[ADVENTURE CARD GUILD] Season 2-B1: We Be Goblins! (Inactive)

Game Master cartmanbeck

@Thunderspirit: So Sorry to hear that. Take all the time you need. My thoughts and prayers with you and yours

Thunder spirit: my condolences. Take all the time you need, we will wait.

I'm planning to set up the next scenario later tonight in preparation for when Thunderspirit can re-join us. If you haven't, make sure you pick your deck upgrade cards and get your decks in order sometime today/tonight. :)

Ranzak has an Item and a Blessing to upgrade.

He will replace his Potion of Striding with Smoked Glass Goggles,
and take a Blessing of Lamashtu to replace a Blessing of the Gobs.

He will also be swapping two promotional cards into his hand for the next scenario:

• The spell "Fire Sneeze" to replace "Confusion"
  
• "Blessing of Zarongel" to replace another "Blessing of the Gobs"
  

It's worth studying the fine print on the promotional cards fairly closely.
I've long been aware of the Horsechopper +1, where if you are proficient with weapons the difficulty of the check is increased by four.
But there's also the Goblin Plate +1, which reduces the damage dealt to you by zero. Such a deal!

Ha, yes, the Goblin Plate +1 has been corrected to say "reduces the damage dealt to you to zero." :)
Relevant FAQ

Is it possible to swap the blessing 1 in my deck for another blessing 1 from my character deck box. If so I will swap blessing of Belial in for blessing of deskari. I have added in corroded helm for tower shield and blessing of shax for BotGods and replaced magnifying glass with signal whistle.

Zarlova has an item B and a spell B to upgrade:

Item: Replace Holy Water with Pearl of Wisdom
Spell: Replace Inflict with Find Traps

Is it possible to swap the blessing 1 in my deck for another blessing 1 from my character deck box. If so I will swap blessing of Belial in for blessing of deskari. I have added in corroded helm for tower shield and blessing of shax for BotGods and replaced magnifying glass with signal whistle.

If you had chosen the Blessing of Belial as one of your upgrades previously, then you can't just switch them. You'll have to find another Blessing 1 in another scenario and use that as your upgrade to get the Blessing of Deskari instead.

I have added in corroded helm for tower shield and blessing of shax for BotGods and replaced magnifying glass with signal whistle.

Isn't that three upgrades?

We only get two. Perhaps Ranzak was confusing you with his four changes?

Two of those (the Item and a Blessing) were the deck upgrades we earned on the last scenario; these are permanent changes.
The other two ("Fire Sneeze" and "Blessing of Zarongel") are temporary scenario rewards (one from each scenario),
but those extra rewards are restricted to swaps of specific promotional cards (although you can change which cards you choose at the start of every scenario).

Or maybe I'm the one that's confused (or, at least, forgetful).

Magnifying Glass got banished last scenario, so needs to be replaced (with the Signal Whistle).

Merisiel's 1007 Urgraz wrote:

Is it possible to swap the blessing 1 in my deck for another blessing 1 from my character deck box. If so I will swap blessing of Belial in for blessing of deskari. I have added in corroded helm for tower shield and blessing of shax for BotGods and replaced magnifying glass with signal whistle.

If you had chosen the Blessing of Belial as one of your upgrades previously, then you can't just switch them. You'll have to find another Blessing 1 in another scenario and use that as your upgrade to get the Blessing of Deskari instead.

It's a little hard to track all the upgrades, but I believe the "Blessing 1" upgrade when Urgraz took the Blessing of Belial was at the end of the scenario we just completed. So until we actually start our next scenario he would be able to change his mind as to exactly which blessing he takes.

(He'd asked a similar question before the game started about whether he could change his mind and take something else instead of Tower Shield in his initial deck, but got no answer).

The problem is that the GM has already posted the information about the locations, villain/henchmen, etc., so strictly speaking this scenario has now started.

No blessing of deskari was from first scenario along with warhammer Weapon b

I took blessing b and armor b shax and helm from last Scenario. All is working as expected not as I hoped.

I have no problem with people continuing to trade out after my initial post, as I only wait for the majority of people to be "ready" before we move forward.

That said, we're still on hiatus until Thunderspirit can make it back online. If we don't hear from him by Monday, I'll message him directly.

Funeral was yesterday, and I tried (without success) to sleep in today.

I should be ready to go on Sunday or Monday. Thanks for your kind words and patience, all — I really do appreciate it.

