Jürgen Hubert
First Post
Yesterday we were playing Warhammer Quest, and after our 3rd-level party was totally slaughtered by a bunch of orcs and goblins, one of my fellow players told me of a brilliant idea: Why not play D&D like Warhammer Quest?
For those who don't know about Warhammer Quest, it's a board game that's essentially "dungeon-crawl" role-playing reduced to its stereotypes: A party consisting of four heroes (the "default party" consists of a barbarian, a dwarf, an elf, and a wizard, but there are numerous other professions available...) recieve a randomly-determined "mission" to go into some dungeon and fulfill a certain objective. The dungeon is created randomly by drawing cards from a deck of cards and placing a new floor tile (a straight corridor, a room, or other dungeon feature) next to an existing one until the heroes find the so-called "objective room" (where the End Fight takes place). Along the way, there's a one-in-six chance each round that monsters appear to fight the heroes. Most of them aren't too much trouble to take down with sound tactics and a little luck, but if the heroes tarry too long, new monsters will arrive and make their lives even more difficult... When the monsters are beaten, the heroes recieve gold for defeating them, and often a magic item as well that they need to distribute among themselves.
After finishing the End Fight, they travel to a settlement. If they go to a bigger settlement, they can buy more and better stuff in it - but the journey takes longer, and there are all sorts of things that can go wrong with it (bandits, flash floods, lightning strikes that melt all your gold... Once they arrive in the settlement, they can buy new equipment and, if they have enough gold, train to rise in level (which means that they might get more hit points, fight better, learn new tricks or spells, etc.), but even in the settlements there are random events everyday (one of the worst is that you get married and retire from adventuring...
)
More on Warhammer Quest can be found here.
Back to my friend's idea: Playing D&D like Warhammer Quest should be pretty easy. After all, most of the work is already done - there are numerous professions with clearly defined abilities, plenty of statted-out monsters with appropriate challenge ratings, random magic item tables... even gp limits for various settlement sizes!
The only problem I see here are the spellcasters. You see, in Warhammer Quest, there's no limit to the number of spells a spellcaster can cast every day. Instead he rolls 1d6 at the start of each round and adds his level to this number, and that's the amount of spell energy he has for that turn - and in that round, he can cast spells in any combination as long as the total spell energy cost doesn't exceed this number (if he does, he needs to tap into his personal energy reserves, which only renew after each adventure.
In Warhammer Quest, the wizard function as the party's healer (yes, wizards can cast healing spells in this game), and heals the other characters during breaks in the action - and he can do this as often as he likes. In other words, as long as the party doesn't get overwhelmed by large hordes of monsters (all too possible...), they can survive in a dungeon indefinietly without loosing their access to magical healing or other spellcasting support. This is, of course, directly at odds with D&D spellcasters, who can only cast a certain maximum number of spells each day, and must rest before being able to cast spells again...
So the D&D mechanic for casting spells needs to be replaced somehow, yet still allow for differences between the various D&D classes (wizard vs. sorcerer vs. cleric vs. druid...). Does anyone have any good ideas for this?
And what do you think of the whole idea? Any good suggestions?
For those who don't know about Warhammer Quest, it's a board game that's essentially "dungeon-crawl" role-playing reduced to its stereotypes: A party consisting of four heroes (the "default party" consists of a barbarian, a dwarf, an elf, and a wizard, but there are numerous other professions available...) recieve a randomly-determined "mission" to go into some dungeon and fulfill a certain objective. The dungeon is created randomly by drawing cards from a deck of cards and placing a new floor tile (a straight corridor, a room, or other dungeon feature) next to an existing one until the heroes find the so-called "objective room" (where the End Fight takes place). Along the way, there's a one-in-six chance each round that monsters appear to fight the heroes. Most of them aren't too much trouble to take down with sound tactics and a little luck, but if the heroes tarry too long, new monsters will arrive and make their lives even more difficult... When the monsters are beaten, the heroes recieve gold for defeating them, and often a magic item as well that they need to distribute among themselves.
After finishing the End Fight, they travel to a settlement. If they go to a bigger settlement, they can buy more and better stuff in it - but the journey takes longer, and there are all sorts of things that can go wrong with it (bandits, flash floods, lightning strikes that melt all your gold... Once they arrive in the settlement, they can buy new equipment and, if they have enough gold, train to rise in level (which means that they might get more hit points, fight better, learn new tricks or spells, etc.), but even in the settlements there are random events everyday (one of the worst is that you get married and retire from adventuring...
)More on Warhammer Quest can be found here.
Back to my friend's idea: Playing D&D like Warhammer Quest should be pretty easy. After all, most of the work is already done - there are numerous professions with clearly defined abilities, plenty of statted-out monsters with appropriate challenge ratings, random magic item tables... even gp limits for various settlement sizes!
The only problem I see here are the spellcasters. You see, in Warhammer Quest, there's no limit to the number of spells a spellcaster can cast every day. Instead he rolls 1d6 at the start of each round and adds his level to this number, and that's the amount of spell energy he has for that turn - and in that round, he can cast spells in any combination as long as the total spell energy cost doesn't exceed this number (if he does, he needs to tap into his personal energy reserves, which only renew after each adventure.
In Warhammer Quest, the wizard function as the party's healer (yes, wizards can cast healing spells in this game), and heals the other characters during breaks in the action - and he can do this as often as he likes. In other words, as long as the party doesn't get overwhelmed by large hordes of monsters (all too possible...), they can survive in a dungeon indefinietly without loosing their access to magical healing or other spellcasting support. This is, of course, directly at odds with D&D spellcasters, who can only cast a certain maximum number of spells each day, and must rest before being able to cast spells again...
So the D&D mechanic for casting spells needs to be replaced somehow, yet still allow for differences between the various D&D classes (wizard vs. sorcerer vs. cleric vs. druid...). Does anyone have any good ideas for this?
And what do you think of the whole idea? Any good suggestions?
