Dungeon Encounter cards - A solo / Coop mod

[Maike05]

Hey guys,

I'm working on a solo / cooperative system for HeroQuest.

Here is my work in progress on the Design:

Carte Rencontre HQ - 001 Green skins.png

I want to add support for monsters included in the Base Game for the moment. Will eventually be adding support for popular oldhammer fantasy creatures.

Here is the plan / goal :
1) The Encounter cards will adapt with the number of players. Should you be playing with two heroes or with 6 heroes, then just pick up the matching number of players.
2) The plan is to design several difficulty levels : Easy, Moderate, Challenging
3) There will be greenskins or undead encounter only, as well as mixed encounters.
4) Want to number the card, so eventually, it will be possible to list the encounter cards to use in certain Quests

Any comment or feedback is very welcome !

[cynthialee]

Make a 5th tier for game tables with mercenaries or 5 or more players like +1 Goblin for each henchman or +1 Ork/Fimir per extra Player

don't normally like such mods but this is a good one

I would probably put monster card backs on them though....

Good idea.

[lestodante]

Reward should be variable too... otherwhise I already know what I will find the room when I read the card and decide to search the room for treasures or not.
There should be a roll the dice option. 1 is usually a fail and can be a wandering monster or a trap, depending by the room/card.
2-3 bothing.
4-5-6 can be gold or a special item (just to do an example)

[Maike05]

Make a 5th tier for game tables with mercenaries or 5 or more players like +1 Goblin for each henchman or +1 Ork/Fimir per extra Player

don't normally like such mods but this is a good one

I would probably put monster card backs on them though....

Good idea.

about the 5th tier, I was thinking you can pick an existing combination. For instance if you are playing with 5 heroes, then you can generate a 2+3 player or a 4+1 player.

[Maike05]

Reward should be variable too... otherwhise I already know what I will find the room when I read the card and decide to search the room for treasures or not.
There should be a roll the dice option. 1 is usually a fail and can be a wandering monster or a trap, depending by the room/card.
2-3 bothing.
4-5-6 can be gold or a special item (just to do an example)

I basically agree with you and this is what I’ll be exploring. It is a work in progress.

A simple solution is to allow for drawing one treasure card, ignoring traps and wandering monsters.
Another solution is to add a random loot table on the encounter card.
There is a third cool system but it would require a deep tweaking of the existing treasure cards. Have a deck of common loot and a deck of rare loot.

I also see a conceptual problem with the current design as well. Imagine you generate 4 rooms/encounters and you decide to retreat. You might have a problem for tracking down which rewards was associated with which encounter.

Another use for this box could be laying down some monster behaviors or buffs.

[QorDaq]

Another nice addition to your Co-Op/ Solo project.

Am I correct in gathering that the example card represents one of several possible variations for the "Green Skin" Cards?

[Oftkilted]

Perhaps rather than “Reward” it should have a “special rules”? Or “behavior”?

[Maike05]

Another nice addition to your Co-Op/ Solo project.

Am I correct in gathering that the example card represents one of several possible variations for the "Green Skin" Cards?

Thanks for your interest ! Correct, my current idea/plan is to design a few variants: easy, moderate, challenging.

[Maike05]

Perhaps rather than “Reward” it should have a “special rules”? Or “behavior”?

The more I’m thinking about this rewards, the more I don’t like it at all. I’ll just delete it i think.

About implementation for loot, it could be nice to have double sided tokens. Basically when you kill the monster, you place a dead monster token. As an action during your next turn, when all monsters in line of sight are defeated, you can now search the room and the corpses. You reverse the token to know what found. Can be small amount of gold, potion, weapon, nothing, ... there should be a good proportion of each category in order to avoid unbalancing the game too much.

About the implementation of monster behavior, it should be listed on the back of the monster reference cards. Do you guys know if anybody has already written something on the subject for heroquest?

About the implementation of experience points, this is a whole another topic as there are many assumptions to take.

[QorDaq]

I like the idea of loot. A Body token isn't bad, however, in order to get a proper assortment of odds and ends (Generally lower value than Treasure cards), would simply making another deck not be more in keeping with the game? And possibly allow for a broader variety of interesting outcomes without having to have an unwieldy number of special tokens to make.

A few examples might be;

"You find nothing but a pocket full of lint." (with a few miscellaneous versions, replacing "Nothing" results for flavor).

"Feigning death, this enemy is not defeated and springs to their feet gaining a free attack on your character." Basically fight them again sort of thing.

"You find 1d6 Gold Coins."

"You find a half eaten sandwich." You may eat the remainder, roll 1 combat Die; on a skull lose 1 Body Point for the rest of the adventure-- this may not be healed, on a White Shield, recover 1 lost Body Point, on a Black Shield, nothing happens. (Or something like that).

"You find a fragment of a treasure map." Collect 4 fragments and exchange for an extra Search card on your next Search Action ignoring Wandering Monster and Hazard Results.

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You get the idea, point being, you could have some interesting minor finds/ events without making a ton of tokens.

Not saying they're great examples mind you, but this is what came to mind when I thought about loot in this context.