Midwest Zoom (Oct 16th '21 ???)

[iKarith]

With slightly different arrangements to how dice are handled for combat, I think I'd have everyone roll white shields to defend. I imagine that was done at some point in the design and they concluded it made combat take too long and made the monsters do too much damage while the players were hacking away at them with the current numbers/dice. Especially for fresh heroes who aren't part of a campaign. With the existing dice and the tendency to just throw hordes at the four heroes, it probably would have that effect.

[Kurgan]

"Mentor reports that Zargon's forces have recently begun drinking Chaotic Defense potions as part of their standard issue rations... "

That's going to double the durability of the monsters, effectively. I'm still inclined to only use the blue dice in special circumstances, but we'll see!

[iKarith]

"Mentor reports that Zargon's forces have recently begun drinking Chaotic Defense potions as part of their standard issue rations... "

That's going to double the durability of the monsters, effectively. I'm still inclined to only use the blue dice in special circumstances, but we'll see!

That'd be my sense without some pretty heavy refactoring of other things like the numbers of attack and defense dice. It's in my head, but I haven't yet done the work to sort out the probability adjustments.

[Kurgan]

As we play through (and hopefully get to the various official expansions) you'll see that the way the difficulty was increased by the original map creators was to add many more traps, many more monsters, and increase the number of higher level monsters. Eventually you'll start to see wandering monsters bring multiples, rather than single monsters. You'll see many more instances of traps appearing behind closed doors and even traps that you can't detect by searching. There will be monsters who can open doors, and of course the bosses will get multiple chaos spells. Sometimes gear will be stolen (or even destroyed!). I think you balked a few times at the "immune to fire spells" monsters and the "blocks all skulls with one black shield" monsters (hypothetically, since these only appear, to my knowledge, in the Dark Company, where there are a lot of them!).

Well, get ready, because there are bad guys who can ONLY be harmed by certain artifacts or spells (and not just the one you're thinking of). And yes, even before we get to the "not adequately play-tested" packs, some of this stuff already appears. So far though I think a few tweaks can keep it challenging in these earlier, "simpler" quests without it being frustrating or feel like the GM is cheating.


So it's not JUST throwing many more monsters, but that's a tactic the game designers themselves employed. All I've done is started doing it a little sooner, to limit the anti-climactic endings.

Again, others may disagree, and I'm open to ideas always, but the reason I'm ramping up these Heroes as you progress is that I know what's coming!


I think in the Game System, the designers really did an excellent job, in trying to make sure pretty much each quest had its own gimmick, that it introduced something new. The same can't be said for every instance of the newer (and shorter) campaigns that followed. Back in the day I played through KK and ROTWL (the latter I liked a lot more as it felt less generic and I guess having the recurring villain was great story-wise as opposed to the gimmick of KK) and I remember them being very hard and sometimes the gimmicks were shall we say... rather brutal. I've hosted games with four out of the six solo quests from EQP/BQP (defiantly way too hard for a basic hero to play, much less a noob to HQ), but with tweaking they can be fun. I've also hosted Against the Ogre Horde, the first three and they're very tough, but while the new rules present a few cases of some confusion, they're pretty decent. The Japanese game system starts out VERY easy (if played under NA rules... the original rules introduces magic very slowly, so you add rules as you go through the first four quests)... it's also, in the original rules, very generous on gold (which you need to level up your body points!) and with limited equipment and some other things it really is its own animal... but in terms of just having some fresh new adventures it was pretty cool to run a campaign with some new basic heroes, and great for beginners (some have played them as solo quests as well). When I GM I don't always get it right, but I strive for that balance. And when it's finally my turn to be a hero again, I can't wait to see what people come up with (even if it's just a remix of an existing classic quest).

[iKarith]

As we play through (and hopefully get to the various official expansions) you'll see that the way the difficulty was increased by the original map creators was to add many more traps, many more monsters, and increase the number of higher level monsters. Eventually you'll start to see wandering monsters bring multiples, rather than single monsters. You'll see many more instances of traps appearing behind closed doors and even traps that you can't detect by searching. There will be monsters who can open doors, and of course the bosses will get multiple chaos spells. Sometimes gear will be stolen (or even destroyed!). I think you balked a few times at the "immune to fire spells" monsters and the "blocks all skulls with one black shield" monsters (hypothetically, since these only appear, to my knowledge, in the Dark Company, where there are a lot of them!).

