HQ, AHQ, and WHQ differences

[Davane]

It's easy enough to write quests ala standard HQ for them. I sort of get the impression that most people playing AHQ have made significant changes to the game to suit their play style and players.

Someone commented that GW at the time didn't really do much in terms of balance or even replayability so much. It sounded cool, so they put it in the game. I don't know if GW sort of figured players would fix it if it needed fixing after release, but they have done.

Actually, I've seen three different reviews of Cursed City and based on those, it seems they're still putting stuff in the game if it sounds good without taking balance into consideration. Two reviews noted that not all of the heroes are A-list material. One person had four heroes in one campaign and decided to have a second with the others. The second group had a much harder time doing the same things. If the game gets more longevity (or perhaps because it was so short-lived?) we'll likely see people who love the game try their hands at balancing it a little better.


It seems like GW figured players will figure out which heroes work better than others and may homebrew the deficiencies out of the game. Actually, it kinda seems like that's also how they do things today if I believe a couple of reviews of Cursed City I saw. Two different reviews noted that it has enough heroes you can pick two completely different teams, but that they're not all A-list hero material. Choose one set and you can breeze through a lot of stuff. Choose the other and it's going to be a challenge, at the very least. If the game gets any longevity (or perhaps particularly because it hasn't had any), people will try their hands at rebalancing things.

Be careful, despite the branding, the latest WHQ games are not the same as WHQ. It sounds strange, but they are Age of Sigmar dice-based systems, that reused the Warhammer Quest brand because they got it back from Fantasy Flight games because FF didn't replace Descent with WHQ...

Blackstone Fortress is actually set in the 40K universe, Shadows of Hammerhal received minimal support before being dumped, Cursed City is full of all sorts of shennegans, and the Silver Tower is just plain weird, but then again, it IS supposed to be about collecting 8 runes of magic in the tower of Tzeentch... My point is that NONE of these games actually represent WHQ mechanics in any way that resembles the original WHQ board game...

[iKarith]

I did know that all of the combat mechanics at least had changed. I was under the impression that the notion of general monsters and character monsters was in the original WHQ just like it was in AHQ, but I don't think anyone's ever directly said that was the case.

Moreover, after all of these games being available for approximately about ten minutes before being taken off the market as is GW's standard operating procedure I think, and saying they were not going to do that with Cursed City before immediately doing it with Cursed City and then lying about it "always being planned to be a limited release", well, one of those people who reviewed the game opined further that this would pretty seriously shake people's confidence in the WHQ brand, and in the company's boxed games in general.

I've said for some time now: If you want something made by GW and you see it for sale today, buy it today. It's not likely to be possible to buy it tomorrow, and perhaps never again. That fuels a certain FOMO for people, and I think the company knows this and isn't afraid to exploit it.

At least Hasbro's more up front in their attempts to do whatever it takes to separate you from your money, like honest bandits.

[Davane]

I'll have to get a move on with the HQ CERB so I can do "Combined English Rule Books" for AHQ and WHQ too. Although time consuming, I can't believe how fun the HQ CERB has been to put together, as it has really made me think about the rules and components of HQ in a deeper way than before.

The WHQ combat mechanics were like an upgraded version of AHQ combat mechanics, but built for action heroes. if I recall correctly, AHQ used the "to wound mechanic" but WHQ opted straight for the more D&D-like "+Strength, -Toughness & Armour, deduct from Wounds" mechanic. It wasn't overly original, but still fun.

The fun part was that they went from Deathzones in AHQ, to Pinning, which became a check like Ballistic Skill - you had to roll higher than a certain amount to be able to disengage. The Elf was never pinned, so had the ultimate freedom to be a complete git, but it was like 5+ for the Dwarf or 6+ for the Barbarian.

Even better, you had Deathblows, in which if you killed a monster, your attack would swing in an arc allowing you to attack an adjacent monster, so you could cleave your way through those hordes in swathes of death. You'd be unlikely to cleave through a Minotaur, but the times you'd see Heroes cleave through Orcs to land those deathblows on the boss monsters and whittle them down was pretty satisfying...

[iKarith]

I'll have to get a move on with the HQ CERB so I can do "Combined English Rule Books" for AHQ and WHQ too. Although time consuming, I can't believe how fun the HQ CERB has been to put together, as it has really made me think about the rules and components of HQ in a deeper way than before.

I'd probably make different decisions than you have—and my little project is not HQ but sort of a generic meta-rule-set for games LIKE HQ that's sufficiently not owned by anyone else that I can slap a Creative Commons license on the "SRD" (such that it is) and tell people to have at it, including in commercial products if they want.

There are several things that have been done that include products that WERE HQ-based that had the HQ dice swapped out at the last minute for standard d6 and a price tag slapped on them. Those folks should be warned that if Hasbro's lawyers come to the conclusion they did that, they're likely to get into a bit of trouble.



