is anticipated to occur after ca. 80-100 quests played. (I am not yet that far.)

Finally, a small word of caution: Although THQ is not more complex than original HQ, it is not for everyone. It’s certainly not for casual players and really only for people who are open to more substantial rule changes. Some things are even simpler than in the original HQ, but the action happening on the game board is a different one. You won't guess what can happen there by only reading the rules. Try it out if you are interested, the mechanics are pretty coherent and are also playtested. There is also other good stuff included and I am still in the process of extending this further without overloading it with too much extras.

You could add some equipment cards from other expansions to increase spending, of course you would need to own those expansions as well.
The Reagent Kit, Smoke Bombs and Caltrops from Rise of the Dread Moon, for example, could be implemented into earlier quest packs without breaking the game. It also means you'd need to add in the treasure cards from those quest packs as well.
Otherwise you may just need to stick with the boring potions. Or work out a way for heroes to lose equipment.

Advanced skeletons (attack diagonally) and advanced goblins (move attack move) always help with this. Also, adding enemies to quests and more importantly adding WAYS for the enemies to actually reach the heroes is key. Alot of enemies do very little if they all get trapped behind one door.

So get creative with it. Zombies don't reveal themselves until after the heroes enter a room (crawling up from their grave). Make press plates that the heroes have to stand on in order to reveal a door (and reveals enemies as a bonus), or have the witch lord or some other baddie pop in to add another door to the room just for fun. This way at least you can get two heroes involved if they want to block doors.

I had the same problem and it really helped me be creative to figure out ways to challenge them. I found that alot of cool things like rolling boulder trap is only used once. So you can use those to add some danger to other quests. Trap doors also. Just remebe to throw in extra goodies here and there to keep them entertained and they should still find it fun.

Advanced skeletons and goblins and orc, goblin or skeleton archers made the just stand behind the door tactic harder and sometimes heroes will want to enter the room and try to attack as many enemies as posible.

Vorimir wrote:Advanced skeletons and goblins and orc, goblin or skeleton archers made the just stand behind the door tactic harder and sometimes heroes will want to enter the room and try to attack as many enemies as posible.

And I quote, nowadays I always play with these monsters upgrade

Add the japanese rule to level up. Between quests you can pay 500 gold coins and roll 4 combat dices.
Wizard and elf need 3 White shields and Barbarian and dwarf 2. If they get it they get +1 Body Point.

I made a mistake, you need two white shields to gat extra body points but dwarf and barbarian roll 4 dices and wizard and elf one 3.

If a character has spells it will roll as wizard (bars, druid, warlock...), if it doesnt as barbarian (knight, rogue, berserker, explorer...).

Our house rules:

When the majority of the heroes on the board are Champions (have completed 5+ quests)...
Whenever I place a Game system monster onto the board I roll a combat die for each... if it lands on a black shield (rare) it will promote that monster to an "elite."
I don't do this for wandering monsters or summoned monsters or for Gargoyles. Elite Monsters roll black dice to attack (greater chance of skull), and blue dice for defense (double chance of black shield... equivalent to rolling defense like heroes).

If the majority of the heroes on the board are "Knights" (completed 10+ quests)...
I roll a blue die to determine if they are elites (double the chance of being revealed as an elite).

Since we stream on twitch, members of the chat are also able to use their "gold coins" (channel points) promote monsters to elite (other times I've made a ranged version of a monster, or simply given them an extra defend/attack die). Gargoyles or any other monster can be upgraded to elites. If a monster is already an elite, I give them a second upgrade into a translucent version (if available) with a glowing LED, and I give them some type of magic ability (like having fire of wrath, ball of flame, channel dread, ability to teleport past heroes in a corridor, pass through walls like a specter or gain the "ethereal" ability of a specter meaning you have to roll black shields to score hits against them).

I've also transformed a group of specters into a Dread wraith.

This kind of topic will garner a lot of good ideas. If you use the Search window, you'll find even more. Try typing in advancement and progression. Scan the topic titles of the many pages that present to find even more Inn treasures.

Soul Reaver wrote:
But I've now got two problems:
1. . . . the heroes at this point have pretty much all the armour and equipment they're ever going to want. . . .
2. I've got a bunch of cool new expansion heroes that might be fun to try, but since I never kill off the heroes they're not likely to see any play.

Do you guys have any ideas of how to handle this? . . .

Do you depower existing heroes somehow?

I see a lot of good power up ideas have been posted, but not a depower suggestion. For that, you can check out this weapon damage post I worked up.

I'm not sure if this is what you want since it doesn't address your second problem. For that, maybe you could start up a second group of Heroes to play independently of your Heroes. Take turns playing each group through seperate expansions. Between what Avalon Hill has put out and the homebrew Quests and expansions available here at the Inn, you have more than enough to run seperate groups. The Admiral has been successfully doing that with his brother for years.