I do think The Dark Company probably ports kind of obnoxiously to US rules. Mostly because the reason the enemies are so hard to hit is because they only have 1 BP. If I were the one writing the localization, I'd probably have opted to give them multiple BP but alter the block-all-skulls mechanic to be a very high shield rate. Like defend with any shield or anything but white shields high. Aiming to keep it a tough Quest. I dunno how many dice they roll for defense, but if it's a significant number it might actually make the quest a little harder but change the flavor of it from "wait for them to get a complete crap roll" to "really easy for them to get a good roll". I get the impression there's a lot of one and two hit kills, when your hits actually land. I'd have tried to make it so you got a point in more often, but … likely just one here and there, aiming for a similar average number of attacks to get the job done.

Well, get ready, because there are bad guys who can ONLY be harmed by certain artifacts or spells (and not just the one you're thinking of). And yes, even before we get to the "not adequately play-tested" packs, some of this stuff already appears. So far though I think a few tweaks can keep it challenging in these earlier, "simpler" quests without it being frustrating or feel like the GM is cheating.

Monsters opening doors sounds like what I was describing earlier with D&D encounter complications. Presumably a monster would only open a door to bring in more monsters because they were expecting you…

So it's not JUST throwing many more monsters, but that's a tactic the game designers themselves employed. All I've done is started doing it a little sooner, to limit the anti-climactic endings.

Again, others may disagree, and I'm open to ideas always, but the reason I'm ramping up these Heroes as you progress is that I know what's coming!

I don't think I was protesting was I? Getting the traitor out the door was the closest I got, since the issue was that two monsters spawned where he was trying to go that could literally take him out in one hit every single turn. If we'd used our spells and not had good potion luck, I don't know what we'd have done to get him out the door. And I said then I didn't care if it was hard, as long as it was possible. I thought for a moment and I knew how to do it. And did. Dunno if you expected I might attempt anything like I did, much less expected me to be prepared to do it twice. But I'm still not sure how else it'd be done if not that.

I think in the Game System, the designers really did an excellent job, in trying to make sure pretty much each quest had its own gimmick, that it introduced something new. The same can't be said for every instance of the newer (and shorter) campaigns that followed. Back in the day I played through KK and ROTWL (the latter I liked a lot more as it felt less generic and I guess having the recurring villain was great story-wise as opposed to the gimmick of KK) and I remember them being very hard and sometimes the gimmicks were shall we say... rather brutal. I've hosted games with four out of the six solo quests from EQP/BQP (defiantly way too hard for a basic hero to play, much less a noob to HQ), but with tweaking they can be fun. I've also hosted Against the Ogre Horde, the first three and they're very tough, but while the new rules present a few cases of some confusion, they're pretty decent. The Japanese game system starts out VERY easy (if played under NA rules... the original rules introduces magic very slowly, so you add rules as you go through the first four quests)... it's also, in the original rules, very generous on gold (which you need to level up your body points!) and with limited equipment and some other things it really is its own animal... but in terms of just having some fresh new adventures it was pretty cool to run a campaign with some new basic heroes, and great for beginners (some have played them as solo quests as well). When I GM I don't always get it right, but I strive for that balance. And when it's finally my turn to be a hero again, I can't wait to see what people come up with (even if it's just a remix of an existing classic quest).

I don't think EQP/BQP got nearly as much playtesting as the earlier stuff.

Japanese game almost deserves tp be considered very separately from EU or NA.

[Kurgan]

The Japanese system has its own rules. To me the real challenge of the Dark Company is its length. Double quests exist already but this is a for part quest. An epic quest you play over the course of four (or more) game sessions... but it does seem to have a lot of stuff in there to make it interesting. I'd love to try it out some day.

But the game I play blends them all together in a certain way and somebody else does it another way. I know you're not complaining , we're just talking about the various things. I'm pointing out that there are some deliberate choices the original designers have made... some of them are pretty great, some could use some more thought. There are certainly more ways to make a quest challenging for seasoned players with equipped heroes without just piling on the monsters, though that is certainly a popular way. A few stronger monsters can accomplish the same goal, and probably take about the same amount of time. The GM's job will be to mix it up so it doesn't become too boring. Predictable isn't always bad though either.

[iKarith]

Ultimately some things are going to work better than others. It also is going to come down to personal preference of the group playing the game.

Another thing about the EU game is that heroes were encouraged to be competitive. A lot of reward you divide among the surviving heroes however you see fit sort of thing. When you have a party, obviously you want that to be a roughly even split or effectively that (we're buying what best helps the party with however much gold it takes to buy it, then dividing the rest to minimize the chance of an untimely death resulting in monsters stealing it…) But I remember e.g. an elf killing a barbarian to take Borin's Armor and being joined by a Barbarian who was the sole survivor of quest 7 to have a party with two Borin's Armors.