However if there's a very HQ-like system that they can base their definitely-not-HQ similar to but legally distinct from HQ projects on … then if they go up on DriveThruRPG, there's nothing anybody can say about it. In fact, I might just CC0 the thing which would mean "including me" and they wouldn't even necessarily have to give me credit for it. In fact I might do that just because it might not be fair to have something that could be a set of Steve Baker's 3-2-1 dice, a role to move rule, and predefined characters away from being HQ's rule book writ short. That's hardly a novel idea since the reason I can get away with it is there's a BUNCH of games based upon opposed rolls where some of my dice pool negates some of yours.

The WHQ combat mechanics were like an upgraded version of AHQ combat mechanics, but built for action heroes. if I recall correctly, AHQ used the "to wound mechanic" but WHQ opted straight for the more D&D-like "+Strength, -Toughness & Armour, deduct from Wounds" mechanic. It wasn't overly original, but still fun.

Doesn't have to be hugely original. Actually, it's fair to say that D&D's modern D20 mechanic is really simple and kinda fun. Most grognards have adopted it because it speeds combat, even if many of them grumble that THAC0 wasn't that hard.

The reason I like HQ's combat system so much is that it makes armor really effective against most weapons, except when it isn't—because armor is actually effective against most of the weapons you'd use against it, unless someone gets a lucky strike in. HQ reflects that mechanic. Maybe not perfectly, but conceptually.

The fun part was that they went from Deathzones in AHQ, to Pinning, which became a check like Ballistic Skill - you had to roll higher than a certain amount to be able to disengage. The Elf was never pinned, so had the ultimate freedom to be a complete git, but it was like 5+ for the Dwarf or 6+ for the Barbarian.

Even better, you had Deathblows, in which if you killed a monster, your attack would swing in an arc allowing you to attack an adjacent monster, so you could cleave your way through those hordes in swathes of death. You'd be unlikely to cleave through a Minotaur, but the times you'd see Heroes cleave through Orcs to land those deathblows on the boss monsters and whittle them down was pretty satisfying...

Does that take a long time to calculate? The Dungeon Dive started a game of AHQ using his modified solo rules which allow one search for treasure per room, but also use the threat tokens, some in exploration and some in combat, with others being temporarily discarded until you shift from one to the other … and it felt like it just took a long time to resolve things. Maybe it was that he was stopping to say what he was resolving next, but it felt like dice rolls and table lookups took a long time. The NA HQ does the best it can with that for Zargon by giving him a monster stat block table on the back of the screen, but AHQ doesn't really do that so well.

I assume though that players have made these tables as cheatsheets, but it seems like there might be too many to make that really convenient to do. The idea of having d12s made up that you can just roll to generate the dungeon without resorting to a table kind of makes sense in that regard.

I won't ever actually own WHQ I figure—there's ONE copy of the 1995 version of the game on eBay if I actually include 1995 in the search terms, and the asking price starts with a 9. It doesn't matter what the next two are, because I won't be spending that much on it.

I do understand that it came with a lot of minis though.

[Davane]

I'll have to get a move on with the HQ CERB so I can do "Combined English Rule Books" for AHQ and WHQ too. Although time consuming, I can't believe how fun the HQ CERB has been to put together, as it has really made me think about the rules and components of HQ in a deeper way than before.

I'd probably make different decisions than you have—and my little project is not HQ but sort of a generic meta-rule-set for games LIKE HQ that's sufficiently not owned by anyone else that I can slap a Creative Commons license on the "SRD" (such that it is) and tell people to have at it, including in commercial products if they want.

I'd be very interested to hear them and the reasoning behind such decisions. The aim is to have a core, consistent set of rules, with alternative options as house rules that can be used. Not in this thread though...

The WHQ combat mechanics were like an upgraded version of AHQ combat mechanics, but built for action heroes. if I recall correctly, AHQ used the "to wound mechanic" but WHQ opted straight for the more D&D-like "+Strength, -Toughness & Armour, deduct from Wounds" mechanic. It wasn't overly original, but still fun.

Doesn't have to be hugely original. Actually, it's fair to say that D&D's modern D20 mechanic is really simple and kinda fun. Most grognards have adopted it because it speeds combat, even if many of them grumble that THAC0 wasn't that hard.

The reason I like HQ's combat system so much is that it makes armor really effective against most weapons, except when it isn't—because armor is actually effective against most of the weapons you'd use against it, unless someone gets a lucky strike in. HQ reflects that mechanic. Maybe not perfectly, but conceptually.

The D20 mechanic isn't original, just branded. It could be argued that the D20 system was designed based on the SPECIAL system from Fallout, which predated it by almost a decade. That system just used percentile dice rather than a d20, but it was still d% + bonuses > DC/Opposed Roll. I actually converted the Traits and Perks from the Fallout series to D20. Maybe it's just great people thinking alike, but mostly, apart from a few key quirks, most systems have a lot of similarities when their play styles are similar, because what they are looking to do is provide a quick system the suits the purpose of the game.

In other words, it's like people refining the wheel. The core basics will be the same, regardless, because that's how wheels work, but every other refinement makes those wheels unique.

