Should I bring the D20 into HeroQuest ?

[iKarith]

I've actually been thinking the opposite direction lately after a few minutes looking at Knave, the work of Ben from Questing Beast. What if HQ didn't have classes? What if you allocate points where you want them for the character you want to play and your equipment decides what you can do (but maybe your point allocation describes how well?) And you can only carry so much…

I haven't gotten very far with it … just to think that this suggests that magic would need to be stored in magic artifacts (ala wands and scrolls in D&D) … why? Ah, maybe it takes too long to cast a spell in battle with a spellbook, so you'd create or acquire vessels for the magical energy of an appropriate type. They'd be expensive to buy and you'd have to pay to have them recharged if you couldn't do it.

[Count Mohawk]

Hero Quest, to me, is two things:
1) It's a dungeon crawler. Where D&D is more about roleplay, Hero Quest focuses more on the "board game" aspect. Base game Hero Quest could do with a fair bit of additional tinkering to expand out the options, but the basics are there.
2) It uses the skull-and-shield dice. I have a lot of fun with the German colored dice, but you don't need those; you can get a surprising amount of granularity out of the OG white dice with a little clever thinking. To switch to other kinds of dice would, for me, detract from the nostalgia.

It's not a very "nuanced" opinion, but that's where I stand.

Now, for newcomers who don't have the nostalgia glasses on, I can see the appeal of converting to a d20 or other system. But before you go too far down the rabbit hole of changing the dice up, you should probably ask yourself: "what are the problems in Hero Quest's design and play that I am hoping to resolve?" D20s can solve some problems, but not others. Primarily I see them as a tool to increase granularity (20 faces instead of 6 means you have over 3 times as many possible outcomes). For other problems, however, you need different tools, as described by others in the thread.

[cornixt]

I've actually been thinking the opposite direction lately after a few minutes looking at Knave, the work of Ben from Questing Beast. What if HQ didn't have classes? What if you allocate points where you want them for the character you want to play and your equipment decides what you can do (but maybe your point allocation describes how well?) And you can only carry so much…

I like the idea of a classless HeroQuest. I'm working on a non-HQ RPG card game that has no classes - if you want to be a wizard then you buy magic cards for your deck, for a fighter you buy more combat cards, an all-rounder would buy a few of each, etc, but you can buy cards for any skill to build the kind of character you want rather than being hemmed into what the designer thinks a monk should be like and stuck on that narrow path of improvement. But I see it more as a D&D problem than a HQ problem.

HQ already has such a narrow selection with only a little space for upgrades, so I'm not sure how much you are really gaining by making it all class-agnostic. It seems like you are really just changing the body/mind points of an existing class and not calling it that name.

[Kurgan]

My players have TONS of class, thank you very much. Instead of calling it "class" I just call it "character" or "type." There are multiple humans, multiple elves, etc. it's more like a description of their basic job or training. The idea is taking the work out of having to come up with a character and customize their abilities.

You start with your pre-set stuff, give them a name (if you want) and then you "upgrade" by adding gear you buy with gold you found in the adventure (or earned by winning). I did add a basic advancement system that essentially just enhances the abilities you already have (or gives you more of the same) by winning/surviving a number of quests. To me that's all it needs to be, but others do what they like.

Not trying to turn HQ into D&D (not that there's anything inherently wrong with that if you want to do it at your table), and I realize the dice weren't invented for D&D merely popularized...

The only reason I'd bring other types of Dice in would be a more interesting way to draw a random number of something, than picking from a table. I'm more likely to roll a d6 or draw from a deck for that. But I could roll a d8 to draw a random monster or just shuffle the monster cards and draw one. It could play into the "Solo" quest or maybe in terms of "deathmatching" between two hero type characters. Wouldn't have to be of course... could use the movement dice or the combat dice to simulate probabilities.

If I had exactly 20 options for someone, rolling a D20 would work perfectly for that.