Chests? How do they work?

[sadkitchen]

There is risk as my treasure deck is beefed up with additional treasure, but also additional traps/hazards, some of which cause PERMANENT mind or body damage.

Please share. I have always found the treasure deck lacking in flavor.

-SadKitchen

[polymathis]

Just search this site (and/or others on the net )- we have never created our own cards, just added ones we have found online... it keeps the players on their toes as they never know what I may have found one idle lunchtime and added to the deck!

Some of the French, Italian, Spanish or German sites also have some great cards (and tiles/quests for that matter), as long as you are feeling up to doing a little translation work - Babelfish is my friend!

[Nephew of Mentor]

Personally I'm all about playing pure. I'm ok with house rules clearifying or fixing other vice broken rules, but adding new content such as characters, spells or monsters is not really my style

I like that I'm not the only one that thinks this way, however, I am not opposed to, on rare occasions, adding more monsters, and maybe playable characters, that "feel heroquesty", and maybe the same would go for items if my players get that far. Of course, with entire custom quest books I wouldn't be as much of a purist. There is one exception to my usual purist playing. I don't know where I got it, but my players have been playing for years with the rule that each room can be searched only once, period. Seeing some previous posts I am wondering where I got that, does anyone else do that? Though I think for the sake of trap placement I will start allowing players to search chests independent from "searching for traps".

By the way, one search each room makes for interesting character interactions
"You kill the goblin. I want to search for treasure."
"No, you kill him, I want to search for treasure."
"Be that way, I'm going to leave the room and not kill the goblin then."

[Goblin-King]

We have always played with the "each room can only be searched once" rule.
Seems logical that once it has been looted there is nothing left for the next.
But I don't really think it's in the rules. We just assumed

[Thrawn]

I have always ussed the rule that searching furniture and chest is a separate action from seaching a room. I also require a hero to be right next to the furniture to search.
I also do not allow a card draw for every room. And sometimes to keep them wondering what is up, I give the option "You may draw two cards and deal with any results, or you may pass a draw." Many times they will pass on a double pull and accept nothing rather than face the risk of 2 hazards or wandering monsters.
I try and keep it fresh.
Sometimes I will require them to roll a dice for every point of mind and they must get a black shield to find anything.
But not always. I only do this for 'well hidden' treasures and 'complicated secret doors'.

I tried out having furniture pieces searched separately, but found that it inflated the treasure by a ton, so I moved away from it. I actually thought about house rulling that a room can only be searched once, instead of once per hero in order to reduce random treaure. Perhaps I could take a middle ground and have each room and each piece of furniture searched once. I actually would like the treasure levels more with that I think so that heroes aren't capped out 6-8 quests in.

[cynthialee]

Gold is how my players decide amongst themselves who is the big winner of the game. We do not play the quests in order. I choose a mission, beef the maze up allot, issue artifacts (they will need them and it puts those cards into play instead of gathering dust) a potion each and send them on their merry way.

[Sjeng]

I've just finished quest 1 of Kellar's Keep, and it brought me some new insights about chests.
There is a room near the start with 1 chest in it, but it is surrounded by pit traps, so any hero standing next to the chest, will fall in.

If a chest doesn't really matter during searches for treasures, the pit traps would make no sense, as you wouldn't be required to stand next to it when you search the room.

So we decided to use the following rule:
If a room contains a chest, you may search for regular treasure, not inclusing the chest, which will result in either a treasure card, or something else if it says so in the quest notes, excluding the chest's content. You may only search the chest when standing directly adjacent to it. If you search the room for traps though, you will find all traps, inclusing possible traps on the chest(s) in the room. You can only disarm the chest traps if you stand next to it. (Same as we do with other traps that need to be disabled after you see them).

[Goblin-King]

Sjeng, these are exactly the rules we ended up using

[Thrawn]

I've just finished quest 1 of Kellar's Keep, and it brought me some new insights about chests.
There is a room near the start with 1 chest in it, but it is surrounded by pit traps, so any hero standing next to the chest, will fall in.

If a chest doesn't really matter during searches for treasures, the pit traps would make no sense, as you wouldn't be required to stand next to it when you search the room.

So we decided to use the following rule:
If a room contains a chest, you may search for regular treasure, not inclusing the chest, which will result in either a treasure card, or something else if it says so in the quest notes, excluding the chest's content. You may only search the chest when standing directly adjacent to it. If you search the room for traps though, you will find all traps, inclusing possible traps on the chest(s) in the room. You can only disarm the chest traps if you stand next to it. (Same as we do with other traps that need to be disabled after you see them).

We are talking about using the following rules moving forward with our group.
1) Any room can only be searched once. (Not once per hero.)
2) Each piece of furniture may be searched once.
A furniture search is a separate search from a room search.
You must be standing next to the furniture (including chests) to search it for treasure.

We actually are looking at the same for traps.
1) Each room searched for traps will reveal floor tiles with traps, NOT furniture.
2) Furniture must be searched for traps separately.

[cynthialee]

I like it.