The fun part was that they went from Deathzones in AHQ, to Pinning, which became a check like Ballistic Skill - you had to roll higher than a certain amount to be able to disengage. The Elf was never pinned, so had the ultimate freedom to be a complete git, but it was like 5+ for the Dwarf or 6+ for the Barbarian.

Even better, you had Deathblows, in which if you killed a monster, your attack would swing in an arc allowing you to attack an adjacent monster, so you could cleave your way through those hordes in swathes of death. You'd be unlikely to cleave through a Minotaur, but the times you'd see Heroes cleave through Orcs to land those deathblows on the boss monsters and whittle them down was pretty satisfying...

Does that take a long time to calculate? The Dungeon Dive started a game of AHQ using his modified solo rules which allow one search for treasure per room, but also use the threat tokens, some in exploration and some in combat, with others being temporarily discarded until you shift from one to the other … and it felt like it just took a long time to resolve things. Maybe it was that he was stopping to say what he was resolving next, but it felt like dice rolls and table lookups took a long time. The NA HQ does the best it can with that for Zargon by giving him a monster stat block table on the back of the screen, but AHQ doesn't really do that so well.

I assume though that players have made these tables as cheatsheets, but it seems like there might be too many to make that really convenient to do. The idea of having d12s made up that you can just roll to generate the dungeon without resorting to a table kind of makes sense in that regard.

I won't ever actually own WHQ I figure—there's ONE copy of the 1995 version of the game on eBay if I actually include 1995 in the search terms, and the asking price starts with a 9. It doesn't matter what the next two are, because I won't be spending that much on it.

I do understand that it came with a lot of minis though.

Surprisingly, not really. The pinning roll is a straight die roll, and deathblows are basically free attacks. It speeds up mowing through those hordes of Orcs and Goblins.

I have seen that Dungeon Dive video, and yes, it's just tedious, because DD makes it tedious. He wants to use the counters because he has them, but when playing solo, you actually just roll a die - a 1 is a trap and a 12 is a Wandering Monster. The counters aren't used in solo play.

The GM has a reference sheet, because most of the tables are done for exploration, which occurs during a separate phase of the game turn. Once you get used to it, it becomes quite quick, because the rolls are all together and about the same topic. You could easily use different coloured dice and speed up the rolls. So, a passage is Length, Ending, and Features, so three colours of dice can be used for generating a passage, for a total of 5 dice. For a room it's even easier, as it's Room, Doors, and Features - which depending on the room is either a Hazard or monsters. So again, three colours, and in most cases, only 3 dice are needed.

Most of the tables don't need to be on a cheatsheet, because you simply don't use them enough. You don't need all the tables for the Hazards unless you are encountering that hazard, and you don't need all the tables for generating magical items, because it rarely comes up (1 in 12, or 1 in 6 for potions).

You can get components for WHQ separately - or you can construct a set from scratch. It's not as hard as you think, because the game was fairly modular and customisable. In fact, it was more customisable than HQ, simply because you didn't have a fixed board to work with.

[iKarith]

I'll have to get a move on with the HQ CERB so I can do "Combined English Rule Books" for AHQ and WHQ too. Although time consuming, I can't believe how fun the HQ CERB has been to put together, as it has really made me think about the rules and components of HQ in a deeper way than before.

I'd probably make different decisions than you have—and my little project is not HQ but sort of a generic meta-rule-set for games LIKE HQ that's sufficiently not owned by anyone else that I can slap a Creative Commons license on the "SRD" (such that it is) and tell people to have at it, including in commercial products if they want.

I'd be very interested to hear them and the reasoning behind such decisions. The aim is to have a core, consistent set of rules, with alternative options as house rules that can be used. Not in this thread though...

I'm not very good at keeping threads on track. But yes, we have one for that purpose and it's sitting in my "unread" thread pile because I want to actually take some time with it when I get to it. The problem is, when I do I'm going to be so far behind you'd have probably made all the decisions you're going to make. I should just dive in, probably.

Tangentially related, Dan Defazio just had a review of Tracy and Curtis Hickman's XDM, which you can still get in Kindle format. Not suggesting its mechanics or anything—it's technically D&D edition and even kind of system agnostic … but it's intended for a D&D-style RPG on some level. For a D&D-type RPG, it is excellent reading. Essentially, what it does for D&D in terms of describing the flexibility to run the game you want to run, is what I'm kind of interested in seeing for HQ. Here's a foundation, essentially. By adding half a page to it, you can create the EU or NA HeroQuest rules … or an interesting hybrid like you've been working on.

What I'd have done would be just a little more meta, mainly, with three applications of the meta as the "result", with a couple of example implementations for the EU rules, for the NA rules, and for an ongoing hybrid we'd expect to evolve as playtesting finds things we didn't think of and things get reworded. Europe, North America, and Inn rules.

