The Frozen Horror Chronicles (HeroQuestFans)

[Kurgan]

We're going to finish the Glacial Gate and/or do that playtest tonight on my new setup!

[Kurgan]

Domymontalto braved "Into the Northlands" as the Barbarian. We used Avalon Hill's suggested rules, but even then it was a pretty tough quest! The HeroQuest fans in the twitch chat as usual lent their support and he made it out of there with his animal companion Snowdasher and the Armband of Ice.

Meanwhile Strangebus (Barbarian), Elvyer (Knight), Jacer (Knight) and Alchemist (SavageSully) completed the final leg of the Glacial Gate (the last four rooms!) with a little help from Frank "Hal" Beard (Halberdier). A great night of games with the new hardware setup!

[HispaZargon]

Those dungeoning nights sound really exciting, Kurgan.

[Kurgan]

I've had to go on vacation from streaming due to auto repairs and a friend's wedding, but two Saturday's ago, the Heroes were very close to completing "The Deadly Depths" (Quest 5).

We also had some fun playing with SirDeath (of SirDeathVids) and the gang using the Companion App to play Quests 2 and 3 of the Game System (we even got the Orc Bard, whom we recast as an Orc Pirate, arr that be some fun).

I imagine we'll finish the Deadly Depths up quick the next time (Sept 10th) and move on to the next thing! We had at least one guy interested in Space Crusade, possibly 2.

[Kurgan]

We completed 2 parts of the Halls of Kelvinos... and if all goes well we plan to enter into part 2 of Q7 this coming weekend (if not, then we'll pick things up after Christmas or New Years!).

So far more than 17 mercenaries have perished... but we've got a Barbarian, two Guardian Knights, an Elf, Dwarf, and Wizard/Alchemist waiting in the wings for whoever wants to take control of them during our Saturday evening game time on twitch.

No reason why we can't insert any of the Mythic heroes (the Orc Pirate subbing in for the Bard) if people want to take control of them. In a separate adventure offline, we had a Rogue substituting for the Wizard which worked out fine.

[Kurgan]

Next stream should be this Saturday starting 6pm Central on twitch.tv/heroquestfans (you can also look us up on discord)

[Bareheaded Warrior]

It is always great to read people’s “Battle Reports” so thank you for this one but I do have some questions and suggestions around some the House Rules that you play with.

Blind Trap Jumping Rule
This has been mentioned before along with double jumping in that in some quests there are two-square wide pits or chasms that need to be jumped. In theory you could combine these two rulesets so that your Heroes could blind jump over a single square that may or may not contain a trap or double blind jump every two squares that may or may not contain a trap, but for me personally you jump an obstacle, a pit, chasm or similar, the idea of the Heroes hopping round the board like rabbits seems Pythonesque in its absurdity and is this is need as a fix for an issue I will be interested to understand what the issue is and I think a different fix is needed!

Uncommon Heroic Feat
If a player comes up with a plausible action that is already covered under the rules then presumably an uncommon heroic feat wouldn’t be needed, but if a player comes up with a plausible action that isn’t already covered by the rules and your uncommon feat kicks in then you have effectively created a new rule on the fly, once it has been attempted once, a precedent has been established, so to retain consistency, to use one of your own examples, “rolling a combat die and getting a skull means that you have bashed down a door and surprised an enemy” becomes a standing rule at your table, isn’t this going to add a lot of documentation, potentially a new house rule created every turn!

the "haste" rule
There have been many discussions on this forum and elsewhere around fixed movement for Heroes and whilst I understand the logic of wanting to do this I think the general consensus was reached that the ‘random’ nature of Heroes movement greatly enhances the game as it spoils the best laid plans and forces Heroes to improvise, doesn’t this haste rule mess that up in certain situations, perhaps a haste or dash rule that allows a Hero to sacrifice their action on a turn in exchange for an extra movement die would work better?

Combining Secret Doors AND Traps searches
You could consider my House Rules that combine all three to speed things up
Search – The Binding Topic

[Kurgan]

I love feedback, so please don't take any of this as dismissive, but I have thought about this and so far it has worked for my group...

Of course house rules are subjective. To me these are great rules, but to someone else they might detract from the fun and so then for those players I would not recommend them!

Oddly, the combining of searching seems the least enhancing. The EU rules kept treasure and secret doors/traps separated. We tried it one time and it really didn't seem to have much in terms of overall savings. Jumping down to the "unthreatened movement" thing, some would say that by taking this in one dilutes the fun there. Some parts of the game simply appeal more to different people. Certainly if you played it the EU way you may find that way more natural. I find the split searching is fine with four heroes.


