Ye Olde Inn

I'm sorry if something like this was already posted before, but when searching the forums for "doors" there are just too many topics .

I was thinking of making opening doors a bit more eventful, and then remembered an old game I have in the back of my games cabinet, Dungeon Quest. I won't go into the whole game here, but one of the mechanics was that whenever a hero wanted to open a door, he would draw a cards from the Doors deck to see what happens. Results if I recall correctly were "Door opens", "Door jammed", "Door Trapped" and "Shuffle the deck and draw another card" (so cards put at the bottom of the pile never resulted in the same sequence).

For HQ, I would consider the cards above as well as "Door locked" and "Wandering monster" results. A locked door could be opened with a key, broken down or its lock picked (and suddenly a thief hero makes a lot more sense!); a jammed door would have to be broken down.

Would this mechanic play well in HQ? Or do you think this would bog down the game too much? For one, I guess it depends on the ratio of "door opens" to other cards of course. But if a door could possibly have an explosive or poison cloud trap on it (or some other area effect), it might help against the "all heroes at the door" syndrome . You could even add a card like "Surprise!" that immediately upon opening the door ends the heroes' turn and allows the monsters in the room (if any) to attack first.

I could consider a door deck or perhaps a table if it's because you really want a thief character with something for him to do.
But honestly I think it would be kind of a mechanic bloat to do this for every single door in the game.

If you are into making your own quests I'd rather suggest to just add special doors via quest notes.
Jammed, locked, trapped, magic keyword, opened by lever or pressure plate, magical one way doors etc etc etc.

That way it's kinda more special to encounter an special door, rather than every door having a chance to do something special.

The explosive trapped door and "surprise!" are good ideas.

Have you seen the ideas for an "Evil Wizard Deck?"

Goblin-King wrote:That way it's kinda more special to encounter an special door, rather than every door having a chance to do something special.

Yeah, good point!

sajungzak wrote:The explosive trapped door and "surprise!" are good ideas.

Have you seen the ideas for an "Evil Wizard Deck?"

I haven't, but from context I assume it's something like an idea I am playing around with as well, based on the dungeon counters from AHQ. Could you point me to the topic?

I agree that a Table to roll on for doors would make the most sense mechanically, as it would allow you to weight the table in favor of most doors being in a particular state (locked, Unlocked, etc) based on your preferences... In fact, I'd say creating several table to roll on that favor particular results, as well as one with equal outcomes might be ideal as you could use which ever table was most appropriate to the quest at hand.

That said, cards are way more in keeping with the way the rest of the game works, and could still be tweaked for outcomes, but adds more to the table and would be extra work.

Personally, I like extra details like this in games, and I'd go a step further and recommend that if you like the idea, you could expand on it for furniture searches as well.

In short, do what id fun for you and your group!

maj!

For a game with out an EWP, yes... For HQ, no. As Goblin-King suggests, this is for the Quest notes. We've added a bit more variety to the game by merging the Chaos Tokens from Advanced Hero Quest.

2 of these can be played when opening a door, Trap, Special Character. 1 can be played when reentering an emptied room, Ambush. The EW gets to draw a Chaos Token at the start of their turn if they were no monsters in play that turn. This fixes the issue of slow Heroes taking too much time, when not under threat. There's also Escape, Fate and Wandering Monster. I prefer the EW to have control over these effects rather than a random deck. Makes him more fun to play, opening up new strategies of play.

Here's the link to my 2 page extract from my Expansion, if you're interested. https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BzUqo ... FhLaG9hS1U. There's even more mods in the full write up, with more detailed explanations too but that's far from finished.

Goblin-King wrote:That way it's kinda more special to encounter an special door, rather than every door having a chance to do something special.

True for really special doors, like trapped, magic or only openable with a special quest-item key.
But I think as doors go, "open" and "locked" states are pretty much in the "normal" range.
So I could imagine a deck with around 30% normally locked doors and every now and then a jammed one would still fit in - or add to - the athmoshpere, without taking the spceciality out of "special" doors. If it would be an addition to game mechainics, or just slow down everything, I can't answer for now.

Hmm...

Locked doors would require keys.
Where do the heroes acquire keys and what to do if you are out of keys?
And if you can just break it down, why even carry keys?

What should this mechanic achieve in terms of gameplay value?
To me it seems like it would just slow the game down...
Open door - it's locked - use key - enter
Open door - it's locked - spend a turn or two breaking it down - enter

One man's opinion

I dunno. My thoughts were just a response to your's, keeping the special special.
How to work this out in detail I thougt was the responsibility of Zeus. But if you ask me, some spontanous ideas:
- open. No restrictions
- latched. Hero has to stop movement at the door to open it.
- locked. Very primitive lock, can be lockpicked by every hero by rolling a white shield standing in front of it, toolkit gives +1 die, Thief can lockpick automatically. Can be broken down by dealing 3 skulls of damage (no defense).
- Jammed. Has to be broken down.
Of course, these houserules are rather in favor of the EWP.