Trapdoor's Harrak's Hold

Welf VIII.

Member
Last weekend me and a friend of mine decided to give the new dungeoncrawl rules by the name Trapdoor (available printed and as pdf) a try. Before we had used our own D10-based set of rules (created by Green Knight) for dungeoncrawls, which often ended in backstabbing as we just love our "Intrigantenstadel".
But one should always be open to new things so here we go. The system is based on a D10 and each character or monster has six stats. If you want to hit someone you roll a D10 and add your attack value, while the defender adds his defense score to his very own D10. Afterwards the number of the defender is substracted from that of the attacker. Zero or less mean a miss while every number above that means a hit (the higher the number and the greater the weapon used the more damage is scored). Spells have a difficult rating making the easier or more difficult to cast. And there are a lot of skills to spice up the dire stats. You get xps for scoring damage, casting spells and completing quest, so your characters gain levels, new stats and skills.

We played the short adventure within the rulebook to get familiar with the rules, so we went into Harrak's Hold to kill all the Orcs and Goblins.

We had the four vanilla adventurers from the old D&D. If you charge an enemy you get an additional attack dice and are able to choose which one to use. The knight is an expert defender and gets an additional defense dice. The thief has a low attack score but gains an additional dice if he makes a stealth attack with a dagger, which meant - if our interpretation of the rules was not wrong - that his first melee attack was with three dices (base + charging + stealth). The first two goblins were killed with ease. The wizard seemed incompetent to cast any spells during the whole game. Bad luck!

Orcs and goblins combined proved to be a tougher challange.

But eventually they were brought down one after another.

The red blip was used to mark a figure, which is shaken, so an attacker gains another attack roll.
The cleric was given a healing spell, that - at least in my humble opinion - is far too powerful compared to the other spells. The cleric was able to cast a lot of healing spells which meant that the party was able to enter the last room completely unharmed. Although only allowed to try to use a spell four times each phase between fights, it was enough heal everybody every time any was hurt only a slight bit. A 1 meant a misfire and thus two goblins appeared as wandering monsters.

Small challenges like this only helped the party to recover as in combats the cleric was allowed to cast a spell each turn, while the rest of the party kills the hapless monsters.
The last room proved tougher as here the adventurers faced the or chieftain, his guards and a shaman.

After a few unlucky dice rolls for the adventurers the wizard was killed - I need to paint the killed the slain adventurers.

An orgy of dice-rolling followed, but we could not break the stabd-off and after an hour (!) of dice-rolling a truce was declared.


So what about the rules?
I think there are some great ideas, but also some things I don't like:
The healing spell is too powerful, healing 1-5 points normally and total recovery with maximum succes is too much. Make it a bit easier and only allow 1 point and 1-5 with maximum effect!
One should be allowed to leave the melee with a single opponent, but at high price: Give the opponent one attack of oportunity with an additional dice.
Sometimes we had the situation of an attack with three dices against two. Here the one with more dices should be able to give up one of his dices and take away one from the defender making it two against one. Another option is give one dice in favour of a bonus of +2.
Just one attack for each creature, even a five-headed hydra? Solve it with a rare skill allowing certain dreatures more than one attack.
May be we made a lot of mistakes, but at the moment I would rather dust of my old AHQ-rules or wait for Otherworld's dungeoncrawl system. Sorry!
 
It's the author of Trapdoor here! Sorry for the late response, but I don't frequent this forum and came across this thread by chance. Firstly, I would like to thank you for taking an interest in Trapdoor and making the effort to play a game and create this report: the miniatures and scenery in the pictures are fantastic and the write-up is informative without being over-long. I am naturally sorry that you ultimately found Trapdoor to be an unrewarding gaming experience. I am very welcoming of any constructive criticism, which is what you have provided, and have read your conclusions with interest. Having digested them I will now attempt to provide a rationale for some of the design decisions which you found disagreeable.

'The healing spell is too powerful, healing 1-5 points normally and total recovery with maximum success is too much. Make it a bit easier and only allow 1 point and 1-5 with maximum effect!'
The spell Touch of Belenos and prayer Laying of Hands (the same in all but name) have been altered a number of times throughout play-testing. At one point they were less powerful, and instead automatically healed 2 VIT and at maximum 1d5+2 VIT. However, given that the chance of casting/reciting success is only 30% it was found that in some sessions if the Mage/Cleric player was rolling poorly this level of VIT restoration was not sufficient to sustain a party throughout a quest. The current randomisation of VIT restored (if cast/recited normally) was viewed as being a 'happy medium' and obviously does not guarantee the full restoration of Vitality.

Related to this, you mentioned that the Mage failed 'to cast any spells during the whole game', presumably because of unlucky dice rolling. However, it could just have easily been the Cleric who repeatedly failed to recite his healing prayer, leaving the party in a very sticky situation. I demoed 'The Brigands of Harrak's Hold' at a local club on Monday and the Mage player managed to cast Rain of Svarog (20% chance of success) five times due to some incredibly lucky rolling. I have obviously played the quest on numerous prior occasions and can attest that, on the whole, most attempts at casting/reciting with new characters are not nearly so successful and cannot be entirely relied upon as a 'game winner'. Again, I did play about with limiting the amount of casting/reciting allowed in the Exploration phase even more than the current cap, but this proved to be too sadistic for badly mauled parties seeking to use this period to recover.

