I had a minor epiphany about all this last night that kept me awake, and I blame you for it, Bareheaded! I BLAME YOUUUU!
Prepare to be smited (smote? smitten?) by a 10-body-point wall of text ...
Bareheaded Warrior wrote:HeroQuest is not a game it is a game system, you are provided with the material, and actively encouraged to create your own Quests, so the idea that any individual quest needs to have a high replayability value doesn’t make sense to me in that context.
Well, it wasn't called a 'game system' outside North America ...
The EU game was presented as a game, written as a game (the rulebook uses terse boardgaming language), and played as a game. It can be much more than that, of course. (More about this below.)
I'm reminded of that apocryphal, unreliable comment attributed to Bryan Ansell about Stephen Baker's early prototype being a 'poor imitation of D&D', and Games Workshop revising it to become an 'actual game'. If that's true, I suspect Jervis Johnson had a hand in it. He knows how to make games that work. Once HQ reached North America it seems to have gone back in the 'imitation D&D' direction again, though I don't know if Baker had anything much to do with that re-interpretation.
Bareheaded Warrior wrote:I too, enjoy sandbox, open-world games, but for these to work the world has to have some serious self-generating mechanism, which HQ doesn’t, it relies on someone putting in the graft to make a Quest.
Maybe 'sandbox/open world' was the wrong choice of words. What I'm thinking of is a pre-built 'level' where there is a limited, confined environment, with various enemies and locations predetermined ... but you have a great deal of freedom in how you move around that environment.
Think of a classic 3D platformer like Super Mario 64 or Banjo-Kazooie, where you have a playfield level with a bunch of different activities in various places: hill to the east, meadow to the north, river to the south, small floating island overhead. You can run in any direction and find something of interest. There might be an ultimate objective to reach (the top of the hill for example), but you can get there by 2 or 3 different routes. And if you go exploring in any random direction you'll probably find some cool bonus like a special item.
I mentioned Goldeneye N64 because although it's a first-person shooter, it took inspiration from Mario 64 in its level design. One person or team built each level as a small but realistic environment, without knowing where the objectives or paths would be. e.g. a bunker complex, or a frigate, or a collection of huts around a radio dish in Siberia. Then someone else came along and decided that the player should do A here, find item B here and flick switch C here in order to finish the level. Because of this the player can take any route they like through the level (more or less) and complete the objectives in any order. The frigate level for example asks you to rescue hostages in various rooms, but you can roam around the ship and tackle it in any way you like--front to back, back to front, randomly running through the maze of interior corridors, etc. To some extent many older FPS had similar levels (Duke Nukem 3D and Doom for instance).
After Half-Life, though, the FPS genre moved more toward a strict corridor you're funnelled down, with various exciting things happening along the way like a Disneyland ride. Great fun the first time ... but repetitive if you play it again because the same things always happen in the same order, like a movie.
Deus Ex on the PC was a famous exception, as was System Shock 2. Come to think of it, a System Shock 2 level is probably the best analogue to a Heroquest map of all these examples. It's like a space dungeon: mostly long corridors and small rooms, all interconnected, in a mazelike environment you can go around and around in and get lost ... complete with actual wandering monsters even after you've cleared out every pre-set enemy.
Bareheaded Warrior wrote:The idea is that you play through GS, then buy the next expansion and the next expansion and between all those you create your own quests to bridge the gaps whilst they make a new expansion.
That might be how the NA edition approached it, but I don't think that was how the original game was designed. One of the great things about the quests in the base game rulebook is that you can treat it either as a campaign to play through in order, or as an assortment of 14 possible scenarios that you can pick and choose from at random.
The EU rulebook says "pick a quest and play it." If you want to play through several in a row, then later in the rulebook it recommends doing it in order, but you don't have to (except the last three). Heck, you can pick a random quest from Kellar's Keep and play that if you want--although it'll be a challenge.
Even the expansions can theoretically be played in any order, because as a kid you might only own one. KK and RotWL were even marketed that way. I managed to get KK as a kid, but not Return of the Witch Lord because it was sold out when my birthday came around. (I ended up with Ogre Horde instead.)
The original intent of HQ (though not necessarily the North American interpretation) was to appeal to the mass market. Mass market family games in those days meant taking it off the shelf, playing
one game and putting it back. Ludo, chess, Monopoly, etc. Or you'd reset the game and play it again, over and over. The idea of stringing several games together in a linear sequence was a foreign and bizarre concept to many of us. Heroquest introduced that 'campaign' concept to us ... but we didn't necessarily start out by playing it that way.
Sometimes we picked a favourite quest to play as a one-off. Sometimes we played the same quest over and over because we were playing it with different groups of friends. Often we might not have a chance to properly play through a campaign at all. The game had to work as a typical mass-market boardgame, with replay value,
as well as the extra gravy of an ongoing campaign or making your own quests.
Arguably, the difficulty in the EU base game doesn't scale well to the increasing power of the players if you play through it in order. The quests don't get hard enough fast enough to keep up with the players' equipment purchases and Quest Treasure finds. But that's because the quests are also meant to be playable as one-off games. You can just grab the box and play Melar's Maze or Castle of Mystery with fresh heroes, and have a solid chance of succeeding. In fact it's probably more exciting that way because there's more danger and risk. The ones later in the book will be more challenging, but they're not impossible.
