by Jafazo » October 14th, 2014, 1:53 pm
In order to handle overpowered players I'd first ask whether ANY of the content being used ingame is custom. Custom features tend to be imbalanced. Assuming they're not overpowered because of custom content here are a few suggestions on how I handle powerful Heroes.
Do NOT make Heroes lose artifacts, armor and equipment on a regular basis. That's a HORRIBLE idea and unmotivates your players. If they expect to constantly lose and find armor and weapon pieces frequently, they'll never get attached to things or feel a sense of accomplishment and success. Losing an artifact, like the Spirit Blade, should be a jaw dropping experience. In my opinion, the loss of an artifact shouldn't happen more than about once per quest booklet.
Hero Quests original rules isolate encounters. What that means is that the rules are set up so that Heros basically open a door and deal with the encounter behind it. When a Hero 'opens a door' he effectively 'activates a room'. That room is isolated from other rooms so enemies within it have to fend for themselves without help. This is where most of the problem takes place because a team of 4 well geared and experienced Heroes can dispatch a room with relative ease. Here are a few good ways to improve encounters.
1 - Survive their first attack! Heroes usually attack before you do. They gather by closed doors, open it and you cry as they hungrily dispatch the 5 Orcs you were sure would challenge them. Just about every encounter in your game has to survive that first attack from Heroes so throw in a few weak dummy targets. For example, in that room of 5 Orcs, if each player attacks, they will dispatch about 3 Orcs leaving you with about 1 Orc to attack them back with. Add two goblins to that and strategically place them in the front. On your next turn you'll have a good chance of hitting the Heroes with about 3 Orcs on your next turn.
2. Make your Traps smarter! As Heroes get stronger, more strategically placed traps should be expected. The number of easily discoverable spear traps in a lonely empty hallway should reduce substantially. Instead, set up spear traps in front of your minions so Heroes trigger them when they rush in to attack. They can't search for traps as long as a monster occupies the room so the trap is guaranteed to stay hidden and gives you a 50% chance their turn will end if they roll a skull and get hit with it. Don't abuse this tip though because it can kill Heroes. Each quest should contain no more than about 8 of these strategically placed traps with no more than about 2 per room. Likewise, a strategically placed pit trap can turn the tables suddenly and give your monster a small advantage when he attacks on his next turn. Put a pit trap in front of doors now and again too so Heroes can't search for them and trigger them automatically. Tough Heroes can handle about 2 of these per quest. To mask your evil doings, scatter a few of those 'easily discoverable' traps to give Heroes the illusion they're still finding and disarming some.
3. Improve the number and quality of your rooms! More rooms means more encounters so add more rooms. Also, for each empty room you have in your quest you should improve the encounter within another room by twice it's difficulty. In other words, overall, the quest should hit players with one encounter per room even if it doesn't LOOK like it because some rooms are empty.
4. Start ditching your bread and butter weak monsters for bread and butter medium monsters. In other words, make Goblins more scarce and instead make Firmirs a more frequent face accompanied by a couple of Orcs. When Heroes start to miss Goblins, have them open the next door and find a room full of Goblins with one goblin per square! If you're a fan of Orcs, just make up an in-story excuse and give Orcs the Firmir's stats. Just remember to introduce them in number accordingly as if they were Firmir's.
5. Place more Chaos spells within your quests. In some quests we're introduced to specific monsters who are given chaos spells. No matter who wields them, chaos spells within your quest improve its difficulty. Usually we see chaos spells handed to boss monsters, but we can just as easily hand them to run of the mill Goblins and Orcs. Start introducing magic casting labels to common monsters such as the Shaman Orc and Shaman Goblin. As a strict rule though, don't ever give such a monster more than one spell. You'll quickly notice heroes target your magic casting monsters first, so getting your spells into the quest may become more difficult. Another idea to sneak chaos spells into your quests by having monsters use magic artifacts. An Orc can activate a one time use magic ring that hits a hero with a ball of fire spell.
6. The Alarmist. As Zargon, give yourself a set number of Alarmists per quest between 2 to 3. On your turn choose a monster and state that he is sounding an alarm and activating a nearby room. The monster can activate any room within its line of sight. To do so, open the door within the Alarmists line of sight and set the room up. That rooms monsters become active and can move and attack immediately on Zargons turn. This lets you combine encounters between rooms at a kind of random basis and can really challenge Heroes.
7. Get creative. This is the one idea that will never get old, everything else will. You can get creative and challenge heroes on a huge scale or a small scale. Small scale challenges can be unique traps such as a tar pit that requires a roll of a 6 on 1d6 to escape. A cursed item attaches itself to the Wizard so anytime he casts a spell he must roll a combat die and if he rolls a black shield the spell fails but is not wasted and his action is used up. Heroes laugh when they barge into a room of unarmed Firmir's who fight with 2 combat dice to attack, until their evil wizard casts a unique magnetism spell that pulls weapons to the ground forcing anyone in the room to fight unarmed for this encounter.
Unless you specify your version I'm going by the US rules.
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