Ye Olde Inn

I constantly see people posting about empty chests being a mistake by the designers. This is to the contrary. Not every chest in life is full. It is no different than cupboards or weapon’s racks etc. Some Quests have a special note to find something, other Quests they are mere decoration. An empty chest can be useful to lure unsuspecting Heroes into certain danger. Other times just to take up space in a room. If a Quest note specifies the chest is empty than it is just that and they do not draw a treasure card. If there is no note than they precede to draw a card like any other empty room.

j_dean80 wrote:I constantly see people posting about empty chests being a mistake by the designers. This is to the contrary. Not every chest in life is full. It is no different than cupboards or weapon’s racks etc. Some Quests have a special note to find something, other Quests they are mere decoration. An empty chest can be useful to lure unsuspecting Heroes into certain danger. Other times just to take up space in a room. If a Quest note specifies the chest is empty than it is just that and they do not draw a treasure card. If there is no note than they precede to draw a card like any other empty room.

I see what you're saying, however the one glaring flaw with this argument is that many chests are marked as "Empty". If all non-marked chests are supposed to be empty, why are some of them occasionally marked as such while others aren't?

I may have read it wrong, but I believe the argument wasn't that unmarked chests were empty and you got no reward, but that unmarked chests got a treasure pull, just like unmarked tables, and unmarked bookshelves, and unmarked weapons racks.

Yes, an unmarked chest is just a piece of furniture, so you would draw a treasure card as any other empty room. If it explicitly says in the Quest notes that the chest is empty, then you do not draw a card.

The problem is that you don't really "interact" with chests.
You don't open chests or search chests - you just search the room for treasure.
There's a quest where a chest is surrounded by spear traps. That's totally redundant, since you technically don't even need to stand next to a chest to "open" it.

This is one thing I hope they change in the new version. Make chests a special piece of furniture, that can be interacted with, if you are adjacent to it, by using an "open chest"-action.

I just mentioned it in another thread that I'm hoping for some "advanced" optional rules and opening chests is something that belongs in those rules.

If the Quest notes for room A. state: “The treasure chest is empty.” I do not allow the Heroes to draw a treasure card. Going beside the chest or not doesn’t effect this.

I have a house rule if there is a chest in a room, you can still draw a treasure card which is a separate action and the treasure search has nothing to do with the chest itself. Chests can only be opened and searched if your character is standing on a square adjacent to it. It really doesn't affect game play other than:

1. Makes it more exciting for the players because they know there could be nothing, something, a trap in it or both.
2. Adds more personal experience of interacting within the games environment.
3. Makes it competitive for players to get to the chest to see what is inside.
4. Helps Zargon place key items such as keys, weapons, equipment, armor, scrolls etc. inside a chest instead of simply saying "You search the room for treasure only to find a scroll in the corner of the room".

Sometimes quest notes are long out of necessity, including all the special events and rules etc for that quest. Including a separate letter and/or line of text for every chest therefore isn’t always useful, when it’s easily assumed that a treasure chest without an attached note is just empty.
Of course, somebody might then ask “what’s the point of including an empty chest then?”. But I quite like them. Some chests contain treasure, some are trapped, some are simply a distraction. It keeps the Heroes on their toes and prevents things getting too predictable.

My rules for searching furniture are simple, and work extremely well; each room can only be searched once in total (not once per Hero), but each piece of furniture can also be searched individually. This sorts out the chest ambiguity and also stops the game getting boring/Morcar having to remember which Hero has searched which room.

As discussed on another topic, many people play that in order to open a chest a hero must be adiacent to it.
This is not an official rule but I guess it makes sense.