Take all the time you need Thunderspirit

I agree with Wendy-Ann: take all the time you need. And don’t worry if Monday is too soon.

Monday isn't too soon for me. I could use the game to distract me a bit from all the work my wife will now have to do with my mother's place, LOL.

Thanks for the kind words, all.

I will be offline until December 29th. It is fine if cartmanbeck plays for me in my stead.

A couple of impressions of the next scenario.

It's the first time I encountered the 'ARMY' trait, and really dislike it. The larger your party is, the less likely you are to succeed at all the checks (especially when, as is true in this case, the list of possible checks is almost guaranteed to contain several skills that nobody in the party is proficient in). So in order to defeat a henchman a lot of resources are going to end up being burned. The larger the party is, the more resources are likely to be needed for each encounter (and, of course, the more henchmen are likely to be encountered during the scenario).
While this is somewhat mitigated in this scenario by the option to succeed at a combat check, even those are likely to use up resources. The difficulty starts out at 13, and not many characters have much of a chance of making that on a straight roll. And it only gets harder as time passes.

I'm not a fan of the timer mechanism, either. It may be appropriate for a table of seasoned players where everybody is intimately familiar with the capabilities and playstyle of all the other characters at the table, is an expert in evaluating the risks and rewards of any particular choice of action, and understands every detail of the complications particular to a scenario. But for a table containing less experienced players, trying to barrel through a scenario without really having the time for others to explain what they are doing (and yet still expecting everybody to make the right choice every time) seems inadvisable.

In order to efficiently defeat the henchmen the party is going to need a good plan. We need to understand who is going to attempt which checks, and which resources we will have available to help out. That's hard enough to do at a real table, where everybody is present and able to concentrate 100% on the problems at hand (and to suggest options when things don't turn out quite as expected). It's going to be much, much harder in an online game. Being able to make one post a day isn't going to come anywhere close to what is needed to have any real chance at success.

Even more importantly - we need everybody to participate in the planning process, and to understand what their contribution will be on their turn. If you feel the plan being discussed isn't right, then speak up.

I will admit that one of the first thing that I heard from a player at a table after I had designed this was "There are ARMIES? You're evil!" Trust me, these armies are WAY less brutal than the ones in Wrath of the Righteous, where there are 6 checks, and it's inevitable that someone at the table will be rolling d4s if you're playing with 6 players.

That said, this was originally designed with the timer so that you could efficiently determine whether the fourth scenario could be run during the remainder of the slot you're playing in, say at a convention. If the timer becomes a problem, I'm okay with hand-waving it in this case, since we've never run the scenario in play-by-post format before. This is all still an experiment. :)

We will see how it goes. For online specials we use the convention 1 day = 5 or 6 minutes, but take into account that combat rounds are very slow in PBP games.

We will see how it goes. For online specials we use the convention 1 day = 5 or 6 minutes, but take into account that combat rounds are very slow in PBP games.

Yeah, I didn't think you guys would really need 22 days to finish. :)

I think not exploring might be a mistake, we still need to close two more locations and not using our turns causes us to burn days, which increases the difficulty of checks vs the villain and it also causes us to burn through the blessing deck.

The decision was made, so we will stick with it for now. If we fail this scenario we might want to rethink that strategy,

Oh, we're almost certainly going to fail the scenario.

But we're not looking to close two more locations - we're hoping to find the villain and win by temp closing all the other locations. The problem is that we have to hope the villain is near the top of her location deck - we can't encounter more than the topmost few cards.

We know the villain isn't at the three locations where we aren't exploring. But while in a normal game I'd agree with you that we should explore to try and permanently close those locations, the only way to do that is by encountering and defeating the henchman. That was hard enough at the start of the game; by now it is close to impossible. And even if we were lucky enough to manage to close one extra location, that would probably only have come at the cost of throwing in so many blessings that we wouldn't have enough left to be able to beat the villain and prevent her escaping. On our first henchman encounter, right at the start of the game, we ended up using six spells or blessings; by the time we first encountered the villain and started considering endgame strategy we were already looking at a +4 difficulty increase.

I am suffering from a severe headache, will return when it is better. My apologies.

