Ye Olde Inn

I just wanted to get some feedback on this:

As an aside, there is a key distinction for traps, making them more deadly under the HQ CERB. Having split Passages into Corridors and Junctions, searching is now limited to a single Room, Corridor, or Junction. This means that traps in Passages may now be subject to the same restrictions as traps placed beyond doors - that is, Heroes may have to move into the Corridor or Junction before they can search for Traps, and therefore risk setting off any Traps placed in the FIRST (and sometimes ONLY) square of that Corridor or Junction... This will certainly make your adventures MORE interesting...

If you recall, I provided the following map of the HQ Board, breaking down the board into Rooms and Passages, with the Passages further broken down into Corridors and Junctions.



This is all fairly straight forward, but it wouldn't be until much later, covering Searching and Disarming Traps, that an interesting quirk of this would show itself. Essentially, just as Heroes cannot search for Traps placed in the first square of a Room or Passage beyond an Open Door, Heroes also now cannot search for Traps placed on the first square of a Corridor or Junction beyond the one they are currently standing in. This is quite interesting, as most Junctions only have one square, and thus any traps here can NEVER be found without triggering them.

I haven't gone through all the Quests to see how this change impacts their difficulty, but it does mean that in general Traps are going to be slightly more dangerous, since they are more likely to be triggered...

At your table you can do what you want I suppose, but I don't like the idea much. "Hmm, I'm going to search for traps and I'm going to deliberately not search for them one square away from me, making them unavoidable, unsearchable, undetectable …"

That doesn't seem fair or reasonable, and it's definitely not intended by the original game. If we got halfway though a game and you sprung that on me as how you played … I would call BS and I think I'd be right to do it, so I'd definitely suggest suggesting it to players.

The best mechanism I've seen for making the game more difficult is Zargon (*sigh* I'm just going to have to get used to that… Morcar's gone now. There is no Morcar, only Zu—er, I mean Zargon.)

The PC game had something like this, but it was done, I suppose, because in the isometric view you only got to see part of the corridor, and so this was the corridor you got to search. As a result you could move to the next visible section and search THAT one for Treasure, Secret Doors+Traps and find stuff. Why they did this is a mystery though because other actions are done via the overhead map (showing the entire board).

In any case, the PC game also limited Treasure searches such that each room and section of a passage could be searched for treasure ONCE per quest (yes, as opposed to once per hero)! But the sections are pretty small, I think there were 23 or 24 sections of passage possible on a large quest map, enough to go through the entire deck. I don't recall if the "good" cards replenished on a second run through the deck (since you have rooms as well). Something to check next time I'm curious about the pc game.

Introducing more undetectable traps (especially since we have instant hit traps too) will frustrate players more, but it definitely increase difficulty.

iKarith wrote:At your table you can do what you want I suppose, but I don't like the idea much. "Hmm, I'm going to search for traps and I'm going to deliberately not search for them one square away from me, making them unavoidable, unsearchable, undetectable …"

That doesn't seem fair or reasonable, and it's definitely not intended by the original game. If we got halfway though a game and you sprung that on me as how you played … I would call BS and I think I'd be right to do it, so I'd definitely suggest suggesting it to players.

The best mechanism I've seen for making the game more difficult is Zargon (*sigh* I'm just going to have to get used to that… Morcar's gone now. There is no Morcar, only Zu—er, I mean Zargon.)

I get what you are saying, iKarith, but to argue that it's not fair or reasonable is a bit much. After all, it's exactly the same mechanic, and reasoning, that prevents Heroes from searching for traps beyond doors, which IS intended in the original game.

Instead, I'd argue that it no more or less fair or reasonable than that mechanic, and it does kind of highlight how arbitrary this decision that you can't search for traps beyond a Door really is.

Ultimately, any House Rule to get around NOT being able to search for Traps beyond Doors would be just as applicable to Corridors and Junctions. But, as a House Rule, I don't really want to incorporate that into the HQ CERB as an "official" rule at this point.

The decision to break down the HQ board Passages into Corridors and Junctions was not done on a whim. It's actually taken from AHQ, and would be necessary for any kind of Exploration Phase in a randomised HQ dungeon.

It just seems to be fixing up an inconsistency in the official rules - that you can search Junctions even though you have no idea what's around the corner of said Junctions, including Monsters that prevent searching. A similar argument can be said for not being able to search for Traps beyond Doors - you can't search an area if there's a Monster in that area, and since you don't know until you open the Door whether there's going to be a Monster there, you can't search beyond Doors.

In my mind, the mere threat of a Monster should be enough to prevent searching, so searching Junctions without having explored beyond them is a no go. Of course, by the time you've explored beyond the Junction, you are already IN the Junction, so any traps there would probably have already been triggered.

