HeroQuest Difficulty Calculator
A downloadable tool
I've been working on the concept for this for a long time, now it's finally here.
My difficulty calculator for HeroQuest lets you put in any entity with any stats to get a calculated number indicating the overall suggested power level for that entity. But it wouldn't be special if it just did that.
So, what it really does is get precise power levels -- prioritizing largest potential number -- of groups of entities, so you can finally get a reference of difficulty to measure rooms of any configuration of monster you want.
After all, two goblins, when faced singularly, each have their own predictable power. But put them in a room together, and the difficulty of beating them isn't just adding the two together!
A ton of examples are included, and plenty of room to add your own entire rosters of enemies and heroes -- the workbook has built-in instructions, support for 14 quests so you can track the difficulty of your homebrew campaign, and even supports monsters that defend on white shields or who have multi-hit attacks.
Everyone knows simplicity is best when it comes to HeroQuest, but this tool is for the over analyzers and overengineer...ers. Like me!
I'm proud of this free project finally being ready enough to share.
This tool may be used to help you track arbitrary difficulties of skirmishes for your dungeon crawl gaming campaigns, regardless if personal or commercial - more details are included in the file.
ONWARD!
(update 10/19 - fixed the abomination entry.
| Status | Released |
| Author | AmalgamAsh |
Download
Install instructions
Just open in Excel. Only tested in Excel, if I can make changes to increase (or otherwise verify) compatibility with other spreadsheet tools I will update!
Comments
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After sufficiently nerding out, I wanted to let you know your undead figures are wrong. Skeleton should be 221 not 311. Zombie should be 231 not 221, Mummy should be 342 not 232. There may be others but I haven't checked. I'm just a nerd about how tough Zombie are (3 DD) and noticed yours was too low.
Hit me up if you ever want to bounce ideas off a fellow Excel geek!I'll preface the next part by saying I'm not suggesting you change anything. I just wanted to provide some feedback.
That out of the way, I gotta take issue with your Power formula. It's obviously subjective, but I feel like placing the bulk of the Power level on the BP and AD doesn't really work. 1 Abomination (3 AD, 3DD, 2 BP) is equal in power to 8 Goblins (16 AD, 8DD, 8 BP)?
I've tried a few different variations on fancy formulas, usually along the lines of "How hard do they hit" (AD * <SomeDefaultValue>) and "How hard are they to kill" (DD * BP), but I usually end up in the same situation you're in.
In my opinion, the best way to do this Power leveling thing is to just total everything (AD+DD+BP+FN). I use a single "FudgeNumber" as a way to give Bosses and spell casters a boost. Anyway, this gives you an Abomination (3 AD, 3 DD, 2 BP -> PL = 8) whose PL is equal to 2 Goblins (4 AD, 2 DD, 2 BP -> PL = 8), which seems more fair to me.
I don't really understand your Quest room calcs. 3 Goblins in a room get PL = 24 which is the same as a room with a single Abomination PL = 24. That's not too far off the mark I suppose.
However, 3 skeletons (using the correct numbers, are just Goblins with 1 extra DD) have a PL = 36, so significantly (33%) harder than 3 Goblins or 1 Abomination, which is a little hard to swallow.
But 1 Abomination and 1 Goblin have a PL = 52?! How can adding 1 Goblin to the Abomination's room make it as hard as 2 separate rooms with 1 Abomination each?
There definitely needs to be a compounding multiplier in effect for groups of enemies over single enemies but I don't think the way you're doing it is as balanced as it could be. I'll see if I can come up with something more balanced.
Appreciate the corrections about the undead stats, I did the same thing for the abomination and have no idea how. Too excited to get to the finish line maybe! I'll definitely update those.
Thanks for the detailed review.
It shouls say this somewhere in the info sheet but isnt e plained in depth -- the Calc is giving you the *hardest* possible version of a room, which may be giving you a sense of inaccurate measurements for skirmishes, especially when you add a weak monster and see the number jump really high. To see how this works - and to see exactly why the monsters are sorted - think of your heroes killing the weakest monster in a room full of enemies before their turn ends. The calculator isn't just using the attributes of the monsters but also taking a subjective application of turns into account, and so the strong monsters swamp your heroes. The idea is that any calculation that is able to realistically take into account a room full of monsters should actually give you a range or window rather than a hard number. The hard number that is given here is the "what's the worst case scenario" which to me was better than the alternatives (being "what's the lowest bar of entry for this room but only if you are very lucky?" Or "what's a random number in that window I can give you that won't make sense once you account for the difficulty ceiling with a completely different group of enemies that is much harder but returning the same number?") So that's why I developed this compounding method.
