Too few players in a group

Forums | HeroQuest Rules Discussions
Submitted by pansophy on Thu, 30/05/2013 – 02:40

Hello,

in my latest game some RL events took place and only two players could show up. Instead of cancelling the whole evening, we decided to advance the story without them, but soon ran into a problem when doing Contests: with only one or two players attending, the outcome of a Contest was very random and unsatisfying. Further, it was not very easy to describe the Contest in a good way and the first time the rules felt a bit “too light”.

To overcome this, we decided on a house rule: every “Group Simple Contest” should consist of 3 to 6 different actions, divided evenly between participating characters.

So, with one character entering a Contest that “could” be a Group Simple Contest (a fight, an escape, a chase, etc), the character would describe up to three different actions he wants to do. For each action both sides roll a dice and the outcome of all actions is looked up in the Group Simple Contest Results table.

This rule is not used for Simple Contests or Extended Contests.

The difference between this house rule and Extended Contests is, the character cannot use the same Attribute twice and must put in some thinking to string up some events to get the most amount of actions. This way the story comes more alive and the outcome of a Contest seems to be more bell-curved.

Also, if he player can only think of one action, it is a Simple Contest. And there is still plenty of room for that. 😉

only two

Submitted by Charles on Fri, 31/05/2013 – 05:36.

HeroQuest is supposed to be used as a toolkit to tell stories. Whatever works to make your game feel more satisfying is right.

I also found it a bit of a stretch running a HeroQuest game for my boys. I suspect that the issue you brought up was a (small?) part of why it did not work out.

odd, i’ve run a number of

Submitted by boztakang on Sat, 01/06/2013 – 01:51.

odd, i’ve run a number of solo-player games, and never felt that the rules got in the way… some of my campaigns best stories have come out of single-player scenarios.

I do use mostly simple contests, so maybe it’s just that the extra randomization of results is already “built in” to our expectations… 

States of Adversity

Submitted by pansophy on Sun, 14/07/2013 – 23:55.

The problem is that with only one character you soon end up with a lot of negative modifiers as even marginal failures give a -3 to an Attribute.

Might be my luck in dice rolling, but players end up pretty soon with so flawed characters, that further advancement of the story is not possible (at least for a while).

Maybe I should allow them more points to boost starting Abilities … 

— 

cheers,

Rob

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