I agree wholeheartedly with j_dean80. I've lost count over the last 3 decades of how many house rules, additions, customisations and so on that I have added to HeroQuest but the vast majority have, following play testing, been ditched so the simple reason that the benefit of increased fun and improved game play isn't worth the cost in terms of time, mental effort, admin and increased complexity.
So now I almost entirely keep to the principle of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" and make sure I define the problem I'm trying to fix clearly before making modifications and then afterwards check that they have done the job.
j_dean80 wrote:The best way to utilize traps more is including them into the treasure searching and/or trap placement, forcing Heroes to deal with them.
Exactly, when it comes to searching I found issue with both of 2 options offered in the standard game;
Either, the choice of throwing caution to the wind, crossing your fingers and moving along a passage without bothering to check for traps and then falling into one, (an option only ever selected as the player couldn't be bothered to search for traps or forgot)
Or, the alternative of searching the whole passage from start to end, slowly and meticulously to reveal any suspect squares, crossing over those suspect squares, before moving back to your starting point, over said suspect squares, before then choosing to move along the passage and handling the suspect squares so they you could proceed (even though you had already cross them twice, once on the way out and once on the way back)
The first option seemed too casual an approach for something that could end in the death of your character and the second option was painfully illogical
(despite traveling cautiously along a 12 square passage and then another 12 squares back before rolling your movement dice and moving 8 squares (a total of 32 squares of movement) "in-game" still took 1 turn, exactly the same amount of time as just moving!
So I scrapped the separate searching for traps and secret doors action and just assumed the heroes would always be proceeding with caution is a potentially trapped environment, so incorporated the chance of either spotting a trap and making it safe or failing to do so and setting it off, based on a single roll as part of movement (standard and assumed movement in treasure searches) when you stepped on a trapped square. After all if you never step on the trapped square then it really doesn't matter whether it is trapped or not.
& suffers 1BP damage.
= one hit & pushback
= cancels one hit