To the point about additive formulas, I historically don't like them, but I realize simple formulas for base game monsters can be much simpler and more eloquent since there are only eight monsters. This sheet is for (not to repeat the info section) adding in more complex entities and for homebrewers, and thus make the stats more weighted for situations where you might have a monster that has 1bp, 1ad, but 6dd, or another with 6ad, 1dd and 1bp. These would have the same danger if their stats are added together, but obviously have very different presences in a room, and the calculator deliberately reflects that.
I think 1 abomination versus eight separate goblins would be a fun playthrough with a pretty close end. I might play this out and see how it runs. :)
Happy to help.
I probably should've looked at the Info/FAQ Sheet, that's on me. Sorry.
I like the idea of this being "Maximum Effort" difficulty rather than some random number. We all know a bad run on dice rolls can make or break even the most balanced quest, so anything you have that's consistent is going to work.
That being said, I still don't like your formulas and I'll try to come up with my own, maybe some kind of percentile that ramps up. Like the 2nd enemy increases all monsters by 10%, the 3rd by 25%, the 4th by 45%, and so on.
Re - Custom Monsters: I would encourage you to have some heroes fight a 611 monster (Chainsaw Goblin) and a 161 monster (Dread Warrior with a Dagger. I would happily define them as being in the same difficulty ballpark, whereas you have the Goblin twice as difficult as the Dread Warrior. The 611 is unlikely to survive the first hero attack(s) and therefore be unable to use it's 6AD attack, where the 161 monster is going to stand there and be hammered on while chipping away at the Heroes health on its turn... potentially. Maybe the heroes roll poorly when attacking 611 and 161 can't roll a Black Shield to save it's life... literally... see what I did there? Again, subjective but I would argue the 161 would be far more difficult for brand new heroes than 611 (assuming the heroes get a chance to attack first). It would be fun to try out.
No way, 8 Goblins would chew up 1 Abomination. He'd take 1, maybe 2 out and would himself be taken down in the 2nd or 3rd round.
Maybe that's the way to set a difficulty. Goblin is the "base" difficulty, and every other enemy is rated on how many goblins it takes to kill it (best 2 out of 3). We got all winter to figure this out, then it's WoM time and no one will care about Homebrew for a while! :)
This calculator assumes monster will get first strike, which is part of the maximum difficulty :) that chainsaw goblin isn't gonna be tough to take out, but it's gonna suck regardless!
So after two years of iterations and proba ly hundreds of logically extreme examples like the above, it's all accounted for already (even movement really - the user can pin movement into the S columns should they desire, to add an edge, or a fudge number).
No worries either though, liking the formulas isn't required and I highly encourage folks to come up with their own -- make it better, or make something entirely different!
Best of luck!
Hero movement usually reveals the monster(s) location, so how would they get first strike? It admittedly happens on occasion but for the most part, player 1 kicks open a door and rushes in and attacks whoever they can reach. Then the other 3 jump in, then the monster's turn. I Homebrew that ranged mobs attack immediately when revealed, but otherwise... I understand you're going for max difficulty but it definitely seems odd to make an edge case (player 4 opening a door with the last of their movement) the basis of the difficulty system.
To step back for a second, I want to thank you again for your hard work on this. It's an amazing tool and my focus on the formulas is intended to be constructive feedback, but probably comes across like criticism. I'll stop beating the dead horse and go back to working on my own stuff now. Thank you again for the tool and for the clarifications. Carry on good sir!
No worries and thank you very much! :)
(Just to answer the formula Q and for anyone else wondering about this!)
It assumes the monster first strike in order to ensure the AD attribute is relevant if the monster has no other significant attributes - in practice if a monster has 10 attack, but 1 BP and 0 DD, and we assume the heroes kill it on sight, the tool can't give a fair measurement of that monster. It works against the purpose of the tool to discount it entirely when it's not a guarantee that it'll die upon being encountered.
That's a logical extreme, but the actual formula used would provide the same bell curves if we took away the first strike -- it is left in to make sure the cases like the above can be correctly mathematically accounted for, especially when said monster is encountered in a group.
The numbers mean nothing on their own though -- it is with comparison and frame of reference that any of it will start to make sense for the quest designer.
Also, apologies for not catching this sooner, but I looked again at your 8 goblin / 1 abomination scenario and I assumed that was meant to be compared singularly...but the numbers you have aren't what the calculator should be returning at all.
8 goblins singularly would give a quest difficulty of 32 while the abomination has 24. 8 goblins together in a room have a difficulty of 144. Sounds like there is a calculation bug I may have missed, and if you could reproduce it and show where it's coming up with that, I'd appreciate it!