'One should be allowed to leave the melee with a single opponent, but at high price: Give the opponent one attack of opportunity with an additional dice.'
This is a concept I played around with, but abandoned in favour of simplicity (it also makes the Acrobat trait very valuable). Remember that if you make your opponent Shaken, you can then move away (but not Charge) and that if a defending model's RES Roll at least doubles that of its attacker's MEL Roll then the attacker become Shaken (a 'Repulse'), again possibly allowing the defending model to move away in it's own turn. One idea I have since hatched is that once per quest each hero may perform a 'Heroic Action'. In practice this would mean that they can convert any one dice roll to a '10' and would go some way to breaking deadlocks.

Bottlenecks and deadlocks are obviously a major and to some extent insurmountable problem when it comes to dungeon crawls. I remember frequently spending hours stuck fighting in the same room when playing WHQ as youngster and it is not an uncommon phenomenon in AHQ either (which is a positively deadly game if using the Lair Matrix provided in the rules). Again, as with casting/reciting, this has much to do with luck/dice.

Just one attack for each creature, even a five-headed hydra? Solve it with a rare skill allowing certain creatures more than one attack.
By the same logic you might as well say that as a human has two arms they should get an extra attack. Trapdoor pretends to be more abstract than that: a Hydra has MEL 8 which factors in any specialised fighting abilities it may have, and which makes it a very dangerous opponent indeed; even for experienced adventurers. It also has the Large trait, gifting it an extra d10 when making Melee Attacks against smaller foes. Such a decision is part of the desire to make Trapdoor a streamlined and abstract system. For instance the 'Champion' trait, which gifts an extra d10 when making Melee Attacks isn't really 'an extra attack', it's just increasing the model's chances of rolling high making it a better melee fighter.

I am not seeking to reverse your opinion with these 'justifications', but rather hope that you might perhaps better understand some of the choices I have made with Trapdoor. Whichever system you settle on in the future, with miniatures and terrain of that calibre, I can only say I'm envious of your gaming friends.

Regards

Gareth
 

Welf VIII.

Member
First of all, thank you very much for your reply, rereading my initial post, I think my tone was ruder than intended. Apologies for that.

Gareth the Grot":1u7xpo0z said:
Trapdoor pretends to be more abstract than that: a Hydra has MEL 8 which factors in any specialised fighting abilities it may have, and which makes it a very dangerous opponent indeed; even for experienced adventurers. It also has the Large trait, gifting it an extra d10 when making Melee Attacks against smaller foes. Such a decision is part of the desire to make Trapdoor a streamlined and abstract system. For instance the 'Champion' trait, which gifts an extra d10 when making Melee Attacks isn't really 'an extra attack', it's just increasing the model's chances of rolling high making it a better melee fighter.

I can understand that. Perhaps you are right.

Gareth the Grot":1u7xpo0z said:
... you mentioned that the Mage failed 'to cast any spells during the whole game', presumably because of unlucky dice rolling. However, it could just have easily been the Cleric who repeatedly failed to recite his healing prayer, leaving the party in a very sticky situation. I demoed 'The Brigands of Harrak's Hold' at a local club on Monday and the Mage player managed to cast Rain of Svarog (20% chance of success) five times due to some incredibly lucky rolling.

There is some truth in this. The problem I see is that once anybody of the party is just slightly injured (and the Wandering Monsters are not too strong), an attempt to cast the healing spell will be made four times on every exploration phase (in addition to casting it in combat). At the end of our game, the Cleric had 50% more XPs than the rest. Mainly due to spell casting.

Gareth the Grot":1u7xpo0z said:
This is a concept I played around with, but abandoned in favour of simplicity (it also makes the Acrobat trait very valuable). Remember that if you make your opponent Shaken, you can then move away (but not Charge) and that if a defending model's RES Roll at least doubles that of its attacker's MEL Roll then the attacker become Shaken (a 'Repulse'), again possibly allowing the defending model to move away in it's own turn. One idea I have since hatched is that once per quest each hero may perform a 'Heroic Action'. In practice this would mean that they can convert any one dice roll to a '10' and would go some way to breaking deadlocks.

I can accept that. The Heroic Points sound interesting.

I might give it another try, but with these alterations:

No healing spell.
Every character starts with a healing potion and some might be found in the dungeon (I think this might be a corrective to help out an unlucky - but not utterly stupid party - to be ready to hand more out if necessary)
Characters and GMinions are allowed to drop additional dices in favour of a bonus of +2 per dropped dice.


I am actually looking for two very different systems. One very fast and easy, which is going to be pimped up with intrigues between the different party members (at least one traitor) and the other one very tactical (or at least with a lot of options for different actions in combat). For the latter I would have already given WFRP3rd a try if it was not so damned expensive.

The terrain was just for posing, I think simple paper floor plans would have been more practical.
 

ardyer

Member
Welf VIII.":2hwc4jdk said:
I am actually looking for two very different systems. One very fast and easy, which is going to be pimped up with intrigues between the different party members (at least one traitor) and the other one very tactical (or at least with a lot of options for different actions in combat). For the latter I would have already given WFRP3rd a try if it was not so damned expensive.

Don't bother. WFRP 3 I'd a glorified board game with overly complex rules.
 
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