The Wizard and game play questions

[Kurgan]

Each character will be different and still have something about them that will make them appealing to play even after 13 quests. But if you'd rather just have good rolls instead of having to manage a steadily growing pile of cards (even though those cards are the key to massive power), there's still a reason to pick say, the Barbarian rather than the Wizard. But if we think of it as the heroes working together as a team, rather than each trying to out perform each other and get all the glory individually, it's less important, than the fact that they survive. I know certain GMs who will basically torture the Heroes until he's gotten his kicks, then let them crawl to the finish line. That's another way to do it.

But there will still be charm and fun in playing a set of basic heroes with a new group. I did something like that with the four legacy of sorasil inspired characters playing the Japanese quests. I'd love to finish that someday... (or even start it over from the beginning).

Another great thing to look forward to about magic will be for the Dark Company... where you have several characters that block all skulls with only 1 black shield. Magic still affects them as it would any other enemy, so there's another perk.

Having a hard first quest is really something that was intended since EU 2nd edition. The Maze is pretty easy, but the Trial is hard, and the official Solo Quests are extremely difficult (but with some good rewards/equipment if you happen survive). One of the first quests my gaming group played together was one of the LAST KK quests. It was very difficult and the boss was incredibly tough, but there were also massive treasures, that basically let us buy whatever we wanted on the next quest.

I guess the theory behind some of these "beginning" quests was that you would fail multiple times, until you really learned the game and worked hard for it, but many of us don't have the patience (or frankly the time) anymore. Hence why many saw "Rogar's Hall" as less of a training quest than an exercise in frustration. Having a super hard game requiring memorization in your seemingly endless freetime is a strategy that worked for NES games (that, or it pressured you into spending money on tip magazines,"game counselor" hotlines and special controllers... they tried to keep Game Genie off the market!).

The design thinking behind lots of games today is more like, the gameplay is less important than the story... video games that are created to be more like interactive movies than traditional games where you win or lose. So you slog through so you can watch all the cinemas and then you hang it up and never play it again (unless there's a lot of useless crap to unlock and you're a "completist" freak... nowadays you just buy that stuff right?). This in contrast to the old game style philosophy where it was just about mastering it to get great scores, or just enjoying the gameplay itself and the "endings" were afterthoughts, if they existed at all (or competitive games where nobody cared about beating M. Bison or saving the world, it was all about crushing your human opponents and placing on the leaderboards).

Though I've never played WHQ, I like the idea that you can just play the dang game OR you can overlay the RPG stuff on top if you like that better. I like the minimalism of classic HQ. The "story" are the little bumpers in between, its really about enjoying the gameplay, and if you want to imagine a little extra here and there, fine.

My thought for mixing up the quests is that the early ones are so familiar, I'd want the challenge to be less about memorization (none of the classic elements are lost in the process). As for Heroes not working together and doing silly stuff, it happens, and it gives the bad guys another chance.

[iKarith]

So you slog through so you can watch all the cinemas and then you hang it up and never play it again (unless there's a lot of useless crap to unlock and you're a "completist" freak...

I feel personally attacked by this relatable content. Am I the only one who doesn't get MMORPGs? There you are, deeply invested in the emotional story of protecting the princess so she can unite the two kingdoms to face the looming darkness. She turns to you and says, "Brave warrior, I thank thee for thy courage and tireless commitment against the forces of…" and in barges some doof named SiRKewLDooD shouting "LOOOLL U R such N00BZ!" as he smashes every clay pot in the in the room even though there isn't anything in pots in this game … He again shouts "WTF IS THIS SHIZZ!!@!" as he barges out…

And the princess says, "Um, what was that?"

…anyway…

Each character will be different and still have something about them that will make them appealing to play even after 13 quests. But if you'd rather just have good rolls instead of having to manage a steadily growing pile of cards (even though those cards are the key to massive power), there's still a reason to pick say, the Barbarian rather than the Wizard. But if we think of it as the heroes working together as a team, rather than each trying to out perform each other and get all the glory individually, it's less important, than the fact that they survive. I know certain GMs who will basically torture the Heroes until he's gotten his kicks, then let them crawl to the finish line. That's another way to do it.

My style is more to come up with something that's achievable for the players, but also to not be afraid to modify things a bit. Not Japanese HQ "your goal is to make sure they win, but make them think you're trying to defeat them", but if I realize I've misjudged the difficulty… I might need to make changes.

If the heroes just plow through something and I intended it to be a more difficult encounter, I might have to make sure the next one is a little more challenging, on the fly, perhaps. But if it's starting to look like the heroes didn't have a chance … I might make a mid-course correction the other way.