The D20 mechanic isn't original, just branded. It could be argued that the D20 system was designed based on the SPECIAL system from Fallout, which predated it by almost a decade. That system just used percentile dice rather than a d20, but it was still d% + bonuses > DC/Opposed Roll. I actually converted the Traits and Perks from the Fallout series to D20. Maybe it's just great people thinking alike, but mostly, apart from a few key quirks, most systems have a lot of similarities when their play styles are similar, because what they are looking to do is provide a quick system the suits the purpose of the game.

In other words, it's like people refining the wheel. The core basics will be the same, regardless, because that's how wheels work, but every other refinement makes those wheels unique.

And that's fine. 1E AD&D had a lot of d% tables. Those got refined with time. I don't know what 5E still uses a d% for offhand, but I don't think much.

[AHQ and WHQ dice mechanics]

Does that take a long time to calculate? The Dungeon Dive started a game of AHQ using his modified solo rules which allow one search for treasure per room, but also use the threat tokens, some in exploration and some in combat, with others being temporarily discarded until you shift from one to the other … and it felt like it just took a long time to resolve things. Maybe it was that he was stopping to say what he was resolving next, but it felt like dice rolls and table lookups took a long time. The NA HQ does the best it can with that for Zargon by giving him a monster stat block table on the back of the screen, but AHQ doesn't really do that so well.

I assume though that players have made these tables as cheatsheets, but it seems like there might be too many to make that really convenient to do. The idea of having d12s made up that you can just roll to generate the dungeon without resorting to a table kind of makes sense in that regard.

I won't ever actually own WHQ I figure—there's ONE copy of the 1995 version of the game on eBay if I actually include 1995 in the search terms, and the asking price starts with a 9. It doesn't matter what the next two are, because I won't be spending that much on it.

I do understand that it came with a lot of minis though.

Surprisingly, not really. The pinning roll is a straight die roll, and deathblows are basically free attacks. It speeds up mowing through those hordes of Orcs and Goblins.

I have seen that Dungeon Dive video, and yes, it's just tedious, because DD makes it tedious. He wants to use the counters because he has them, but when playing solo, you actually just roll a die - a 1 is a trap and a 12 is a Wandering Monster. The counters aren't used in solo play.

The modifiers aren't what made that tedious. Stopping to point out that you had two counters so you had to add two, and two counters so you had to subtract two … that was tedious. Yeah DD, we get it. You've got +2, -2, so … straight roll. You didn't need to stop and re-explain it every roll, we got it the first time. I actually like how he did that to make the counters do something in a solo game. But that's one of the things about the aforementioned XDM: Get On With It Already!

The GM has a reference sheet, because most of the tables are done for exploration, which occurs during a separate phase of the game turn. Once you get used to it, it becomes quite quick, because the rolls are all together and about the same topic. You could easily use different coloured dice and speed up the rolls. So, a passage is Length, Ending, and Features, so three colours of dice can be used for generating a passage, for a total of 5 dice. For a room it's even easier, as it's Room, Doors, and Features - which depending on the room is either a Hazard or monsters. So again, three colours, and in most cases, only 3 dice are needed.

Most of the tables don't need to be on a cheatsheet, because you simply don't use them enough. You don't need all the tables for the Hazards unless you are encountering that hazard, and you don't need all the tables for generating magical items, because it rarely comes up (1 in 12, or 1 in 6 for potions).

You can get components for WHQ separately - or you can construct a set from scratch. It's not as hard as you think, because the game was fairly modular and customisable. In fact, it was more customisable than HQ, simply because you didn't have a fixed board to work with.

Still seems like you could have the tables you don't need as often on a sheet ready to go. The rules are walls of text that could be pared down by a lot to just the stuff you actually need in-game.

The tiles I think I could come up with. The cards probably as well. Minis … I guess the ones I have from HQ/AHQ will serve insofar as they go, with some supplements. I do have have 3x GS green sprues, 4x GS white, 2x gray, 2x heroes, plus the AHQ and AHQ Paint Set for additional minis. (I haven't decided what I'm gonna do with the original paints yet… they might be worth a lot more to a competent artist than they are to me since I know that, unopened, they can either be used or restored without a ton of effort. The only one that might not be easily true of is chaos black, and even that could be done, if someone thought it was worth doing.)

I don't know what other minis I would need for WHQ but I suspect that in the end it's not much more than I would need to fill out the other HQ expansions I haven't got.

[Davane]

I'm not very good at keeping threads on track. But yes, we have one for that purpose and it's sitting in my "unread" thread pile because I want to actually take some time with it when I get to it. The problem is, when I do I'm going to be so far behind you'd have probably made all the decisions you're going to make. I should just dive in, probably.

Please, feel free to dive right in. We're already on page 10 of the HQ CERB thread, and I'm just finishing up the GS Treasure Cards and Artefact cards. To be fair, the main reason I wouldn't mind comments is to see if there's anything I have missed out. I'm fairly certain my decisions are solid given how thorough I have been, and the ultimate aims for the HQ CERB, which is for it to be integrated with an inevitable AHQ and WHQ CERB to become the ultimate game.

Still seems like you could have the tables you don't need as often on a sheet ready to go. The rules are walls of text that could be pared down by a lot to just the stuff you actually need in-game.