As a kid, age 10, I rarely had the opportunity to get a bunch of other kids together on a regular basis and play all the way through HQ. Teenagers might be able to do that, but not a kid like me with no other kids in my immediate neighbourhood. I had to rely on my parents driving me around and organising visits to friend's houses on the other side of town. I might get one day at most, at a birthday party or something, and get through 2-3 quests before we went off to do something else, like swim in the pool or go for a bike ride. Then I'd never see that particular combination of other kids in the same place at the same time again for months or years. Very little chance of a 'campaign'. I could only do that with my brother, and two-player HQ is a bit dull because one person is controlling all the heroes in perfect cooperation. So when I played HQ 'properly', with three or more people, it was in fits and starts--often with new players who would only get to play it just that one time. You betcha I played The Trial and Sir Ragnar and Lair of the Orc Warlord a few times over! Did it work? Absolutely. Was it fun? Absolutely.
One of my fondest HQ memories from my childhood was bringing the game to a 'boardgame day' in the last week of school term, in grade 6 or 7. I played it with four other kids who had never played it before. Which quest did we pick? Barak Tor, Barrow of the Witch Lord. Why? No idea. Probably just seemed interesting. They went in with fresh heroes and it was great. Three took the regular path toward the falling block, but the Wizard found the secret doors near the stairway and went off in the opposite direction alone. Then he turned a corner and met a Gargoyle.
"RUN AWAY!"
Once again this probably comes back to the fact that the EU game lets players compete or cooperate as they wish, and is survivable enough for one hero to explore on their own. That means that playing the same quest again with just one new/different player can be entertaining. They'll go do something unexpected and ridiculous like open Grak's door before anyone has found the equipment, despite the warnings and pleadings of the other players.
Incidentally, I'm fond of 'The Trial' because it's designed like a kind of one-shot demo scenario. If you only play ONE game of Heroquest, 'The Trial' is a good one, because it showcases all the monsters and all the furniture, and provides a high level of challenge--while not involving anything complicated like traps or secret doors (in the EU version). I don't really treat it as part of a proper campaign myself.
Bareheaded Warrior wrote:This means that they tend to be fairly linear (not completely linear), the art is disguising that so that from the inside, so for the players it feels less linear than it actually is.
Linear?
The base game quests are far from linear. (Again, speaking of the EU edition.) Almost all of them have several routes to the objective. Some don't even HAVE an 'objective room' as such, like Bastion of Chaos (where you have to hunt down and kill every last monster on the map). The masterpiece that is Melar's Maze has no fewer than three ways to reach the objective room, plus side branches and tricks and dead ends.
In 'Legacy of the Orc Warlord' you might run into Grak and his mates right at the start before you find your equipment, or find your gear first and him last after a long trek around the edges of the map, or some other thing. You'd think Barak Tor would have to be linear in order to wake the Witch Lord at the right moment, but you can go around it in two directions. Even in 'The Trial' you can wander freely around the place in any direction and thoroughly loot the tombs before you bother with Verag's chamber.
Then there are quests that are semi-linear, with one main route, and a secondary zone to get yourself lost in and maybe find some nifty treasure. Sort of a primary and secondary objective, or a consolation prize for failing to reach the main prize.
There are only a few quests that are genuinely linear. 'Lair of the Orc Warlord' gets away with it because it's so short and cosy. 'Race Against Time' is linear with one distracting side-branch (with a treasure reward), but it's short too. In any case, I get the feeling that quest was meant to have some kind of timer mechanic that was left out for whatever reason.
Again, all this is in service to HQ's original design intent--which was for 10-12 year old kids to compete with each other or cooperate as they saw fit, and split up and go off on their own to explore if they wanted to.
Warning, rant ahead ...
Many of us have an idea that in a dungeon crawl 'the party' should stick together at all times. But the best thing about EU Heroquest (ahem) is that the party DOESN'T have to stick together.
It's probably a lot more practical to let everyone split up in a boardgame, when you can see where everyone is at all times, than it is in a pen and paper RPG, when you'd have to ask half the players to step out of the room or pass them secret notes or whatever because they're at the other end of the dungeon. Yet many dungeon crawlers since then (in my limited experience) seem to rigidly stick to this idea that the party has to advance in a group. If you do that then, really, only one player is doing any actual exploring: the leader, or the toughest guy who takes point. The Barbarian in HQ's case. The other three players are just along for the ride waiting for something to happen. It's kind of dull, really. I love Warhammer Quest (1995) but you're prohibited from going more than one room away from the leader with the lantern, and it's suicidal to do so anyway. (In fact it's suicidal just to go down a WHQ dungeon in the first place, but that's another story.)
You don't explore; 'the
group' explores. Which ends up feeling like a fairground ride shunting you along a linear sequence of rooms and corridors, waiting for the next event.
