Got this game for christmas. Thought I'd try playing it solo to start getting familiar with it. Set everything up, chose Seoni, and gathered together the suggested cards for her deck, and set up the locations etc for Brigandoom!
Round 1: Encountered a Xulgath at the farm. 9. 1d12+1d6+2 should do it, and it did. Sure, it cost me a card, but that ended up at the back of my deck, so no problems. Feeling confident!
Round 2: Werewolf. Blessing of the Gods out. Seoni gets roflstomped, discards all her cards.
Round 3: Oh well, Seoni has new cards now. She'll kick their butts! New Blessing of the Gods, and the same werewolf! Dammit! Invisibility saves Seoni from a humiliating replay.
Round 4: Seoni encounters a Warlord! This time 1d12+1d6+2 turns out to be 1+1+2, modified by the Warlord to 0+0+2. Another roflstomp. This time, there are no more cards to draw. Death ensues.
Yeah, the game is far too easy. :(
I am sure I missed something or a lot, but man, that was brutal!
RPG Superstar 2011 Top 32
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As a quick note, Seoni doesn't get to recharge cards she discards for her innate attack ability. Those go in the discard pile so use it sparingly.
That Warlord roll was super unlucky, 1/72 chance of double 1s on d6+d12.
Seoni is tricky to play solo. She can kick butt but she is very vulnerable to damage, and she doesn't have many spells to start with.
She really benefits from healing, so if you can find the Staff of Minor Healing or one of the heal followers it should help a lot.
Welcome to this awesome game!!!
Sounds like you were really, really unlucky. You were also playing one of the most powerful damage dealers, but also easiest to kill characters. Ryric is correct that Seoni gets to recharge spell cards, but not the card she discards to use her attack power. But imagine how much quicker you would have died if you knew that!
PACG is truly awesome, and I hope you enjoy it. To help you along your journey, if you don't mind I'd like to offer you a few minor points of advice. If you do mind, then stop reading here and just go have fun with the game.
First, you should note that hand size is basically also how much damage a character can take. So the smaller the hand size, the less risk of death. The spell casters all have larger hand sizes, which makes them "squishier" than say the fighter or the monk. As you discovered, if Seoni wipes her hand size twice, she's dead since she only has 3 cards left to draw. But Valeros (hand size 4) can wipe twice and still have 7 cards left.
Second, the game "scales" very interestingly as you have more characters playing. In a 1 character game, your character will have to take all the damage you encounter. But as you add more players, even though there are more locations, the damage gets spread out among all the characters, so you chances of not dying generally increases. But the trade off is there are more cards that need explored and still only 30 turns, so instead you have to burn your blessings and allies for their extra exploration powers. (i.e. 1 character = 30 cards in location decks & 30 turns. Odds are you'll find a villain or henchmen before you hit the bottom of every deck, so you won't even need all 30 turns. No need to waste cards on extra exploring. But 6 characters = 80 cards & 30 turns. Odd are still that you'll find a villain or henchmen before you hit the bottom, but you still might need to average 2 explorations per turn. And "trapping" the villain by temporarily closing locations becomes key.)
Those two things together mean that some characters don't go solo quite as easily as others. And you picked (in my opinion) one of the characters that might be toughest to solo. Not impossible, just tough.
But, the great thing is that you can play more than one character in your solo campaign! So add another character (or two). Kyra makes a great teammate for Seoni since she can heal her. So if you like playing Seoni, consider taking Kyra along with you. If you play more than one character, just play each character as a separate turn and use the rules on the scenario cards to set up the extra locations.
I think playing 2 or 3 characters "solo" is great fun. Largely because as any single character there tends to be a card type you don't really need. For instance, as Seoni solo you'll get bummed every time a cool weapon is encountered because you'll know you probably cant acquire it and even if you did you couldn't keep it at the end of the scenario. But team her with Krya and Valeros (for example) and virtually every card you encounter is something one of your characters can keep.
Be sure to check out the FAQ as there are clarifications/errata on a few of the cards. And enjoy the awesomeness!
Round 4: Seoni encounters a Warlord! This time 1d12+1d6+2 turns out to be 1+1+2, modified by the Warlord to 0+0+2. Another roflstomp. This time, there are no more cards to draw. Death ensues.
Yeah, the game is far too easy. :(
I am sure I missed something or a lot, but man, that was brutal!
I'm pretty sure the rules say that no one die can be valued at less than 1, no matter how many modifiers are sutracting from your roll.
So you still would've only rolled a 4 (1+1+2) and lost, but this is something to keep in mind for the future. Be aware this is true for a monster's die roll too!
I'm pretty sure the rules say that no one die can be valued at less than 1, no matter how many modifiers are sutracting from your roll.
The rule is they can't be less than 0.
No matter how many penalties are applied to a die roll, the result cannot be reduced below 0.
Sorry for the misstep. Thank you for the clarification.
Oh wow I just realized something - so if you encounter the Warlord in the Waterfront (both of those things subtract 1 from each die rolled), if you were rolling 3 dice you wouldn't just subtract 6 from the overall roll?
It sounds like you'd look at each die and reduce that die by 2 or in the case of a 1, just down to zero... That's a little nicer than how I thought that combo worked, I had missed that line in the rules.