The Experiment

[Gold Bearer]

I thought he moved towards the door after searching and I missed this post.

You can't search in the middle of the movement. You can't search if you already searched for treasure.

My bad.

[Anderas]

So this is the map after Orc and Goblin moved... and then Gold Bearer.





After, Kitch and his Barbara can still go

[Kitch1982]

Movement

Kitch1982 rolled 2 6-sided dice:

3 south

[Anderas]

I remove the white sheets now
Kitch has still some movement points

[Kitch1982]

I'll search for traps and eot

[Anderas]

No traps

Both, Orc and Goblin move up the stairs. You hear their laughing in the distance.

[Kitch1982]

Lol the little swines! I assume that's the end of the quest? Although I would probably search that lower room for treasure so perhaps give me a final treasure card. If it's a wandering monster I'll fight hopefully it's a treasure horde

[Anderas]

A treasure Horde is it not, but:





And yes indeed, this quest is over, except if you want to play the final turns to reach the exit.

Outside the dungeon, you find traces. One spoor shows the Orc and the Goblin disappearing in the forest. The other one was coming from you, when you have been dragged into the dungeon. The second surely leads back into the forest and then to the village, where you know you would find the pathfinder who was betraying you. Maybe he knows more, if asked intensely....
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so was the plan. Have one side quest per quest; and let you decide what to do next. No Side Quest would ever disappear, but the longer you let it go, the more difficult they would be, until after three or for turns not solving it, it would come back to you, in one or the other way. Sooner or later one of the side quests would get old and come back.

However, it will not happen. With my kid, a full time job and a house to renovate, i found out that it is increasingly difficult for me even to keep the pace of one update per day; and i did the updates under the pressure to do it in less than 10 minutes in the little time frame that my daughter would give me. This is not how a game should be - it should be fun. I think it is easier to meet an evening and play a quest, quick in one evening per Quest, and with personal contact.

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However, the Experiment was there to test the rerolls. I think, with the original Hero Quest system is not suited to support the rerolls. A Reroll is most beneficial with the best chance - in HQ it is best to reroll skulls, second best to reroll white shields, and not worth at all to reroll black shields. That's plain wrong.

If you introduce rerolls, they should offer a real and free choice between attack, defense, movement and other things, in order to have real tactical choices to be made which would add fun. So, the first thing to change would be the attack dice: It shall have the same amount of successes for attack and for defense, and for everybody. For sure, that would change everything else as well. I don't know if it is worth it or not to introduce a deep root change like that.

In our special case, of course there was the added difficulty of having a PBP game, which is SLOW each time one player hands over the action to somebody else. It is even slower if you do that several times per turn because of reroll decisions. That was the second reason i never rerolled for defense - and Gold Bearer warned me beforehand that this would happen. You're right, thanks!

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Sure thing, I calculated the quest to have 15-18 BP of damage for you. In the end, i think it was 21 or 22 BP of damage that i really dealt. A little bit of the additional damage was coming from a wandering monster, but the rest was close enough to the calculated damage to say the calculation works, more or less. Additional damage because of rerolls was equalized by the superstrong spells of Stormy.
To be honest, the calculation said it would be "between zero and 36 points of damage, with the peak between 12 and 24". Which is good enough.

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Gold Bearer, for Stormy I was already giving feed back in another thread. I was entirely honest, maybe a little bit too much. In very short: I would give her 5 Body Points at least, so that she survives an attack even if there was accidentally bad conditions. I would also remove the most of the "any place on Board" and "Entire Room" capabilities; which are too strong. Not in this quest, because most of the time i had just two or three monsters in a room; but imagine a room full of skeletons or something similar... to strong.

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Thanks a lot for your participation!
Sorry Kitch. Perhaps you can use the additional last 25 Gold Coins in a Quest of somebody else.

[Gold Bearer]

Gold Bearer, for Stormy I was already giving feed back in another thread. I was entirely honest, maybe a little bit too much. In very short: I would give her 5 Body Points at least, so that she survives an attack even if there was accidentally bad conditions. I would also remove the most of the "any place on Board" and "Entire Room" capabilities; which are too strong. Not in this quest, because most of the time i had just two or three monsters in a room; but imagine a room full of skeletons or something similar... to strong.

