Ye Olde Inn

Noticed lots of unsprung traps get either left behind or ignored completely & wondering if I can incentivize my hero's into wanting to disarm & collect them to build something else.

Depending on how many traps you have 3or5, you can use its mechanisms to create different things Macgyver style and maybe even augment your weapons in general. These have a one time use.

First thing that comes to mind is a:
Bouncing Betty= Shoots darts (1pt Dam)up at anything passing through its square. Monsters do notice it though & can go around it or roll a CD. Monster rolls a & suffers 1BP damage.

Bolo= Entangles a monsters feet hindering their movement for one (or two?) rounds.

Safety harness = The strings braided together makes a rope for you to swing over a Pit if your "Jump or Disarm" fails.

Augment Bow or Crossbow = Using gears & strings you gain a +1 Att for one shot only.

You see what I'm getting at & yes I don't want the wizard to have dozens of these Bouncing Bettys as he opens doors & just tosses them in a room before taking off lol. He can only carry 3 or 5 of these per quest. Only one can be dropped on the square next to you & maybe even hero's can't pass through it without making a roll like the monsters. IDK

Haven't really thought it through yet but I saw something similar to this years ago on our site when thinking of a Gnome/Hobbit "Tinkerer."

The best thing about HeroQuest is its simplicity. This is what keeps it fun and appealing for people of all ages and backgrounds. Fantasy fanatics and just casual board gamers alike. Adding a lot of extra mechanics might sound fun on paper, but you risk slowing the game down too much. This will make each gaming session take too long and make people bored. Think of the long corridors as already a problem in some quests. The best way to utilize traps more is including them into the treasure searching and/or trap placement, forcing Heroes to deal with them. The NA system of trap search, Zargon just points to the board to show where traps are. It is up to the Heroes to remember them. Lot of times they forget which squares and still trigger them. For the treasure search, I mean, if a Hero searches for treasure in a room before searching for traps, they will trigger the closest trap. Move the Hero to that square. If they performed the trap search before a treasure search then they would know which squares to avoid during their search of the room. Think of it this way, when they perform a search they are walking around the entire room checking everything and then finish back on their starting square. If a piece of furniture has a trap then they would obviously have to walk up and disarm it before searching for the treasure in it as normal rules state.

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.

There's been several cool concepts for a Tinkerer character in the past, Hobbits that can make food at the Fire place, Brew masters making beer, I saw one of us even invented a Gnome/Hobbit character who could build a tank out of enemies armor & certain things that had 3BPs, Lol I'm all for it.

I agree about adding complexity but I'm sure you're not against having new heros. If you built a Tinkerer character how would you do it?

burglekutt wrote:There's been several cool concepts for a Tinkerer character in the past, Hobbits that can make food at the Fire place, Brew masters making beer, I saw one of us even invented a character who could build a tank out of enemies armor & certain things that had 3BPs! Lol I'm all for it!

I agree about adding complexity but I'm sure your not against having new heros. If you built a Tinkerer character how would you do it?

Not sure how to work out the mechanics, but sounds like a Dwarf Engineer to me.

j_dean80 wrote:Not sure how to work out the mechanics, but sounds like a Dwarf Engineer to me.

Probably, but depending on how powerful of items he was able to make would judge how many BPs he should have and what standard armory weapons he could use. If the guy could build a tank twice a quest then he should be a lower BP character I'd think, sort of like the wizard.

Other heros that disarm traps could give them to him, furniture provides wood, nails? Paper & candle wax mixed with an enemies body fat at the alchemists bench would be interesting.

Buckler= Using leftovers from enemies armor, roll a 1d6 along with your Defense.. Roll a 1 and it counts as an extra . It is destroyed once it defends against one BP damage.

Might work better as a companion in a Dwarf themed Pack than a new Hero type.

I'm just thinking about the time it would take to dismantle and build things. The other Heroes would be long gone.