Incorrectly Played Rules

[Fullork345]

[Comments generated by this post were moved to the Courage Spell topic on 8/23/16.]

I apparently always played courage wrong. Thought it lasted until line of site ended, not only one attack.

[Kurgan]

Grew up playing the NA game...

We were pretty young, and impatient to start playing rather than study the rules, so we did all kinds of stupid things when we first started playing.

The first major blunder was treating "looking" as requiring the player to trace out with their finger on the board what squares they were looking at. If you didn't specifically look at it, you didn't see it! So going into a room didn't reveal everything by default. So we would go wandering around through empty rooms, hoping not to see anything bad. UNLESS you ran over a square with a monster or piece of door furniture, then you were forced to back up and place it there. I believe the original EU rules said something about how you could open a door and before going in side, look straight through the door to see just what is in front of it. But we weren't even close!

"Roll one red die for each of his mind points... if a 6 is rolled the spell is broken" we took to mean you roll a red die ONCE and it either has to equal his mind points OR be 6 (before that we thought if it was over your mind points or 6, it was broken). We carried on for awhile before we realized that didn't make sense.

We tried though.. we were like.. maybe what you don't know can't hurt you, so the Wizard is actually more susceptible to spells, while the dumb brute Barbarian doesn't know why you're waving your hands around like you think you're some Jedi or something...

We also tried the "buy infinite helmets" loophole. Well maybe you could bang those helmets into a suit of armor or something...

We had some arguments about the rolling boulder in Kellar's Keep... does it hit the wall and roll BACK again? I raised a big stink the first time I got "Command" used on me, arguing that as a "monster," he couldn't use potions, open doors, drop items, etc. Yes, I used to be a sore loser.

And yes, we had the "unlimited treasure searches" thing active too. Later we changed it to all four can search a room, even after the "quest treasure" in it has been found. Still way too easy to get all the good treasure really quickly and gear everyone up too fast.

When a Hero falls into a pit trap, Zargon mentions that they can search the pit for treasure if they want (as the rules state) and we would then forget and let them search it right then and there, even though they already used up their action...

We came back to the game later as adults, and after careful reading of the rules and such we have been much more strict. The "house rule" of heroic feats using your imagination (and villainous feats for the bad guys) in certain situations was satiated with the discovery of the "Combat Cards." That was the first thing from the community we implemented. Good times...

We never reshuffled the Treasure Card Deck before EACH draw (only at the start of each new quest), but I think we had a debate already about that in another thread. Some play it this way always, others do so. So the "real way" is to re-shuffle the deck when a "bad" card gets returned, and only then, right?

[Daedalus]

That's how my group did it--shuffle right after returning a bad card so it cannot be forgotten. Also, the Treasure Cards should be shuffled when setting up the game.

[Kurgan]

More mistakes...

A few times we played quests and rolled to disarm traps with characters other than the Dwarf, forgetting that nobody had bought a toolkit and you actually need one to even be able to attempt it!

For many years, until recently actually, in the NA game, we put out the secret door tile when you found one, and then replaced it with an "open door" when you got up next to it to open. We wondered why we were running out of doors... (even went on ebay to order more!) and only lately realized you just move "through" the tile. Simplicity itself! Without the nitpickers at the Inn, I wouldn't have realized stuff like this.

We never acknowledged the fact that you can technically fire the Crossbow/throw daggers and launch spells "off-axis." That is, we always drew a straight line through the diagonal, horizontal or vertical squares from the piece, rather than that weird way they show in the Rules of Play drawing which is still legal. So now it's much easier to hit!

Also, we never really realized that you can throw daggers at point blank range (see magical throwing dagger card) and that Crossbows can hit the four diagonal squares (without needing a square in between).

When it came to passing items, I think we forgot that its only the one whose turn it is that gets to pass, so we just had sudden exchanges on the fly.

I think we ended people's turns when they got Wandering Monsters as well, forgetting you can still use movement if you have it. [Edit: We hadn't made it to EQP/BQP where your movement STOPS when you hit a Wandering Monster TRAP but if your action hasn't been used yet, you can use it, even easier to forget!]

I don't think we applied the "if you haven't yet used an action on your turn" when the Hero had a healing spell but had been reduced to zero (happens with Wandering Monster hits and Hazards). In the moment you're like "dead... but you have a way to survive!" kind of thing.

Often we'd reveal rooms once you opened the door, rather than the moment you chose to move inside (technically you can just stand in the doorway and look through, seeing only what is LOS on those squares).

I still play it how where if you open a door to a corridor (but don't step into the corridor) you only see in straight lines from where you are (rather than revealing the entire thing like revealing a room you've stepped into).

We never paid close attention to the "no backtracking" rule, either.

We let characters on the same side leapfrog (even past their max movement), but that was more like a house-rule, rather than thinking we were doing it right but being wrong! (mario bros inspiration)

And this was a homebrew thing, the intention of the Ron Shirtz Combat Cards was for "pure combat" characters to have them, but we gave them to everyone. I guess because a lot of the artwork clearly showed an Elf, we figured why not let them all in on the fun. By that logic, Zargon should have gotten 6-8 cards instead of just 4 (the same number as the Heroes would have total). That was before we added sjeng's EW deck of course.