I suppose you could, but in most cases, the "wall of text" rules are just the references on the table. For example, the Hazards section is basically the tables and rules for the various types of Hazard room you can generate. It's worth noting that it's generally worth creating your own cheatsheet anyway - the rules for Furniture, for example, only apply if you combine the Furniture from HeroQuest, else it's really just a Hazard.

The tiles I think I could come up with. The cards probably as well. Minis … I guess the ones I have from HQ/AHQ will serve insofar as they go, with some supplements. I do have have 3x GS green sprues, 4x GS white, 2x gray, 2x heroes, plus the AHQ and AHQ Paint Set for additional minis. (I haven't decided what I'm gonna do with the original paints yet… they might be worth a lot more to a competent artist than they are to me since I know that, unopened, they can either be used or restored without a ton of effort. The only one that might not be easily true of is chaos black, and even that could be done, if someone thought it was worth doing.)

I don't know what other minis I would need for WHQ but I suspect that in the end it's not much more than I would need to fill out the other HQ expansions I haven't got.

WHQ came with four Warriors (Barbarian, Dwarf, Elf, Wizard). For the monsters, you had 3 Minotaurs (3rd edition Talisman, integrated bases), 6 Orc Warriors, 6 Orc Archers, 6 Goblin Spearmen, 6 Goblin Archers, 12 Snotlings (individual, integrated bases), 12 Rats (individual, integrated bases), 12 Bats (individual, integrated flying bases, and so terribly fragile), and 12 Giant Spiders (individual, no bases). That covered all the Encounter cards in the base game.

The expansions were a little more lacking - they gave you Encounter cards, but for all except the signature villains, you were expected to provide your own miniatures anyway. It wasn't so bad with Lair of the Orc Lord, as the base game was fairly Orcy enough that aside from some more specialist Orc and Goblin encounters, you essentially had all the minis, but for Catacombs of Terror it was disastrous, since unless you had an Undead army, you didn't actually have the basic Undead models needed to create an Undead dungeon...

[cornixt]

The D20 mechanic isn't original, just branded. It could be argued that the D20 system was designed based on the SPECIAL system from Fallout, which predated it by almost a decade. That system just used percentile dice rather than a d20, but it was still d% + bonuses > DC/Opposed Roll. I actually converted the Traits and Perks from the Fallout series to D20. Maybe it's just great people thinking alike, but mostly, apart from a few key quirks, most systems have a lot of similarities when their play styles are similar, because what they are looking to do is provide a quick system the suits the purpose of the game.

In other words, it's like people refining the wheel. The core basics will be the same, regardless, because that's how wheels work, but every other refinement makes those wheels unique.

And that's fine. 1E AD&D had a lot of d% tables. Those got refined with time. I don't know what 5E still uses a d% for offhand, but I don't think much.

5e only uses it for the Sorcerer Wild Magic results (rolling a 1 for casting a spell if you are that subclass), and it's really only a for 50 equally likely results, so it rarely comes up even if you have that character in your group. Even in AD&D most of the % rolls were for tables in increments of no more than 5%, which is effectively the same as rolling a D20 anyway.

I like how almost everything in 5e is a D20 roll except for damage, they are good rollers and have enough variation so that bonuses have an effect but not overwhelmingly so.

[iKarith]

I'm not very good at keeping threads on track. But yes, we have one for that purpose and it's sitting in my "unread" thread pile because I want to actually take some time with it when I get to it. The problem is, when I do I'm going to be so far behind you'd have probably made all the decisions you're going to make. I should just dive in, probably.

Please, feel free to dive right in. We're already on page 10 of the HQ CERB thread, and I'm just finishing up the GS Treasure Cards and Artefact cards. To be fair, the main reason I wouldn't mind comments is to see if there's anything I have missed out. I'm fairly certain my decisions are solid given how thorough I have been, and the ultimate aims for the HQ CERB, which is for it to be integrated with an inevitable AHQ and WHQ CERB to become the ultimate game.

That was the other reason I haven't been rushing to it, to be honest. When you suggested it, several folks came up and said they'd kinda like the non-branded open-licensed rule set, but it kinda seemed like you already knew what you wanted to do and made up your mind what the outcome was going to look like. In some ways that's a good thing because those wanting the open, non-branded open-source thing kinda said we wanted that and then kinda let it hang for a bit there. At least in my case it was because I didn't know what the thing I was thinking about would look like just yet, except that what I was kind of imagining would not work.

I was kind of imagining a set of rules divided into sections—characters, movement, combat, etc, in two-column format like my old 2E D&D books had, but shorter, with like colored page borders so it was fast to turn to the rules for whatever, and put into a loose leaf binder so it was easy to add to. It'd come to a place where it would describe something you need rules for and just have them where NA/EU agreed or, where they didn't, an Option 1/Option 2 box to let the EW choose the rule they wished to use. Y'know, again kinda like my old D&D books had back in the day.

And there'd be a conspicuous place between the rules for a particular thing to slot in a template with other optional rules about that thing and we'd make up a nice template that had the same page border, and each option would indicate what things beyond a single copy of the Game System.

