Jumping over occupied pit traps

[Daedalus]

Don't recall it ever happening after playing the NA Quest Booklet, Kellar's Keep, and Return of the Witchlord.

[ndsandman]

I have never seen two players land on same pit trap yet. But glad I read this here to have an answer if it happens.
I will go with option A.

Thanks

[Templar]

I've never seen it either, but you can never be too prepared! (actually you can )

[polymathis]

It happens in my games all the time, but we quite often have eight to ten players on the board, so there is quite often congestion in the narrow corridors!

[wallydubbs]

Maybe it's wrong but I often play it if one person's in the pit the other hero can just step on his head and move to the next square.

[Nicodemus]

I've had it happen a few times that more than one Hero fails a pit jump in a corridor and ends up in a pit. We just crowd the models over the pit tile.

[Kurgan]

This is where the "grave digger" character class really has his time to shine, allowing him to fill in pit traps.

Or else they gather up the corpses of the enemy to clog up the pit...

[Bareheaded Warrior]

From the point of view of an SE player I would choose option D (hehe)

Option D) As two characters cannot share the same square, and jumping a pit has a chance of failure that would result in two characters sharing the same then you cannot attempt to jump an occupied pit and would have to wait until the other character moves out of it (or if they are an opponent then attack them when they are down!)

Much longer answer … I suppose that this really boils down to “How deep is a pit?”

In real life a trap that involves the combination of a hole in the ground and one or more sharpened spikes or stakes can vary in depth from 1m to several metres deep and the depth of the HQ pit traps isn't stated in the rulebook.

There are loads of different variants (“trou de loup / wolf hole", a tiger pit, punji trap, stake trap, roman "lilies") all the way up to a traditional large trapping pit but essentially, they fall into two categories

1) Those intended to temporarily disable an attacker (trap them) to slow down an attack (the HQ Pit rules achieves that) and ideally either force their colleagues to help get them out and call in a rescue/extraction (not relevant to HQ) or to make them vulnerable to defenders (very relevant to HQ - the 1 less attack dice whilst in a pit does make the victim more vulnerable to a defender)

2) Those designed to kill or failing that trap the victim until such time as the trappers returned. Importantly for these to be effective they would have to be well over 2m deep AND crucially too wide in either dimension for a victim to be able to brace themselves so that they could climb out, i.e., they were designed very hard to escape from

Our pit traps in HQ clearly are not of type 2, amply demonstrated by the fact that the rules state that not only can a Hero get out unaided but doing so is sufficiently easy that it doesn't cost them a single lost movement point or a lost movement die, and that they only cover a single square ~5 feet across in either direction maximum.

Based on this logic I have done the following in my house rules for standard (shallow) pit traps.

As a hero, once in a pit, you may search the pit for treasure or secret doors as if it were a separate room unto itself.

Scrap the above rule (granted treasure could conceivable be in a pit trap, from a previous, now dead, occupant, but that would be the same as any other square and could be called out in the Quest notes if needed – the idea of finding a hazard inside a pit trap especially a second pit trap seems daft, same for secret doors – really how secret do you want a secret door to be!)

Exceptions: When on the stairs or in pit traps, sharing a square is permitted.

Scrap the exception above (for both stairs tile and pit traps whilst we are at it)

Effectively limiting pit trap “occupants” to one, once someone is trapped in it then the square is blocked no one else can enter/pass through that square – you obviously can’t step aside to let someone pass if you are trapped

These changes, scrapping a one-line exception to a rule that isn't needed and scrapping a single stand alone line of text, seem to me to be the simplest way of resolving this issue and for HQ simple is best.

Finally, it sets up the option to have a proper large version of the pit trap as a special feature in a quest, at least 2x2 squares or even an entire room that plunges you several meters down, does some real damage, into an actual genuine separate room with all the normal room rules around treasure, traps, and secret doors that you cannot get out of (without finding the secret door), you could even through in some Undead previous victims for added spice

[Shark]

does anyone allow Hero’s an option of not jumping, but taking a turn to climb into the pit and then another to climb out? The idea being they wont take any damage doing it this way but clearly take longer to cross.

[Bareheaded Warrior]

does anyone allow Hero’s an option of not jumping, but taking a turn to climb into the pit and then another to climb out? The idea being they wont take any damage doing it this way but clearly take longer to cross.

I don't.

Taking a turn to climb out of a pit would be introducing an inconsistency to me, pits (and their variants - pits of darkness, long pits and so on) are all consistent in that you can climb out of them for free, making an exception to that based on how you entered the pit would seem strange to me.

Equally jumping a pit brings with it a risk, will he or won't he, and therefore increases the fun of the game, giving an option to bypass this and replace it with something that removes the element of risk and fun and just makes the process slightly longer feels like a move in the wrong direction personally.

Back to the original post, and having read this thread again, I'm still sicking with option D!

Option D) As two characters cannot share the same square, and jumping a pit has a chance of failure that would result in two characters sharing the same then you cannot attempt to jump an occupied pit and would have to wait until the other character moves out of it (or if they are an opponent then attack them when they are down!)

Not really familiar with the European rules, but the American rules state more than one hero can be in a pit trap.

I appreciate that under NA rules, the sharing squares rule is suspended for the purposes of pits, but for me that is something of a quick and dirty fix. The restriction on two or more characters occupying the same square is a fundamental one for HQ, an early design principle that a lot of other material was built on top of, making an exception to that principle as a quick fix for a situation that rarely occurs, without considering the unintended consequences, and leaving that for generations of players to try and work through is a cheap shot.

If we now allow two characters to share the same square then...

Do they both suffer the reduced dice effect of the pit or is that meant to be between a character in the pit and a character outside it?

Does that even matter as strictly speaking the two characters cannot attack each other at all, as you are only allowed to attack a character who is adjacent to you and sharing the same square means that they are not on adjacent squares?

But then being not adjacent means that they could attack each other with crossbows, LOS is guaranteed as they are on the same square, and they are not adjacent so shoot away (and for that matter you could throw daggers too, you just wouldn't be able to stab each other with them as you are too close, but room enough to throw apparently)

If one was a spellcaster then presumably they would have LOS to another character on the same square, so they could cast a Ball of Flame, but would they both get roasted?

If another character wants to try and pass through a square occupied by two other characters, a monster and a hero for example, how does the passing rule work in that instance, a hero cannot pass due to the presence of a monster AND simultaneously he CAN pass due to the presence of a hero

And so on...