It's a bit of a balancing act. Players have to have a fair shot. Not necessarily an easy one—if it's supposed to be hard, then it's supposed to be hard. Otherwise you don't have the epic knock-down, drag-out fight with the orcs we did after we got Rogar out and we wouldn't have had to come up with a clever way to get him out and then chop our way through! If there wasn't some genuine risk it might not work out … it wouldn't have been much fun, would it?

(Not to say I don't enjoy occasionally just obliterating a few monsters with overwhelming rolls… Just … sometimes it doesn't work out.

But there will still be charm and fun in playing a set of basic heroes with a new group. I did something like that with the four legacy of sorasil inspired characters playing the Japanese quests. I'd love to finish that someday... (or even start it over from the beginning).

Another great thing to look forward to about magic will be for the Dark Company... where you have several characters that block all skulls with only 1 black shield. Magic still affects them as it would any other enemy, so there's another perk.

Yeah but aren't there like a dozen of them PLUS the chaos warriors, with several body points each, and the wizard has TWO spells that can affect them, single-targeting, one dealing up to one BP, and the other dealing up to two? And isn't the point of The Dark Company that you're supposed to find them all and kill them all? (Deliberately not looking at this stuff because I'd prefer that I not see something that'd give me an undue advantage whenever I get there…) And the wizard won't recharge his spells at any point during all of that… The profound advantage of the wizard is a little less advantageous when when his GREAT BOON works twice, is gone after the first part of … isn't it like eight or ten quests … with no recharge.

Part of that is Dark Company was designed to be hard by EU rules. Everything's supposed to have one BP, but have massively more defense, so it takes relatively a ton more hits to actually take anything down. By NA rules, since they have otherwise NA BP each, it seems like if they've got enough potions they can just block them in a room and have elf and dwarf on either side pommeling them with missile weapons while the barbarian casts Stabmore and just keep passing the Barbarian healing potions until Zargon manages to whiff rolls to wipe them all out.

That's doable given enough money saved going in … but it kinda sounds like D&D 5E boss fights with superhero characters… The secret of D&D is that every time the characters get stronger, so do the bosses. So where your character could take out a monster in one or two hits at level two or three, at level 15 or 16, the boss fight is a multi-hour long slog where you inflict 100+ HP of damage in a turn and the boss just kinda says, "hmm, that itches a little."

Old grognard D&D players like low level and scaled fights because the fights wind up being like the orc gauntlet… Yeah, there's a lot of them and just a few of us, but we can take 'em down in just a few hits … but if we miss a roll or two in a row, the elf dies. Hope you've got some healing.

I don't know if the NA localization of Dark Company has given much thought to the slog factor.

Having a hard first quest is really something that was intended since EU 2nd edition. The Maze is pretty easy, but the Trial is hard, and the official Solo Quests are extremely difficult (but with some good rewards/equipment if you happen survive). One of the first quests my gaming group played together was one of the LAST KK quests. It was very difficult and the boss was incredibly tough, but there were also massive treasures, that basically let us buy whatever we wanted on the next quest.

I guess the theory behind some of these "beginning" quests was that you would fail multiple times, until you really learned the game and worked hard for it, but many of us don't have the patience (or frankly the time) anymore. Hence why many saw "Rogar's Hall" as less of a training quest than an exercise in frustration. Having a super hard game requiring memorization in your seemingly endless freetime is a strategy that worked for NES games (that, or it pressured you into spending money on tip magazines,"game counselor" hotlines and special controllers... they tried to keep Game Genie off the market!).

I seriously know people who use e.g. Game Genie to make things harder. Final Fantasy 1? Sure, let's let's patch the bugs and … oh, guarding the mirage tower teleporter? Yeah, it's not a Blue Dragon anymore. No, we decided that the BlueD was just not a good guardian. Went instead with a little encounter with WARMECH.

This in contrast to the old game style philosophy where it was just about mastering it to get great scores, or just enjoying the gameplay itself and the "endings" were afterthoughts, if they existed at all (or competitive games where nobody cared about beating M. Bison or saving the world, it was all about crushing your human opponents and placing on the leaderboards).

My favorite game of the early era, and honestly my favorite game of any era if I'm being completely honest, is Chrono Trigger. It was very heavy on the story, especially for the time. It had 12 endings, not all of them were amazing or even amazingly different. But the point of them was that your actions mattered, and some of the outcomes were hilarious. The game's about time travel, so … yeah, there should be multiple endings!