Okay, so the scenario is still technically winnable, but if you all would like to give up and try again, that is certainly allowable. I think the way that I did the timer wasn't very good for play-by-post (an artifact of the fact that this is the first time I've run it over play-by-post, so I apologize for that). For the next run (which I hope you would all still be a part of) I think I would instead have the difficulty increases happen based on the number of turns that have been taken, so that if someone can't post for 24 hours it doesn't hurt you all as badly, and you'll be able to more easily predict the difficulties when your turn comes up.

So, we'd start with this rule:
At the start of the first turn, set a timer for 50 minutes plus 10 minutes per character. For every 10 minutes elapsed, the difficulty of checks to defeat banes that have the Human or Elf trait is increased by 1. If you do not complete the scenario before the timer runs out, you lose the scenario.

Note: We will be treating 4 turns as 10 minutes. At the start of every 4th turn, the difficulty to defeat Human or Elf banes will increase by +1.

So, I'd like to take a vote from the group on whether to give up this current runthrough and try again, with this new rule.

That change makes a lot of sense.

I'm willing to start over, I don't mind. This group has already taught me a lot about the intricacies of strategy I hadn't grok'd before.

First off Magabeus are you ok?

Second I like the idea of a do over. I do think we should explore even the henchmen locations this will thin them out a bit and give us opportunity to gain more resources, plus if we do flub a close check we will have less cards to check when later looking for the villain. I still think defeating the henchmen will be more miss than hit even before the difficulty starts ramping up.

Getting better, still not 100% (are we ever at 100%?)

I am happy to do this one again, I think Cartmanbeck's change makes sense and is fair.

I propose to run this one out (no exploring in turns) and then try again.

I will finish the scenario. But I'll step out when we replay the scenario. I'll probably rejoin a different campaign.

@khazkhaz: Will be sad to see you go, but I understand. If you haven't seen yet, we're going to be running a bunch of tables of card game in March as part of OutPost... check out the sign-up sheet and sign up for a game or two there, if you're interested! :)

OutPost Convention signup

(Card Game tables are in pink, about halfway down.)

I have been thinking all day about what I want to do. I am not finding PbP particularly enjoyable for the card game. Most of my enjoyment of the game and PACG comes from the interaction around the table, something that is very difficult online especially where we are seperated by so many time zones.

I really only have about 4 hours in the evening to post. I have been trying to post in the morning this week where it's been needed to move the game along but it is very disruptive for me.

I believe I would prefer to just let the timer tick and end the scenario. I do not believe I am interested in replaying it as a PbP especially at the moment as I will have little time over the next few weeks.

I may try again but I think I would prefer people be in the same time zone or close so that the time zones cause less problems.

I will write down my observations from this game and post them this weekend as I know you are looking to improve how PbP ACG is done. Thanks for letting me dip me toes in the water of the online gaming arena.

Totally understandable, Wendy-Ann. Play-by-post isn't for everyone, so no hard feelings there at all! I'll be looking forward to your critique and feedback.

It sounds like we've got at least four votes for giving up on the current scenario and allowing the timer to tick down. You'll all still get a chronicle for this scenario, and you still get to pick a deck upgrade. I'll work on getting the chronicles put together this weekend and sent out to everyone, and then we can start again on Monday with those of you who wish to continue.

Thank you all for being a great set of guinea-pigs for this format. I know it's not the easiest thing, and can be frustrating sometimes, so I appreciate you all sticking it out for four scenarios and helping me determine where improvement is necessary.

For those of you sticking around, I'm planning to continue running you through the second adventure as well.

I'm in two minds as to whether or not to continue. I'll try to come to a conclusion before Monday :-)

I would like to finish this adventure, I will make my mind up about the second adventure after we have finished.

FYI, we now have a lodge specifically for online card game recruitment, the Flaxseed On Deck Lodge

In the mummys mask set the game designers thought that all those look ahead powers (such has Harsks Examine the top card of your loaction at the end of your turn) made life a little too easy

They introduced Trigger key word

Trigger key words mean something bad happens when you examine rather than encounter the card

The keyword trigger will be on the card and a power will state what happens when you examine rather than encounter the card

In case of the deathtrap Harsk has just encountered if he had examined it he would then have to make a perception check. However he encountered by exploring so the trigger on examine power does not come into play

Sigh, I have no idea how that Malfunctioning Deathtrap got in there, but it's a Mummy's Mask card and we're using Rise of the Runelords base set, so that's not correct. That said, we'll go with Harsk having defeated the barrier either way, and I'll try to figure out why the random card generator is showing cards that don't belong in the box.

Ain't technology grand? :-D