In classic EU HQ you don't have to wait. You can just turn left when everyone else turns right and go see what's down
that passage instead of
this one. Even if cooperating you can all spread out across the board to check all the doors instead of hanging around each other all the time. It means that each player is exploring on their own instead of 'the party' exploring (which really means the leader). And if 'the party' does stick together, at least there are several ways to go and everyone can discuss which one to try first.
I don't think it's a coincidence that arguably the worst quest in the base game, 'Prince Magnus' Gold', is a long linear spiral that barely even has any side branches to investigate. Effectively it means that only one hero is doing the exploring, such as it is, and the other three are just following in his footsteps with nothing much to do for most of the quest, except help fight the occasional monster. And even the leader is barely even exploring because he's funnelled down what amounts to a long, long corridor. (This is another quest that feels like it was meant to have something else in it, like being chased by monsters after you reach the treasure or something, but it was never implemented in the published version.)
People whinge about Kellar's Keep being a boring slog ... and they're right. I used to think it was just the sheer number of enemies to hack through one at a time. But it just occurred to me last night that the linearity might be a big culprit.
Almost all of the quests in KK are basically a line from A to B. Go from this door on the edge of the map to this other door on the other side of the map, with a zigzag line in between and a series of scripted encounters with monsters along the way (ambush rooms, skeletal Dwarf warriors, etc.) Once you notice it you can't un-notice it. There's not much in the way of exploring to be done. Occasional extra rooms and so on, yes, but any side branches tend to be short dead ends. Only a couple of KK quests - The Great Citadel and The East Gate off the top of my head (if I'm remembering the names right) feel like proper Heroquest, with an expansive environment you can roam around in and tackle in different ways. And only one or two are even semi-linear (like the last one, Grin's Crag, with one true path and a couple of fake-out zones).
KK is basically Prince Magnus' Gold plus a double helping of monsters,
all the way through. No wonder people give up halfway through the quest pack!
(However, Kellar's Keep also contains a spectacular example of classic HQ exploration. One quest has two different exits--one of which leads to the secret quest Belorn's Mine. The fact that the NA edition forces you to
always go through Belorn's Mine so you don't "miss a quest" is a glaring example of the NA designers missing the point. Exploration is in the DNA of HQ and they took out one of the greatest bits of exploration in the whole game!)
Heroquest in its original form wasn't built to be played as a linear game on linear maps. If you play it that way it feels like it's got the brakes on all the time. The occasional linear quest is fine as a change of pace. But usually, you should be unsure where to go next. If you know where to go next (because there's only one obvious route) then it just becomes an exercise in rolling combat dice.
/rant
Of course, you're not arguing for an obviously linear path of the Prince Magnus' Gold type. You're arguing for what I call 'semi-linear', where there is one true path disguised by side tracks and extras, so players aren't sure if they're going the 'right' way or not. Which works well enough in HQ and I have no real issue with a quest done like that. But it's not the same as true non-linearity, where there are
several right ways. Which brings me to ...
Bareheaded Warrior wrote:Within the context of the game and the players (excluding the GM obviously), I’m not clear on the difference between creating an illusion or feeling of choice and exploration and presenting actual choice and exploration within the context of a game which is itself an illusion.
Well, 'creating an illusion or feeling of choice and exploration' might be best defined in the game Super Metroid, which has a single predefined linear path you're meant to take through the game ... but it doesn't feel like it because you roam freely around the underground maze trying to figure out where to go next.
Actual choice and exploration can be seen in something like Melar's Maze in HQ.
Linear: "I know where this game wants me to go next."
Creating the illusion of choice and exploration: "Which way do I go?" There's only one answer. But you don't know what it is.
Actual choice and exploration: "Which way do I go?" There are several possible answers. Plus some tricks and trolling dead ends.
Bareheaded Warrior wrote:As mentioned above, the Quest as written has 5 possible routes of which only one actually leads to the objective so the only variability here is how many other paths the heroes go down before they find the one that leads to the objective, and as the heroes don’t and can’t know in advance which path leads to the objective then it isn't really a choice, it is just random. Roll a red die, 1-5 you have taken the wrong path, roll again, roll a 6 and you have achieved your objective.
'Choice' doesn't necessarily mean '
informed choice where you know the consequences in advance'.
In fact, choice when it comes to exploration is the opposite of a meaningful choice, because if you knew what was there beforehand in order to choose, there wouldn't be any unknowns, so you wouldn't be exploring in the first place.
The essence of HQ is that you don't know what's down the next passage or around the next corner. But you get to decide if you'll go investigate by yourself--and reap the rewards if there are any to find--or if it's safer to stay with other players at the cost of letting them have all the fun of finding out what comes next and probably grabbing treasure before you can. "I'm going to go this way and see what happens."
Anyway, the other paths aren't necessarily 'wrong'. You can find gold and a potion in one of the other routes. (And a fake-out empty trap chest in another.) You can also have fun fighting monsters, which is an 'objective' all by itself when you're ten years old. If the player who finds Sir Ragnar keeps all the reward gold for him- or herself, at least you got something out of it too.
In the other non-linear quests, there are several 'right ways' to approach or move around the map and eventually reach the objective.