That … isn't going to work. First, if you were going to put the rules for HQ into a binder, it'd need to be one of those mini-binders I used in college. There's not enough HQ rules to put into a standard 3 ring binder for 8.5x11 Freedom Units paper or 3 (4?) ring for A4 for … the rest of the world who has sense enough to use the same thing.

Unless you were printing it at iKarith font sizes of course, which … I mean, I might do that. But the whole idea of what that looks like was wrong, I concluded, since ultimately that would just be HQ rules and Hasbro owns those. We can't just take their name off it and claim it's open source now, free to be used in commercial products or not, no strings attached. That's literally the opposite of how things work!

I since concluded that the generic open source rules would have to be that: Generic. Rather than supplying two options corresponding to NA or EU rules, you'd leave the specifics to someone else to fill in with whatever specifics they want. The result is too generic to be called complete, but it's also too generic for Hasbro to say it's "from" their game even though I do spend a LOT of time here at the Inn where we discuss their game primarily, in what for some must seem like painfully exact detail. But for incomplete, it should be easy enough to fill in the missing bits and you have exactly the HQ rules. Or something very different, you choose.

I suppose you could, but in most cases, the "wall of text" rules are just the references on the table. For example, the Hazards section is basically the tables and rules for the various types of Hazard room you can generate. It's worth noting that it's generally worth creating your own cheatsheet anyway - the rules for Furniture, for example, only apply if you combine the Furniture from HeroQuest, else it's really just a Hazard.

Yeah, AHQ is really meant to be played with HQ from what I can tell, so that's fine. And I have to make custom cheatsheets anyway as I need to be able to read them.

I don't know what other minis I would need for WHQ but I suspect that in the end it's not much more than I would need to fill out the other HQ expansions I haven't got.

WHQ came with four Warriors (Barbarian, Dwarf, Elf, Wizard). For the monsters, you had 3 Minotaurs (3rd edition Talisman, integrated bases), 6 Orc Warriors, 6 Orc Archers, 6 Goblin Spearmen, 6 Goblin Archers, 12 Snotlings (individual, integrated bases), 12 Rats (individual, integrated bases), 12 Bats (individual, integrated flying bases, and so terribly fragile), and 12 Giant Spiders (individual, no bases). That covered all the Encounter cards in the base game.

The expansions were a little more lacking - they gave you Encounter cards, but for all except the signature villains, you were expected to provide your own miniatures anyway. It wasn't so bad with Lair of the Orc Lord, as the base game was fairly Orcy enough that aside from some more specialist Orc and Goblin encounters, you essentially had all the minis, but for Catacombs of Terror it was disastrous, since unless you had an Undead army, you didn't actually have the basic Undead models needed to create an Undead dungeon...

So I'd need some Minotaurs, rats? not skaven?, orc archers, snotlings, spiders, and bats… My goblins are HQ, so they're not spearmen, but unless expansions called for other goblins, HQ's minis will work in a pinch. And with 4x the GS white sprues I probably have enough undead. The stuff I'd need are the sort that Reaper tends to sell in multipacks anyway, so that helps.

5e only uses it for the Sorcerer Wild Magic results (rolling a 1 for casting a spell if you are that subclass), and it's really only a for 50 equally likely results, so it rarely comes up even if you have that character in your group. Even in AD&D most of the % rolls were for tables in increments of no more than 5%, which is effectively the same as rolling a D20 anyway.

I like how almost everything in 5e is a D20 roll except for damage, they are good rollers and have enough variation so that bonuses have an effect but not overwhelmingly so.

5e makes literally everything a d20 check for success, except for magic. Which is an automatic hit. And for massive damage. Oh and more classes are now spellcasters than races have darkvision, and it's a f**king meme that "every" race that isn't humans has darkvision, making humans a liability.

The problem with OG D&D is that Gary Gygax HATED wizards and wanted people to not want to play them, so he made them absolute weaklings. People complained, so over the years D&D has made magic more and more powerful. And then gave everybody who wasn't strict melee some kind of spellcasting ability. Now it's kinda gone the other way: Everybody including the average magic user can use weapons, but oh! they also have the ability to deal crazy damage in most encounters.

The secret that D&D DMs know, but many D&D players haven't worked out is that no matter how much you level up, the game doesn't get easier. The monsters are always as strong as you are. That's by design. Which means that all getting a bunch of extra hit points and doing two and three and four attacks per round and 100+ HP of damage in a round as a result … all that really means in the end is that boss monsters that used to take six or eight rounds of combat now have thousands of HP and the fight against then takes three hours instead of 15 minutes.

