Ye Olde Inn

[This topic was moved from General HeroQuest Discussion on 7/22/16.]

One of the common complaints about the Magic Usser in HQ is that he is underpowered. Getting players to take the mage after a couple games can be difficult when the other heroes are available.

But buffing the mage can prove disasterous in most cases. I think the main reason the is an issue is that the game master is buffing the mage too much.

So I was sitting here and thinking....how to fix it?

I think I may have a reasonable fix.
Everytime the mage casts a spell the player of the mage and the game master will roll a D6 and compare results. If the game master wins this roll the spell is lost after cast as normal. However, if the player wins this roll off then the spell card remains in the mages spell inventory and may be cast again. If the dice roll nets a tie then the mage retains the spell but the next time the spell is cast there will be no roll off and the spell will be removed from the mages inventory.
Require the player of the mage to wait 2 turns before he may replay the spell that was recovered.

I don't feel that the wizard is underpowered as such, but he ofthen demands specific situations for his spells to really pay off. What I like to do (when I'm GM) is create quests that have a couple of rooms that are aimed towards specific spells. A couple exsamples:

You could have a treasure/whatever room only reachable with pass through rock - remember to put in some kind of one way exit.
A room with scores of low-mind monsters for wizzy to put to sleep.
Room filled with high-end monsters to mist through.
Put in rolling boulder traps which the tempest can help you escape from.

But regarding your suggestion:
I think it should just be a fixed roll... e.g. roll 4+ to keep the spell. Seems like it would be about the same, just with less rolling.
If you keep the roll-off I definitly think you should remove the rule about a tie roll. The player has 9 spells... Having to remember that maybe 3 - 4 or more spells are now one-use-only is too difficult.

edit: But try it out and tell us how it worked out

I tend to keep acurate game notes so knowing whats been ussed or not is no issue.

I can hear you about tailoring quests where certain of the mage spells are needed but I need to get my players through the first few quest books first. As it stands, playing the quests as written, it can be difficult to convince many players to choose the mage. I can't really blame them when the barbarian or dwarf is available. I have seen it where the players are rolling dice to see who gets stuck with the mage, so that is not good leaving things as is.

There are a lot of us who have been on here for a couple of years who could expound for pages and pages on this issue.
I would simply suggest to spend an hour or two thumbing through the threads here on the inn, and maybe check out the
classic aginn's inn sight, as well. There are many, many threads dealing with this. They might be able to give you several
ideas on how to handle buffing the wizard some.

However, if you want some specifics, let me know...I'll message my thoughts to you. Might be better than taking up
more room on the inn's server.

Ah let's discuss anyway!

Give the wizard the innate ability to make a fireball of 2 dmg - monsters must roll defense equal to their mind and get black shields to reduce the dmg.

So long as that fireball is only large enough to target one monster and limit the rate of fire to once every other turn and it may be a perfect fix.

Don't forget we have a conflict of game systems/rules here. In the European Edition, the Wizard is fairly balanced. When the game was released in the Americas, some of the regular monsters and most of the boss monsters were given increased BP. Although three of the four Heroes deal well in this new game environment, the Wizard with his lower BP and lack of equipment (the Wizard has more of a weapon/armour restriction too) doesn't fair quite as well. He's a far more challenging Hero to play and few that I've played with use him effectively.

It's unfortunate the Wizard Quest pack never saw release as I'm sure there were some useful Wizard based artifacts and spells included.

maybe ease some of the weapon and armor restrictions on the mage.
Pretty sure if the mage can cast spells with a staff in his hands then a long sword should be no issue. Also a helm should be allowable as it does not stop your hands from doing thier thing nor does it interfer with speach.

true. and when you combine the helm with the wiz cloak he gets 4 def.
give him magic staff and he gets 1 dmg normal and 1 magic dmg - which if you want can always hit.

How about something like this-