Ye Olde Inn

I was thinking about how HeroQuest and other similar dungeon crawlers are essentially board game versions of Tactical RPGs, and those sorts of games more often than not have an option to have one of your units guard and make no other action, and this idea occurred to me.

In addition to Attack, Cast, Search (Treasure, Trap or Secret Door), and Disarm, a Hero may choose to Guard as their action in a turn.

Choosing to Guard results in rolling +1 defence dice when a Hero is attacked until their next turn. If they have a shield equipped, Guard is +2 in defence dice.

I think that's a really interesting idea.
I would have to think about it abit more before I adopted it myself. I'm a fan of simple rules that add tactical options, so long as they fit seamlessly into the original game. I think most players would choose to attack rather than wait for an attack, but I can think of a few incidences where this would be a cool move. I'll be following this thread to see how it pans out.

Would you extend this to monsters, or just Heroes?
Maybe this would work well as a learned skill once a Hero gains a certain amount of experience (many of us here have introduced advancement skills for each Hero type).

Pancho wrote:I think that's a really interesting idea.
I would have to think about it abit more before I adopted it myself. I'm a fan of simple rules that add tactical options, so long as they fit seamlessly into the original game. I think most players would choose to attack rather than wait for an attack, but I can think of a few incidences where this would be a cool move. I'll be following this thread to see how it pans out.

Yeah it is intended to be only useful in a few situations, such as when you are alone and on low health, and you want to give teammates more time to reach you.

Pancho wrote:Would you extend this to monsters, or just Heroes?

I was only thinking about Heroes but I don't see why the monsters shouldn't be able to as well.

Pancho wrote:Maybe this would work well as a learned skill once a Hero gains a certain amount of experience (many of us here have introduced advancement skills for each Hero type).

Funny you say that because that's how I plan to introduce it to my current group.

LordPon wrote:I was thinking about how HeroQuest and other similar dungeon crawlers are essentially board game versions of Tactical RPGs, and those sorts of games more often than not have an option to have one of your units guard and make no other action, and this idea occurred to me.

In addition to Attack, Cast, Search (Treasure, Trap or Secret Door), and Disarm, a Hero may choose to Guard as their action in a turn.

Choosing to Guard results in rolling +1 defence dice when a Hero is attacked until their next turn. If they have a shield equipped, Guard is +2 in defence dice.

It's simple enough and works really well with the shield being worse than the helmet because it takes one hand to use, this compensates nicely. You could also give it to the scouts to make them more worth having.

Pancho wrote:Would you extend this to monsters, or just Heroes?
Maybe this would work well as a learned skill once a Hero gains a certain amount of experience (many of us here have introduced advancement skills for each Hero type).

Agreed. And certain new monster types.

Gold Bearer wrote:

LordPon wrote:I was thinking about how HeroQuest and other similar dungeon crawlers are essentially board game versions of Tactical RPGs, and those sorts of games more often than not have an option to have one of your units guard and make no other action, and this idea occurred to me.

In addition to Attack, Cast, Search (Treasure, Trap or Secret Door), and Disarm, a Hero may choose to Guard as their action in a turn.

Choosing to Guard results in rolling +1 defence dice when a Hero is attacked until their next turn. If they have a shield equipped, Guard is +2 in defence dice.

It's simple enough and works really well with the shield being worse than the helmet because it takes one hand to use, this compensates nicely. You could also give it to the scouts to make them more worth having.

If you think that makes the Scouts more balanced then sure, that's a good idea.