Not sure that's how that's supposed to work. But then … I'm also not sure that the rules say that can't happen, and I've been through those a lot lately.

[Kurgan]

Good points. When I first played Hero Quest, it was among family. Later on, its mostly been 1v1 with the Heroes all being controlled by one person OR I've been playing against a couple (or two) who freely share their gear with each other.

On the other hand, I do see cooperation in those few instances when its a mixed group. People give each other gold or trade gear they can't use (or give extras to their neighbor).

I'm not quite sure, but the competition aspect reminds me a bit of classic arcade fighting games (which for me were like Double Dragon and Final Fight, where you scrolled around beating up punks, as opposed to two guys on a single plane of movement trying to beat each other in 3 rounds). In those games most of the time you could beat up the other player but it would make it easier to lose if you did this (even if you got a few points or stole the weapon they had). Mostly it was there so getting in each other's way was a danger, and (I suppose) it could lead to petty players taking out their frustrations on each other. A few games of this type had "grudge matches" or "vs. mode" where you were meant to fight one another, but mostly it was a convention to drain more of the players' health by having them be obstacles for each other.

I could see where it could be exploited, let's say you give all the gear from a hero to the others at the end of a quest, then kill him, and the replacement hero comes with a new weapon. Then again that seems like a really absurd way to get (at most) 125 gold. I mean if you don't really lose any progress by a single hero dying, of course. If this were a video game*, how it would go is that you'd come up from the stairs, load the gear onto one guy, kill the others then head back down the stairs, repeat, until you have as much gold as you want. What sane GM would allow that?

* You can't do this in the official PC game, because you can never trade gear between heroes... your gear dies with you, period. And others have pointed out there was no explicit mechanic about selling back gear in the EU rules, which are the editions that had the "competition" in the first place. Selling back gear IS explicitly in the Japanese version and was intended in the NA version as it appears in the expansions.

So perhaps the Heroes are still meant to work together and this is just another way for them to be their own worst enemy. Other than The Maze and Prince Magnus' Gold (and two "training" arenas that were in the rules of play for at least the 1st Edition), I don't recall any other instances in official quests where the "competition" aspect (or ability to go rogue) were implemented. Of course that could have been a leaping off point for the imagination of the players, but it's hard because you tend to all start and end in the same place.

I guess the motto of heroes should be "Join or die" !

[iKarith]

I wonder if the thing that made the game so competitive under EU rules was one of GW's touches. The rules particularly for the 1st edition EU rules were pretty careful to word combat rules in a way that leaves the possibility of player attacking player open. It doesn't say that you can do it, but it also doesn't say that you can't. Maybe they were leaving the option open for something like the Chaos spells … but I have to think that GW would have been saying no, these people come from different factions and they might continue to behave in a winner-take-all fashion.

MB might've more had the notion of a band of heroes who'd be working together. Or maybe the intention was the other way around for all I know?

The other rule that makes the competitiveness in the EU rules is that players block each other unless they give permission to pass. We just say that of course heroes can pass heroes and … I don't recall if NA rules explicitly say heroes can't attack each other … but the 1st edition EU rules definitely implied that they could be hostile to each other, and the NA game definitely takes some steps to make you think otherwise, basically because if you play The Trial that way, you're not going to win.

[Kurgan]

Imagine the Wizard trying to kill the Barbarian... lucky rolls with his three combat spells and he could do it, though he doesn't get to revive himself with healing (only heal 3 body points when he's down to one, for an effective total of 10 IF he took both healing spells, 7 if he took one, as the Elf surely would take Earth or Water).

No revivals from death and no selling equipment back at half price... no potion hoarding AND with the PvP mechanic, would change things a lot.

Imagine every quest starting with a deathmatch and then turning into a solo quest... until the heroes realize that they will only have a real game (and win!) if they work together.

Seems like team sabotage in the bad guy's favor most of the time... otherwise sneaky blows here and there as the quest goes on if people get antsy/bored. A hero goes rogue and everybody else gangs up to get him eliminated (screw you guys I'm going home!).

The usual way of "not working together" is for people to split off into different directions and each get into trouble, or running around the board, fleeing combat (but activating rooms in the process, vainly looking for the "exit goal"). I guess that puts a lot of pressure on the Wizard ("use your X spell, dangit!"). Things can go wrong if they don't work together, but that's a far cry from actually attacking each other, which was perfectly possible in the EU editions since the spells say any figure/piece or character rather than just any monster. Chaos spell cards were introduced to EU players in ATOH and WOM expansions even though some characters had access to actual spells (stolen from the Heroes) or individual abilities sprinkled throughout the base game and KK/ROTWL (that the NA replaced with proper Chaos spells).