I am thinking of a number of possible ways to get around these limitations (both exploring junctions and through doorways) and I am currently toying with a couple of possibilities for House Rules:

1) Cautious Movement - basically, you take an ACTION before your Movement which reduces your Movement by 1 Die, and you roll 1 Combat Die. If you don't roll a Skull, you can reveal, but don't set off, any traps you move through. Thus, if you suspect that there are traps beyond a Door or in a Junction, then this will allow you to move past them. Of course, since you spend your action first, you can't attack, disarm, or do anything, and you remain unprepared for whatever may be beyond the Door/Junction. Plus, if there are no traps, then you've just wasted your action for nothing.

2) Directed Searching - here, instead of just searching an area for Traps, you can instead opt to search only a single square for traps, that ignores not being able to search beyond Doors or across Junction/Corridor boundaries. You don't move, so you can only choose a single orthogonally adjacent square. This will be enough to search beyond a Door or into a Junction or Corridor without having to move into the space first.

3) Passage Searching - When you search in a Junction, you can also search any adjacent Corridors as well (NOT Junctions). Thus, this removes the issue of searching for traps going from a Junction into a Corridor, but the threat of not knowing what is around the corner of a Junction without exploring it remains. However, because this is one way - being in a Corridor still doesn't allow you to search adjacent Junctions, even if you are standing next to them - this would be a house rule rather than anything "official." For simplicity, the default would be as the rules state - when you search an area, you must be IN that area.

Ultimately though, I think that if Morcar is going to design new quests, then if they bear this in mind, it shouldn't be a problem. They can avoid placing too many traps in Junctions, and be wary of placing traps in the corridors surrounding the central room, since these are two spaces long at most, and as such, such traps will be undetectable from at least one direction.

Plus, of the three games, even with this modification, HQ is STILL the most lenient with Traps, because at least you get a chance to search for SOME of them...

Actually, AHQ, of the three games gives Heroes the chance to spot and disarm traps AS they are sprung, thus getting rid of the requirement to search for traps entirely. Maybe something like this could be adopted for HQ instead, to get around the unavoidable, undetectable trap scenario. Of course, both HQ and WHQ still have the event-based traps, which don't give you a chance to spot or disarm them before they are activated. In HQ, this is the Trap/Hazard cards in the Treasure Deck, whilst in WHQ, the Events deck (which included both Monsters and Events) would have Traps that worked just like any other non-combat Event, so a pit trap was as likely as finding an old skeleton in the dungeon. It wouldn't be until the Roleplay Rules that WHQ actually had the option to spot Traps, to counter the diabolical traps placed by the GM...

Kurgan wrote:The PC game had something like this, but it was done, I suppose, because in the isometric view you only got to see part of the corridor, and so this was the corridor you got to search. As a result you could move to the next visible section and search THAT one for Treasure, Secret Doors+Traps and find stuff. Why they did this is a mystery though because other actions are done via the overhead map (showing the entire board).

In any case, the PC game also limited Treasure searches such that each room and section of a passage could be searched for treasure ONCE per quest (yes, as opposed to once per hero)! But the sections are pretty small, I think there were 23 or 24 sections of passage possible on a large quest map, enough to go through the entire deck. I don't recall if the "good" cards replenished on a second run through the deck (since you have rooms as well). Something to check next time I'm curious about the pc game.

Introducing more undetectable traps (especially since we have instant hit traps too) will frustrate players more, but it definitely increase difficulty.

I miss the video game. It was the same on all platforms, but it was far from consistent. Depending upon how the areas were divided, you could search for traps and spot enemies around corners. Note that the video games were, ironically, using the UK version of the Searching rules for Treasure - but as you say, there were a good number of passage areas that you could search.

I'm guessing that the reason they did this was because they already divided passages into areas for visualisation. Whilst, we as human beings, are able to realistically look at a top down map and determine what is and isn't visible, and thus what can reasonably be searched without moving when searching passages, a computer could not without breaking the board down into areas like it did. Searching an area isn't the same as drawing lines, so it has to be handled differently.

There's a lot of inconsistency with the board game, and I think this is why they used the visual areas for the video game like they did. For example, you could search to find a trap in a corner junction, but still remain unaware of the monster a few spaces down the corridor from that junction? That's no more or less reasonable than not being able to search a space next to you just because it's in a different area. At some point, you really need to just accept the arbitrary nature of some things and have done with it. In this case, the limitation is searching without moving, and it's knock on effects.

Yeah and it was like two games in one... the isometric view (your little fifth or whatever, of the board) and the map view (showing everything, that you used to see monsters move and to aim at stuff for ranged/magic) . The PC game was very "broken" in terms of difficulty (way too easy), but it's an official source, so make of it what you will. Obviously it is based upon the two EU editions, but was released after the NA edition (same year as the Japanese version in fact). The NES game is different, but as we know, it wasn't really finished, so who knows what they intended beyond what was in those prototypes (Kellar's Keep and the missing equipment for one!).