The only deviation we did was that we played all of the sets as one large mission where the goal was to simply reach the goblin king. This was more due to me misinterpreting that portion of the rules. In the rulebook the epic game type says to play each mission one after the other in turn and the player to reach the end of all the missions with the most bosses defeated wins, and if there is a tie for bosses defeated, then amount of gold is the tie breaker. Also if you have the most monsters defeated, you gain 1 extra gold. The rules don’t, however say what to do in the case of a tie for both bosses and gold.

To be honest, though, I feel that the only thing about the experience that would have changed was play time, it would have extended the game a little more.

As for house rules, it takes a very liberal stance on that, it simply states that you can try building your own missions, or changing the rules but suggests that the secret is trying to change only one thing at a time if you’re changing a rule.

In respect to the cooperative play, there is what the rules call Battle Heroica where one player plays as all the monsters on the board and always goes last, they get to move a single monster using the same rules for moving a hero. The difference is that they have no special abilities and cannot pick up items or gold.

The tricky thing about coming up with a cooperative style of play is that defeating an enemy is a simple binary result. Although perhaps using the battle Heroica rules and either giving the monster player the ability to use special abilities for boss characters, or giving the boss monsters health and inventory trackers like the heroes

As for epic Heroica, does it provide rules on playing it in the instructions? Does it suggest any possible house rules or rules changes?

I agree that it would probably be even cooler if the cooperative element was emphasized more. Perhaps everyone needs to get to the end to defeat the boss together, or something. Or they need to complete a number of objectives to win.

The difficulty is that Wizards is a large company with shareholders that they have to keep pleased. If they don’t continually put out new product, then the shareholders get upset because they’re not increasing profits. They’ve found that the only things that sell really well are the core books, so they figure they’ll just put out more of those and then they’ll make more money. But RPGs, by their very nature, are not something that requires continual revision. People can be perfectly happy with the first edition of something if it’s good. If it’s not good, then they may well just not play it in the first place. As such, Wizards is having a hard time figuring out how to maintain D&D as a business.

Smaller publishers don’t have this issue. They’re printing only a few thousand copies, and they don’t have shareholders to appease. They can be more creative with what they put out, because they can take risks and not piss anyone off.

I love 4th edition (though I do agree combat is overlong and battlemat-focused than I’d like), but I’m completely ignoring the Essentials line. All that does is muddy the waters and require me to buy more books. I’m fine with 4th edition as it is, and that’s the problem.

I also think players themselves might be getting a little tired of the treadmill with Wizards, and will be branching out more and more. It was easier for Wizards to keep them in the loop with the OGL, but now there’s a lot less d20 material out there. So instead of staying within the same RPG area, they’re really branching out and playing completely different games, and in some cases they’re not coming back.

Hopefully the response at GenCon was good enough that we’ll start seeing more about these minis in the near future.

Oh, and welcome to the site, Penn!

Glad you liked it! ;p