Ye Olde Inn

HeroQuest can be played with one, two, three, or four heroes. Obviously, the more heroes playing the better your chances. The written rules do not have any way to deal with the fact of changing the difficulty in any way when only one or two heroes are playing. How do you guys handle this? Do you reduce monster hp, do you remove some of the monsters from the quests, do you have the real life players control more than one hero so all heroes are in the game? I really do not like this last idea as I want each real life player to feel connected to their one hero. Playing more than one hero makes it feel more like a game, than a role-playing experience.

The HeroQuest base game handles it by allowing one player to control more than one hero and advises against using less.

Gold is divided among the survivors, so fewer heroes means more gold per hero as well.

But it is also true that having four heroes, especially controlled by one person, can make the game take longer (the player is having to manage more things, vs. each one having their turn ready to go just waiting for their turn).

Then again, one hero by themselves is going to be mobbed by monsters, not being able to take advantage so much of techniques like blocking doors and forming a protective screen when searching for treasure to avoid wandering monsters. They will have to fight (or run) from all monsters by themselves. And if they are not the Wizard or Elf, they may have a harder time healing (but the Barbarian and Dwarf have more body).

The Dwarf by himself is a good choice if you are going solo since he starts with the ability to disarm traps.

Still, there are solo rules out there. The Solo Quests in Barbarian and Elf Quest Pack are of little help since they have extreme (I would say broken) difficulty which is a common opinion shared on these forums.

The Dave Morris novels have solo quests (Growl of Thunder, Running the Gauntlet) which are much easier. These are probably too easy, but his technique was to have the solo hero discover a prisoner that can be freed and assists the solo hero as an npc. (Wizard solo finds a Barbarian ally... Barbarian solo finds a Wizard ally). The Ally may be a full fledged hero but may be wounded (not have full BP) or have some of their spells already used up. But here you can do whatever you like. Maybe you find a prisoner with no weapons and only 2 BP, but nearby is a chest or weapons rack which lets you load him up with some gear, a weapon and maybe even a piece of armor. The treasure all goes to you, or maybe he collects a fee for his services (which you can't get back; don't pay it and he runs off on his own).

In other words, you're adding mercenaries (which you normally can't hire until after you become a champion, but you can say they were prisoners rather than guys you went out and hired). But then you have the same issue as above, in which now the game takes longer because they have to decide how to manage multiple characters (but it gets easier with more hands on deck).

You can certainly do what you like, but the game as written is really intended to just have fewer players control more heroes. It is a game, in the end. Only the Japanese edition billed itself as a "Role Playing Game," despite the common themes.

Space Crusade also uses the "party" technique, in that game you control a squad even though your commander is the most important character.

Now then maybe you don't want to use four heroes. You could just say 2 heroes, and give them extra gear to make up for the lack of the others. Pair a magic user with a combat character. Or maybe give the two magic users some extra armor. If there's no Dwarf, add a Toolkit for the stronger character. Or perhaps just give the two heroes a couple of potions or spell scrolls (stuff that gets used up)? Again, up to you. Just keep in mind more cards = more time per turn if you're trying to keep things moving along.

This was something I struggled with as a kid, and for some reason we never really entertained the option of playing multiple characters. The game is clearly scaled to a full party of heroes, but we always just played one hero per player, which was usually 2 or 3. That explains why we died, a lot, and struggled mightily with many of the quests. Looking back at it now, and reading Kurgan's post, it is obvious that the easy answer should have been to always have a full party. What can I say though, we had a lot to learn back then.

I really like the mercenary idea. I never wandered outside the core game in to expansions, published quests, novels, or champion status, so never knew there would eventually be an official mercenary part of the game. I think I may start using that idea right from the start. I have a party of three. My idea was for each player to control one hero, and the fourth hero would be controlled by all players using a democratic vote to settle disputes. I did not like the idea so much. HeroQuest is not an RPG in the traditional sense, but I was hoping to use HeroQuest as a gateway in to more traditional pen and paper RPGs like D&D. So I wanted my players to focus solely on their own hero and the best way to develop them, even throwing some more flavor in to the mix by asking them to describe what it looks like when their character kills the orc or casts a spell.

I love the mercenary idea Kurgan mentioned. I am going to go with whichever hero no one chooses is available as a mercenary for hire. The mercenary will be free for the first quest, and I will come up with a 'pricing plan' for his services for each quest thereafter. I would control the mercenary as the DM allowing the mercenary to move at the beginning of the monsters' turn. The mercenary will not be able to search for treasure, traps, or secret doors. I will just control him basically as an extra attacker, meat-shield, or healer (whichever role the party is lacking). The mercenary will get no cut of the treasure or loot earned for completing quetes, so if the heroes want to equip him with more powerful items they will have to pay for that themselves.

This post deals with adjusting difficulty for number of players through order of play and potions.

Nice ideas Daedalus. So really the Solo Questing Elf and Barbarian should have each had 3 healing potions! That would have made them a lot more survivable...

ATOH gave the full party 4 full potions each [Edit: should have been FIVE, oops], if I recall correctly, so that was saying something about the level of difficulty they were anticipating.

In my youth we typically had one player controlling 4 heroes or two players with 2 heroes each. This makes the game a little easier since you could pool your money and buy what you need most for the character that needs it. (This is particularly true if your second hero is the Wizard.)

You could control one hero that has a total of 24 body points, can use all 12 magic spells, starts with a broadsword and dagger, can disarm traps on anything but a black shield, and can search the same room for treasure up to 4 times!

That still doesn't stop him from being mobbed of course...