Dwarf King’s Hold – Treasure & Cave Ins!
July 22, 2011 by beerogre
By now you’ve watched this week’s videos about Dwarf King’s Hold: Green Menace and read my earlier posts. You’ve got a pretty good idea about how the different sides play and how I design the races by thinking about their character first and making the game rules to create that character.
Orcs = fighty; Elves = fast & dodgy.
So what now?
Well what you might not have picked up on is how different the second game feels from Dwarf King’s Hold: Dead Rising.
Different races obviously makes for different game play, but that’s only the start. There are two important new scenario rules: Treasure and Cave-ins.
Treasure Counters are variable value (0-2) and are secret from both players until they are taken off board. They are portable, which means that you now have to decide whether to leg it with what you have, stay and look for more, or act as an on-board reserve.
Different scenarios use the Treasure Counters differently to create more variety, sometimes you can see the square they’re on, sometimes only the tile (and you have to search for them). Sometimes you need a certain amount, other times just more Treasure than the enemy, and still other times you have different objectives entirely.
Cave-ins make the board itself dangerous and also mutable within the length of a single game. You never know the order things will collapse in, and as anything on a collapsed tile is instantly destroyed you can occasionally lose a vital Treasure Counter as well as your models. You know which general areas are vulnerable to collapsing, so you always know if you’re taking a risk moving onto a tile. Sometimes it’s a risk you have to take, other times you can pick and choose. On the other hand, perhaps you can ignore the creaking tunnel entirely and take the Treasure you need off the enemy instead.
All sorts of new things to think about.
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Does treasure have any effects while carrying it? Or does it just function as an objective/victory point?
I like the sounds of cave-ins. The dungeon taking out your team is always a fun wild card! I’m surprised there hasn’t been any traps yet (at least that I’ve heard of). In my experience of roleplaying dungeon crawls: traps just pop out of walls on their own. Like fungus that shoots arrows.
Treasure doesn’t slow you down. I did try that in early tests. However, it didn’t seem to add anything much to the game. Throughout the design process I’ve been paring things back to leave the simple and fast rules that pose the interesting tactical quandaries without lots of baggage. in the end I decided that slowing down when you were carrying stuff was just baggage.
No traps yet, but they’re on my list 🙂
A thought on traps: since models in DKH are all “goon” models (no one is ‘your player character’), getting killed by traps will prove a lot more fun than getting hit in an RPG. I think back to times when I was hit by a trap and went, “oh crap, now I’m in danger”. I only had one player character. If I lost an orc to a swinging log trap, I think it would be genuinely entertaining, and eliminate the sting felt in an RPG when triggering traps (ie, the risk of losing your continued ability to play).
A good point. Of course, if we do get heroes, etc then we’re back with the old problem, but it’s always entertaining for the other players 🙂
add traps to my wants list on the other post
Roger that.