Random encouter cards

[Big Bene]

Well, as for a "themed" quest, I think this is contradicting the purpose of the whole project. MOst premade quests have a "theme", which dictates the wandering monster and the choice of monsters in the rooms. But the players don't know this "theme" beforehands, let alone choose it. Only the evil wizard knows. It's part of the fun for the other players to find out. Now if you play alone using encounter cards, you'd also want to "explore" the dungeon and be surprised by the inhabitants.
One may complain that a themed dungeon has a more compelling realistic feel to it than a purely randomized one. So I just came up with this little idea - just include a number of cards (a significant percentage of the deck) reading "same monsters as last encounter", plus a number (fixed or randomized). This way you would effectively have parts of the dungeon assigned to special "themes", with a chance for a change every now and then.
Or, somewhat more sophisticated - divert each card in two halfes:

Each half has an encounter of a different type - greenskins, undead, or boss (grey). The orientation of the card indicates wich half counts as valid in the moment. Now if you draw a new card, just orientate it so that the same monster type is "up" as with the card before. As every card only has two types (two halfes), and there are three mnster types, sometimes it won't match the last card. These are the times the "theme" of the dungeon changes - the hero has entered another section, or the course of events has turned. In this cases, just orient the card the way you draw it.

[Templar]

Nice idea! But what if you want an "alliance" kind of section where two types of monsters mix frequently?

At the top of my head, maybe a number "x" in the corner of a two-part card (as you have above) means that the next x number of cards must be orientated so that one of the monster types on the just drawn card is matched. For instance, a greenskin/Boss(gray) card with a 3 means that for the next 3 cards, no card can be oriantated as an undead encounter. If new greenskin/Boss(gray) cards is drawn within this limit, it is orientated so that the monster type alterate between the two.

Just spittballing here

[Goblin-King]

As for adding new homebrew monsters...
I don't see the problem. You will have to make new cards when you make new monsters any way.
Of course it helps if you already know what monsters you want to include.

If you want specific combinations/types...
What Big Bene said, and I myself admitted it should just be abandoned for a more userfriendly and simple system.
But the idea of "same type as last encounter"-cards is a good one. That is what I would do.

Well... I still think this system needs levels. At least two. Easy mode and hard mode can both blend into normal mode.
Easy - You meet easy and normal monsters
Hard - You meet hard and normal monsters

Or you could make three levels...

Either that or the deck should just be based on a fully equipped character?

This is what I like about the powerup system in Mario and Sonic games. They don't grow stronger and stronger. They have just the same basic equipment (Rings or Mushroom/fireflower) even in the endgame. That makes balancing difficulty very easy!

[nedius]

An update on my progress.

I've 20 cards done, some of which include duplicate version of the same thing.

I went through the quest books for Hero Quest, Kellar's Keep and RoT Witch Lord. I compiled a list of all the monster encounters, and all the rooms that have an 'event' style filling (rooms of just chests, or a non-quest objective thing) and all the 'quest specific' encounters (like the Dwarven Forge, chests with quest objectives in etc).

It gave me a list of events, quest objectives and monsters that would fill over 150 cards... So a big deck! HeroQuest alone takes up one and half decks of 54 cards.

And that's before I begin making treasure cards with 'secret door' and 'traps' in them.

I like the ideas that are being passed around here, they are giving me things to think about.

Rolling a dice for traps when searching means that there is a 1-6 chance of falling into a trap each tiome you search - that is significantly higher than in the base game. There would need to be then some form of 'defence' to counter the higher likelyhood of setting one off.

I liked the idea of themed decks - so if you know the map is an undead one, then you use the undead deck. If it's greenskin, use the greenskin one. If it's mixed, select a mix. I like the idea of the cards being leveled - so you won't get cards from kellar's keep whilst doing mission 1 with new characters. I'm not sure how to balance the reward of those though, unless killing all the monsters in level 2 or above provides you with one or more treasure cards...

Big Bene's suggestion of reversable cards is interesting... but that could be acheived with selecting specific card types and excluding others.

My current plan is to select the cards based on what appears on the map. Yes, I'll know what I'm going to meet, but never where or when. Alternatively, if I make an extended deck, then I can mix more in, so I may get more of the easy meets, or more of the difficult meets.

[Maike05]

Too bad it's not in english, but there is a french fan who made an amazing random dungeon generation system.




Maybe you can take contact with him to share good ideas His name is Elessar on the forum.

[nedius]

Hi again,

I some advice!

I've come up with two posible back art for my cards, but am not sure which to use! Here they are:





The top one is a re-colouring of the standard monster cards, since it's monsters you're going to be encountering. The second is more in keeping with the treasure and event cards. I can't decide which I perfer! What do you think? Preferences? Advice?

Secondly, I've now finished all the basic encounters from the main heroquest quest book, so am ready to print off the first set of cards! Will pdf them and post them here some time over the weekend. I'm now starting on the 'objective' and 'quest' cards, cards that are specific to one quest or another. The Boss cards and so on. Anyway, below is an example!