If you want combat NOT to take three hours, there's two ways to do it. Both fundamentally change how half the D&D game is played. But that's okay, because if you want a faster, more cinematic combat and less complex decisions about how (or if) a roll is necessary to determine if you can do a thing … Is it still D&D at that point? I guess that'd depend—do you consider Pathfinder to be "D&D"? Or Index Card RPG? Those change D&D's rules in major ways (although Pathfinder 2E vs. D&D 5E is a little harder for me to say where one ends and the other begins without literally doing what Davane is doing to the NA/EU HeroQuest rules…)

Tracy and Curtis Hickman do not claim they're not altering the rules in pretty major ways, just that if you are willing to do so, you can transform something that can be kind of clunky at times into something that operates on simple mechanics that gives players and the DM a lot of freedom to do what they want. Player says they want to do X. You don't have to figure out what mechanics are involved with doing X and what rules and skill modifiers apply … You can make it up as you go. But I suspect experienced DMs already know that.

All the player needs to know is they had a brilliant idea, said they wanted to do it, the DM told them what they'd need to roll to pull it off and the consequences of failure, they nodded because that sounds about right, and they rolled… If they succeeded, it'd make for an amazingly heroic story! If they failed … well, it'd still make for quite the story. Hope they survive the consequences so they can be the ones to tell it.

And that brings us back to magic. Why doesn't magic work that way in D&D? Why don't you have a target number to roll, based on whether or not you've learned the spell, or other spells in the same domain, how much time you've had practicing it, whether it's something you use often, and the target's resistance to magic? You've been using Magic Missile for years. You're 6th level, with modifiers, if you roll a 4, that orc's getting three magic arrows to the chest and he's a goner. You want to do what? You've never done that before. It's similar to a spell you've used before, but only similar, and you've only used that spell a couple of times. You can try it, but the DC is 15, and your bonuses are only gonna give you a couple points on that. (If you're playing with some kind of fate points, you might wanna be prepared to use one!)

Such a thing winds up being a pretty major overhaul to magic in the game. It makes magic perhaps even more powerful than it is in 5E (and that's saying a lot), while at the same time reining it in a bit by making it potentially dangerous for the caster.

Apprentice: I wanna cast Magic Missile!
Master Wizard: To what end? There's nothing to attack here…
Apprentice: I'm attacking the darkness!
Master: Many have attempted to attack the darkness with Magic Missile before you…
Apprentice: They tried and failed?
Master: They tried and died.

(I might be mixing my references a bit.)

[Davane]

That was the other reason I haven't been rushing to it, to be honest. When you suggested it, several folks came up and said they'd kinda like the non-branded open-licensed rule set, but it kinda seemed like you already knew what you wanted to do and made up your mind what the outcome was going to look like. In some ways that's a good thing because those wanting the open, non-branded open-source thing kinda said we wanted that and then kinda let it hang for a bit there. At least in my case it was because I didn't know what the thing I was thinking about would look like just yet, except that what I was kind of imagining would not work.

I was kind of imagining a set of rules divided into sections—characters, movement, combat, etc, in two-column format like my old 2E D&D books had, but shorter, with like colored page borders so it was fast to turn to the rules for whatever, and put into a loose leaf binder so it was easy to add to. It'd come to a place where it would describe something you need rules for and just have them where NA/EU agreed or, where they didn't, an Option 1/Option 2 box to let the EW choose the rule they wished to use. Y'know, again kinda like my old D&D books had back in the day.

And there'd be a conspicuous place between the rules for a particular thing to slot in a template with other optional rules about that thing and we'd make up a nice template that had the same page border, and each option would indicate what things beyond a single copy of the Game System.

That … isn't going to work. First, if you were going to put the rules for HQ into a binder, it'd need to be one of those mini-binders I used in college. There's not enough HQ rules to put into a standard 3 ring binder for 8.5x11 Freedom Units paper or 3 (4?) ring for A4 for … the rest of the world who has sense enough to use the same thing.

Unless you were printing it at iKarith font sizes of course, which … I mean, I might do that. But the whole idea of what that looks like was wrong, I concluded, since ultimately that would just be HQ rules and Hasbro owns those. We can't just take their name off it and claim it's open source now, free to be used in commercial products or not, no strings attached. That's literally the opposite of how things work!

I since concluded that the generic open source rules would have to be that: Generic. Rather than supplying two options corresponding to NA or EU rules, you'd leave the specifics to someone else to fill in with whatever specifics they want. The result is too generic to be called complete, but it's also too generic for Hasbro to say it's "from" their game even though I do spend a LOT of time here at the Inn where we discuss their game primarily, in what for some must seem like painfully exact detail. But for incomplete, it should be easy enough to fill in the missing bits and you have exactly the HQ rules. Or something very different, you choose.

Those are fair criticisms, I suppose. I would like to point out that I decided to incorporate the cards and other necessary components, as it seems like a lot of the rules are actually covered on them rather than in the rule book, and currently the HQ CERB stands at 44 pages in a 12-pt font with easily readable headings. At the moment, I'm still compiling text, so the HQ CERB could drop some pages with formatting, and other layout options. This is the meat of the project, as it only covers the Game System, but the idea that it only fits a few pages are somewhat laughable without actually looking at it.