Of course there was one ending that every player was going to see at least once…

https://youtu.be/Va-jMGrUFo8

(Don't turn your speakers up when you don't hear anything at first.)

Though I've never played WHQ, I like the idea that you can just play the dang game OR you can overlay the RPG stuff on top if you like that better. I like the minimalism of classic HQ. The "story" are the little bumpers in between, its really about enjoying the gameplay, and if you want to imagine a little extra here and there, fine.

My thought for mixing up the quests is that the early ones are so familiar, I'd want the challenge to be less about memorization (none of the classic elements are lost in the process). As for Heroes not working together and doing silly stuff, it happens, and it gives the bad guys another chance.

The best thing about HeroQuest is that a lot of the story is the one you create along the way. Years from now, Bob the Orc is still going to be funny. Nobody is gonna have any idea who the hell Bob is or what he did that was so memorable. It's always going to be a massive Noodle Incident. Same's ultimately true of any game where creativity and storytelling is part of the game, but the details aren't well-defined.

[Kurgan]

And while I haven't tried to spoil everything for myself either, as the Zargon of my playing group (and so far, for this one) I've checked to see if i need any special assets or whether a quest might be doable for a certain situation.

The Dark Company is massive (and its meant to be played, at minimum after you've played the 14 quests, which virtually ensures your Heroes are going to be maxed out in terms of gear unless you seriously got a TPK on the last quest or so), it throws more stuff at you than any quest pack (up until the later group quests of EQP/BQP). The goal isn't to kill every enemy, that is virtually impossible (they "respawn" when you change boards), rather it's to seek and destroy a particular boss set, that's it. So you could actually run away from enemies until you find those guys and take the win. It's by no means easy, but magic is the key to destroying characters with those particular rules. To say more I'd be spoiling it all. NA rules don't rely upon single body point enemies (and the wizard becoming barbarian-like in his combat via artifacts), but it also lets you escape death with healing AND hoard potions. Unless you have nothing else to do, DC will surely be a multi-session adventure. Rogar's Hall has about as many enemies as a typical Dark Company board (minus the special enemies that have super defense).

Just checked and it is absolutely feasible for the Heroes to have bought everything they could want from the standard Armory by the end of the main campaign. You'll get some huge bonuses for completing KK, BQP and EQP (BQP is definitely harder of the two in terms of monster BP thrown at you, but you do get to blow money on mercs). Depending upon when Mercs become available, that is how you move towards evening the odds (while blowing your bank account). Sure, you'll buy the odd potion here and there, but the game gives you a pretty good amount of them as is, and a good number of the Alchemist Shop potions are only useful to the Barbarian or Elf. Then again, like Mercs, at a certain point, you can buy as many as you can afford. That doesn't make any difference to the Wizard of course, because he's the same throughout in relation to the other heroes, without the homebrew upgrades.

[Kurgan]

Revisiting this old (and great) topic....

We see the recently released 2021 Hasbro Remake allows the NA Wizard to be buffed by allowing him once again to buy Bracers (for a premium price, 550 gold!) and the fact that the Cloak is (still) an artifact that only he can use [well, there's the matter of whether he has to fight the optional Warlock hero for it if they are both in the party remains unresolved], ends up making it fairly decent. Due to a pretty obvious oversight, a loophole is present wherein he can buy a fairly cheap melee weapon (the Hand Axe) as soon as he can afford it and boom, has now has a previously unavailable (admittedly one time use) ranged weapon of 2 attack dice (well, if he wants to blow money on throwing axes he certainly can, but potions are probably a better idea). And he can STILL get the Wizard's Staff later (again, assuming the Warlock doesn't get to it first). In any case he can have his maximum attack dice pretty early on (even if the 2 dice diagonal strike will have to wait for the artifact).

Courage duration is clarified as "line of sight" so that limits the maximalist interpretations if you're playing it strictly by the text.

The fact that they finally let you officially buy healing potions (previously you had to wait until the later NA quest packs and they were uber expensive) is a big deal as well, even if they only heal 2 BP for 200 gold.

Wizard is buffed further in Crypt of Perpetual Darkness as he can wear the Crown of Shadows for yet another defend die.

Prophecy of Telor (Mythic questbook by the legendary Stephen Baker) potentially allows the Wizard to REALLY shine as well (spoilers if I say more).

If the Wizard is the first to die in Spirit Queen's Torment (Teos Abadia's Mythic questbook) he can come back (one time) as the Orcish Bard, but your mileage may vary there...