I didn't see that, I'll take a look. There's no way I'm giving the storm wizard 5BP! 4BP would be too much, that's standard wizard BP. The lowered BP and movement is to ballance the combined spells and extra spell set. The only ones (apart from the ones that use three spells) that can be cast anywhere on the board are the ones that include a spell that can normally do that, and cyclone because the pass through rock part allows the spell to pass through rock. The ones that use three spells should definitely be anywhere on the board because they take three spells to cast. In a room full of monsters any combined spell is probably going to miss some targets and if they've got multiple BP the ones that are hit will probably survive. Besides, why raise the BP and make the spells worse? That's one boost and one downgrade which would make the character less distinctive.

I knew the rerolls would be total pain in the arse but I thought I'd give it a go. Also it's very weird to give the monsters with shields extra BP. They should have extra defence dice, BP is natural toughness without armour.

The quest itself was nice though. The sign was a lovely touch.

[Anderas]

I wanted Monsters with BP not with defense dice and I was just searching for more or less fitting symbols. The shields, ok. I have found some small stars, between one and five stars, that could be an alternative.


Background: Monster defense dice are very weak. You give a Monster 5 defense dice, everybody cries "what it is so strong"; but it is in reality close to nothing. Give them white shield defense, and it is a different thing for sure.

The BP on the other hand, they are reliable; but they don't remove too much of the character of the monster. For example the 3 BP Goblin, he is stronger than the EU Fimir with 1 BP; but he is still a Goblin with 2 Attack and 1 Defense, as it should be. A Goblin with 10 defense dice (which would be the same strength) on the other hand, is not really a Goblin.

If you want to know the basis of my calculations; these values still give you a pretty good overview which Monster is stronger than the others..
You see, Grak, the 4/4 Monster with one BP, is weaker than a standard Orc with 2 BP.
This was pretty convincing. Don't raise AT/DE to the sky, rather give the guys a BP more here and there.

Monster	AT	DE	BP	Average Loss of BP if Ini is on Hero Side	Average Loss of BP if Ini is on Monster side
Goblin EU/US/YeOlde	2	1	1	0,3	0,8
Orc with spear	2	2	1	0,7	1,6
Goblin Boss	2	1	2	0,9	1,4
Fimir EU	3	3	1	0,9	1,9
Orc with spear and 2 BP	2	2	2	1,1	1,6
Goblin Elite Fighter	2	1	3	1,5	2,1
Grak	4	4	1	1,7	3,1
Orc YeOlde	3	2	2	1,8	2,8
Fimir US	3	3	2	2,2	3,2

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For Stormy; I think even the standard wizard has not enough BP. My opinion only, of course, he should have 5 BP.
And yes, I would make Stormy "less distinctive" that's true. I don't like all-or-nothing characters. You could kill him in one round, so he has no effect. Or he can speak his spells, but then, his combined spells are much stronger than 2 or 3 single spells, so they are too strong. They have the possibility to kill an entire quest, which is bad.

I always hated RPG magicians, who could do nothing apart killing the arch-enemy with his little finger. Hours of doing nothing and saving his energy, until the big final meeting of the Heroes with the villain that should be the high point.... then he puts all his power into one spell. And the adventure did not have a final climax point, but instead, it has become a low point because it was over far too quick and will hardly be remembered by anyone.

In my opinion, any magician must be constructed in a way that he can't destroy the quest climax in any way. Two things not: No "I stay back and heal you every three rounds so that you can continue standing in the way of the dragon without danger" on the one hand, and no "I wiggle my finger, and the final fight that is supposed to last five rounds is over in a quarter of a round".

Best and most convincing reason: Imagine standing one or two Stormy type magicians on the side of the evils. The Heroe's group get's hit by the combined Fire spells, and sees no enemy so they can't defend themselves. Next round, combined earth spells. Next round, combined water spells. Round 4, combined Air spells. Some of them would die without having seen the enemy, maybe most of them.
Or imagine Stormy in "the forgotten Legion". It's a quest, intended for very experienced heroes. Stormy could solve it single-handedly while being beginner.



Bah, ok. That is, of course, only my opinion.