In terms of what I want - since I have HQ, AHQ, and WHQ, I can see the overlap and describe in very broad strokes what a combination game would be like. However, before I get to that, I am working on CERBs which are more of a complete reference work for each title, designed for those that want to recreate each game for their own enjoyment. Obviously, I can't copy everything, so I have tried to focus on what makes the game functional over all. For example, I have nearly finished with the GS, but I haven't included the Quest Book, even though the Quests serve as the meat of the system. But then, there's more than enough fan quests here that can cover the Quest Book being left out. However, although I wasn't originally going to include them, I felt that many components included rules that would otherwise have been in a rulebook, such as Spells and Equipment.

In terms of decision making between rules sets, I have tried to intelligently choose which version I would include as the base system, and which would be house rules. The idea is that it SHOULD be possible for either version of the game to be playable using the CERB. I have done my best to limit what changes I have made to the rules, and the only real change is breaking up Passages into corridors and junctions. Although this is mostly for logistical reasons, I discovered that applying the "must be in the room to search for traps" rules meant an additional complication if you keep Corridors and Junctions as discrete, which I have yet to fix. To imagine it, think as if you have put a doorway between each Junction and Corridor section on each map. Of course, any fix to this also fixes the issue with traps beyond doors, so I am not adverse to leaving this complication in to be fixed later.

Another real purpose of the CERB is to clear up any ambiguity in certain scenarios. For example, the line of sight rules. Right now, there's no difference between line of sight and line of effect, so if you can see it, you can shoot it. However, map reveals aren't based solely on line of sight, so you can reveal features that you cannot see. Thus, you can see everything in a room, even if it's hidden behind furniture, as long as you don't have to search for it, and you can see all monsters in a passage, even if they are standanding behind one another and therefore not technically visible for "line of sight".

As such, it would be nice if you could check out the HQ CERB, even if it's really just a case of checking my homework, to see if there's anything I missed, any conflict that needs resolving, or areas that could be considered for improvement. Just bear in mind that the HQ CERB is designed primarily as a reference work, for combination with future AHQ and WHQ CERBs, and as such house rules desired now might actually be covered or made redundant in such works.

I suppose you could, but in most cases, the "wall of text" rules are just the references on the table. For example, the Hazards section is basically the tables and rules for the various types of Hazard room you can generate. It's worth noting that it's generally worth creating your own cheatsheet anyway - the rules for Furniture, for example, only apply if you combine the Furniture from HeroQuest, else it's really just a Hazard.

Yeah, AHQ is really meant to be played with HQ from what I can tell, so that's fine. And I have to make custom cheatsheets anyway as I need to be able to read them.

On the contrary, AHQ is a complete game in it's own right, and the supplemental information for using HQ components with AHQ takes up 3 pages of the 62 page rulebook. It's just that a lot of fans have both AHQ and HQ, and as such, they favour combining the two to the point at which they seem like both are always being played together. If anything, the AHQ rules were designed to supercede the HQ rules, to the point that it includes rules for playing the HQ Game System Quest Book using the AHQ rules, and the four Heroes from HQ presented as AHQ Heroes.

I don't know what other minis I would need for WHQ but I suspect that in the end it's not much more than I would need to fill out the other HQ expansions I haven't got.

WHQ came with four Warriors (Barbarian, Dwarf, Elf, Wizard). For the monsters, you had 3 Minotaurs (3rd edition Talisman, integrated bases), 6 Orc Warriors, 6 Orc Archers, 6 Goblin Spearmen, 6 Goblin Archers, 12 Snotlings (individual, integrated bases), 12 Rats (individual, integrated bases), 12 Bats (individual, integrated flying bases, and so terribly fragile), and 12 Giant Spiders (individual, no bases). That covered all the Encounter cards in the base game.

The expansions were a little more lacking - they gave you Encounter cards, but for all except the signature villains, you were expected to provide your own miniatures anyway. It wasn't so bad with Lair of the Orc Lord, as the base game was fairly Orcy enough that aside from some more specialist Orc and Goblin encounters, you essentially had all the minis, but for Catacombs of Terror it was disastrous, since unless you had an Undead army, you didn't actually have the basic Undead models needed to create an Undead dungeon...

So I'd need some Minotaurs, rats? not skaven?, orc archers, snotlings, spiders, and bats… My goblins are HQ, so they're not spearmen, but unless expansions called for other goblins, HQ's minis will work in a pinch. And with 4x the GS white sprues I probably have enough undead. The stuff I'd need are the sort that Reaper tends to sell in multipacks anyway, so that helps.

Nope, WHQ used Giant Rats, not Skaven. There were rumours that a Skaven expansion was also planned, and this is backed up by a Skaven-themed WD article, but the base game itself decided that it was going with a much more Orcy theme. Of course, the Roleplay Book included rules for Skaven, as part of the 66 page bestiary, which is not a bad chunk for a mighty 192 page tome. The LotOL expansion included many different specialist types of goblins, but none of the minis, so unless you specifically needed multiple types of gobbos, you could get away with them fair enough. In WHQ, goblins are deemed only to fight with either bows or spears, which makes things a little bit easier for you.