But the logic behind blind trap jumping is that the designers of EQP/BQP/etc. had them in mind when designing those quests. It provides a "solution" to the old "problem" introduced in the original version of the game that a trap on the opposite side of an open door was impossible to detect or avoid (short of just not going through that door), especially with traps that can't be avoided (step on the square and you take the damage, no rolling). Jumping traps is already something you could do (in theory) every turn, so long as there was a revealed trap tile. However this simply allows for the above scenario where there is a new square that can't be detected one way or the other. This is still a risky proposition and it's still better to generally search for traps (even though it won't help you with the doorway traps).

The double wide pits are a different thing entirely, and I have yet to run across any (well there was one instance where people could have tried to jump the chasm the long way but it never came up) in our adventure but I was planning to treat them rules as written. Why would it be different jumping a pit vs. jumping two squares? Well one is a harder thing to do. Still the double trap jump rule came straight from the draft notes and I wanted to try it out. We've so far only used it a couple of times.

The Uncommon Feat is just that, it's not a guarentee that every time from now on you'll always be able to pull it off. Heroes can do all sorts of things beyond ordinary people, but even they do not succeed every time. So if your scheme to [do whatever thing] succeeds there's nothing that says it will ever work again. But you can try... if Zargon approves.

Yes, an ever expanding giant rule book of random things would be rather silly I agree, for HeroQuest anyway.

Fixed movement for certain situations was something I was thinking of doing for a long time. I agree that rolling to move is great and I like it (don't have any problem with it) so the idea wasn't to get rid of it entirely but leave it as an option for when there are literally no monsters on the board. Someone who wants to retain competative randomness may not even want to allow it in this situation. The only time official HeroQuest gave fixed movement (prior to "into the northlands" suggestion, and that's all it was, a suggestion) was with the Elven Potion of Speed.

So with all that said, I hope the above isn't stopping you from playing with us. If it was, I would consider modifying the experience when you were playing. Then if you want some of our recordings (granted, they can be long, replay on faster speed) you can see they usually work and we don't always remember to implement them on every turn, so sometimes it doesn't maker any difference at all!

PS: When time permits I will gladly read your other thread about how you think the rules should be. I'm always open to other POV and have changed my mind before based upon it!

[Kurgan]

So in the last installment, many more mercenaries perished, but the three brave heroes persist on... and had very little trouble dispatching the undead Hero (I'm surprised they didn't attempt Holy Water, instead they defeated him the old fashioned way). I gave the gargoyles a few surprise chaos spells for variety, including a usage of "Melt" from the cutting room floor draft notes. The monsters seem to have met their match for now, but a massive battle awaits!

TRhere is yet one more session required to finish the Halls of Kelvinos... a very long quest! The completion will have to wait until after the New Year!

[Bareheaded Warrior]

I'll very briefly summarise the search rule changes that I made, and whilst they are deceptively simple it usually does take some time for the ramifications to sink in. (Also bear in mind these rules are used in combination with the 'looting' action for chests mentioned elsewhere)

• If, during movement, you step on a trap then you get a chance to attempt to disarm it before it goes off (5+ on a red die*), otherwise you suffer the effects

• If, during movement, you step onto a square containing a secret door, then you find it automatically (unless obviously the Quest notes that it cannot be found from that side or something similar)

• A search (formerly "search for treasure") action in a room involves assumed movement throughout the room, therefore if the room contains an unsprung trap then your Hero is placed on it and the above rule takes effect (or if multiple traps then he is placed on the nearest)

• A search (formerly "search for treasure") action in a room involves assumed movement throughout the room, therefore if the room doesn't contain any unsprung traps, but does contain a secret door, then your Hero is placed on the corresponding square and the above secret door rule takes effect (or if multiple secret doors then he is placed on the nearest)

• Otherwise the searcher gets the treasure from the Quest notes if any is indicated or draws a treasure card, as usual

*The Dwarf gets +2 on his roll due to his special skills and a Hero with a toolkit gets +1 (therefore the Dwarf with a ToolKit gets +3) which gives Heroes the motivation finally to actual purchase this item.

This means that depending on the presence of traps and secret doors and the numbers of them, it may take a number of search attempts to complete a room search (of course most rooms don't contain any secret doors or traps so one search attempt is sufficient to fully complete a room search) but a room is only searched completely once (not once per Hero although multiple Heroes may make attempts or the same Hero may make multiple attempts if the first is not fully completed due to the presence of traps and/or secret doors).

Under this ruleset, searching for traps and searching for secret doors, as separate actions are no longer needed reducing the 'search actions' from 3 down to 1.

This also eliminates all the uncertainty around search areas in corridors, the unintended flaw introduced by the original search rules around traps behind doors, the need for players to remember to keep mechanically search for traps and secret doors over and over again (or risk having to get frustrated by endless back-tracking) and most if not all of the other 'issues' that crop up regarding searches which also renders the 'blind jumping' mechanism unnecessary.

The ruleset is simple (more simple than the original) and once implemented so intuitive that most people that I know that have implemented it wonder why they didn't do it this way from the start.