This is less a broken rule and just the fact is that despite me loving to play as Zargon, when I play, 9 times out of 10 I forget something. But the self imposed rule is that if I forget, then it just gets scrubbed from the quest... if it was something super important, it will have to be fit in later if I missed it.

[Kurgan]

Many rules debates later... so you can backtrack in the NA rules, looking (LOS) matters for aiming in corridors in the NA rules, and Wandering Monster traps do "stop movement" (but not the action if you have that left on your turn).

I deliberately ignore the Crossbow orthogonally adjacent shooting rule, even if Avalon Hill says that's the way it always was and always should be in the NA rules, I interpret it the Japanese way to keep the crossbow and the longsword both useful at their regular prices.

And you're supposed to shuffle the treasure deck once when the quest begins... and right before each and every treasure search (for good measure!) but bad cards still go to the back of the deck.

[Zenithfleet]

Playing the EU game, we used to write down any potions we found in the Treasure deck on our character sheets (the same way we would for potions found in the quest notes). We didn't realise you're only supposed to write down gold/jewel values--anything else is kept as a card until the end of the Quest, then discarded. No stockpiling of Heroic Brew!

We probably got this wrong because 'The Rescue of Sir Ragnar' has a healing potion in a chest that you write down on your character sheet and presumably can then keep from game to game, so we started treating the treasure card potions in the same way.


Also, more of a general issue, but ... although I kept my childhood copy of Heroquest mostly intact, the one thing I lost was the EU rulebook. I have no idea what happened to it, but it vanished only a couple of years after getting hold of the game. I was usually careful about things like that. Maybe it got left behind at a beach hotel or something ... Because of this, I spent many years playing HQ basically from memory and relying on the Quest Book alone. Luckily it's such a straightforward game that it didn't really give us any trouble, but I'm sure there were a lot of things we played incorrectly.

When I discovered the Inn, I printed out the American rules because they seemed superior. For a few years I ended up playing a kind of hybrid NA/EU ruleset, using a mix of rules from the American edition and vaguely remembered EU rules from childhood--plus the EU quest maps, of course. This included things like drinking a healing potion when you were reduced to 0 BP.

It was only a few years ago that I finally got hold of a replacement EU 2nd ed rulebook. (I never printed off a copy from the Inn's PDF for some reason.) Coming back to it fresh as an adult gave me a new appreciation for the simplicity and clarity of those rules (well, mostly simple and clear), as well as the general overall design, and I've gone back to preferring them over the fussier NA rules. Although trap tile placement and removal is completely silly in the EU version and we always house-rule that.

Unfortunately some of the custom EU cards I made for the Inn were done in the period before I found the EU rules again, so the wording is sometimes a bit too NA-style.

[BlackJax]

I recognise many of these same incorrectly played rules from when we played back in the day!

1. "Combat to the death" - I think the confusion was caused by the mention in the rulebook that once you've finished combat you could continue to move, which we took to mean that combat was all sorted in one turn, as being able to wander off mid-combat seemed unnatural, but actually that is allowed in HQ (although my "pinned" house rule tackles that issue now)

2. "Automatic Move when Opening Door" - We missed the automatic move through the door when opening it rule as that is only cryptically referred to in the rulebook.

Both of these were discovered and corrected when we played with players outside our group.

Another area that I know we played wrong was around the searching for traps (and secret doors) and the handling of traps once you had found them, disarming and such, but that was because we never seemed to be able to agree on the rules as written so we just ditched them and house ruled, so that was a deliberate decision more than a mistake although from my reading on the Inn it appears we weren't alone in experiencing difficulty in this area!

[The Admiral]

"Automatic Move when Opening Door" - We missed the automatic move through the door when opening it rule as that is only cryptically referred to in the rulebook.

Huh? Where's that rule? I've never even seen that discussed by anyone before.

[MULE]

I always played Spell casters can cast a Spell AND make an attack. Its wrong but we've kept it. Speeds things up and keeps the Wizard from getting stuck at the back so much. Also gives Morcar's big bosses a chance of getting at least one long awaited Spell off before death.

Thinking about it theres a lot rule bending with the 'actions' in our dungeon. Each Hero can attack, open doors, cast a Spell and do one of the following - Search for traps, search for treasure OR disarm a trap (if available).

I'm not sure if secret doors are meant to be revealed on trap searches but again they are in our house rules.

[manaknight14]

"Automatic Move when Opening Door" - We missed the automatic move through the door when opening it rule as that is only cryptically referred to in the rulebook.

Huh? Where's that rule? I've never even seen that discussed by anyone before.

I'm from the US and wasn't aware of HeroQuest back in 1989, but I think I've heard this was a rule back in the original 1st edition? I'm pretty sure it was dropped from later editions, particularly in the US. There have since been official quests that make following this rule impossible (e.g. a monster on the square immediately behind a door).