Ye Olde Inn

One of the complaints that one of my players makes is that they've bought all the gear and she's now the money bags in their game. That's because we're playing vanilla EU rules where you can only buy an item once. So to combat this I've been thinking about throwing in an element of maintenance with armour and Teldurn's and IvenBach's post's has prompted me to post the following (I haven't searched if others do anything, clearly Teldurn's does). This was also an issue with the Lone Wolf RPG rules which resulted in a lot of discussion. HQ is a bit limited in terms of the range of numbers it works with whereas the LWRPG had plenty of flexibility but even then, people struggled to keep things simple.

So, here's a couple of simple ideas for heroes with equipment (artifacts are exempt from damage);
(keeping in mind this is about introducing a trigger for damage and not affecting the outcome of combat)

• like what some do with weapons in attack, all 's result in damaged equipment
(this results in a lower chance of damaged equipment the more you have)

• if they roll more 's and you roll more 's than your number of defensive equipment, then an item is damaged
(this results in weaker monsters are less likely to cause damage than stronger monsters as well as a lower chance of damaged equipment the more you have)


Some damage handling ideas;

• items note how many hits they can take and the wearer decides what is damaged
(this results in repair / replacement situations and means shields and armour can last longer than helmets

• where possible equipment is repaired or replaced between quests

• repair cost is half the purchase price


What do others thoughts or mechanics?

If you have Combat Die that is of a different appearance than the normal Combat Dice, like a Battle Masters or HeroScape CD, then you can use it as a "Wild Die".

To make this work, all attack and/or defense rolls, by Heroes and/or Monsters (based on what effect you are going for), would require a singe Wild Die to make this work. A Wild Die would act like a normal Combat Dice, but if it (and it alone) rolls a particular icon, then it would trigger an effect.

For example, you could have it so that if a monster rolls a on it's attack roll, then the defending Hero might loose one piece of armor, with Platemail being reduced to Chainmail. If they roll a with that die, then the roll counts as two hits, but the monster's weapon brakes, reducing it to one less Attack Die. With the Heroes, a would reduce a monster down to one less Defense Die, while a count as two hits, double all other , but the Hero's weapon brakes.

That that was just an example on how this works. You are free to think of your own methods.

Another method could be that the players trigger a random combat event if a Hero rolls a on the Wild Die during an attack and/or defense roll. Such events could be drown by cards, or rolled on a table. The effects could be critical hits, lost attack/turn, dropped or broken equipment, etc.

We used to just play that they loose their equipment (not quest treasures though) every quest unless they can't buy any equipment. We assumed there was long enough between quests for them to sell everything and spend all the money. It was still too easy.

I like this houserule. Too complicated for my games, but still I like it

The usual way I deal with players getting too wealthy is to either kill some heroes or throw in some rust-casting monsters.
I want to avoid "passive effects" as much as possible, because I tend to forget about it.

Gold Bearer wrote:We used to just play that they loose their equipment (not quest treasures though) every quest unless they can't buy any equipment. We assumed there was long enough between quests for them to sell everything and spend all the money. It was still too easy.

Like... loose all their equipment? How did they NOT wipe in the later levels?

It could work but I don’t like the idea to count dices each time you attack. When you do an attack the only thing you should want to see is if you hit the target or not.

If you want to damage their equipment you can make a rule “after 4 quests your items needs repair” or “after 4 quests roll a dice and if it’s a black shield your item is broken”. But I don’t like the idea to destroy the weapons and armors of players. They have earned them or they have paid gold for them. It’s not fair.

If they are too wealthy try to take their money from questing. Each time they are facing a tough monster say that he asks 100 gold and he will let them pass. Or on the travel, they could need a carriage, or horses, or a boat. They could spend too much money for them. Of course you can suggest them to buy more potions, or throwing daggers, or you can offer them some magical daggers with a high cost.

If they don’t want to buy anything put more monsters in your quests, they will need more healing potions, and then raise the cost of your healing potions. It is very easy to make them spend money if you want.

Phoenix was the first one to bring weapon damage to the attention of the Inn here. He read about the idea somewhere and developed it (too bad his chart is no longer available.) I developed my own house rule from that idea at the end of the thread in this post.

I like Patroclus' alternate ideas about draining money between Quests, but I wouldn't want it to be at the whim of the Morcar/Zargon player. That would make gold coin treasure rewards feel futile to me. I would say incorporate such occurances in a deck of adventure cards to ascribe such unfortunate events to the whims of fate. Some fortunate events should also be included so that the end of a Quest isn't simply a punishment. Basically, you'd be trading gold coins for in-game benefits which are mainly temporary in nature.

While I don't remember if The Road Warrior's event deck included gold coin loss or not, what I'm talking about would fit well in his project, I think.

The easy way to implement this, would simply be to give the players an "upkeep cost", the ammount of gold they need to spend each game to upkeep their equipment.

This could be simple as a fixed amount (say 5 per Quest).

Alternitively, it could be based on what equipment they are carrying (1 per item).

To be very harsh, it could be proportianate to how many quests they have already completed (one per quest).

If you're too harsh with this sort of thing though, it turns into the economic system of AHQ, which is a whole other kettle of fish.

Or give a piece of armor Body point of its own, say 20 for plate, down to 4 for a shield.
For every skull from an enemy attack you negate with your defend roll, you have to take away a BP from any piece of armor of your choice.

That's like "It will be your equipment's damage if it didn't hit you", which is mostly close to the truth anyway.
The chaos warrior hits you with 3 skulls, you manage to shove your shield in between to only get hit by 1. The shield, however, takes two...

I can think of the following repercussions:
- Heroes tend to buy several armor pieces to be able to divide those damage points among them.
- they tend to keep the plate longer maybe (including movement penalty), because other equipment is cheaper to buy
- uhm...
- it's pretty freakin' simple to keep track of
- In general, heroes have to buy more. Much more. Could be worth implementing.