Good afternoon everyone!
I have a really elementary question. It sounds like I've been playing this wrong for the last several months. The manual spells it out but I just have to confirm because it seems strange to me:
The rule book states that the minute you are required to draw a card from your character deck and there are no more cards left in your character deck, your character is dead. Even if you still have cards in your hand.
I have been playing where the player dies once the last card in-hand is used.
My problem with this is, all things being equal, some characters start out with more hit points than others. One character whose max hand is 4 vs another's 6 starts out with 2 more hit points. I guess that isn't uncommon either in comparison to traditional RPGs. But I guess the worst part for me is I still have cards in my hand that can be used to win. Being defeated while you still have cards in-hand seems strange to me.
Is there anyone out there that plays this rule differently than the rule book?
Yes, that is part of the point. A larger hand size means you have more options at your disposal but are also squishier. Caster classes in the RPG have low hit dice, but make up for that with their flexibility in being able to prepare for a myriad of situations. Fighters in the other hand have few tricks up their sleeve, but they are also very tanky. In the ACG, both of these are abstracted to your hand size vs deck size; low hand sizes are more tanky because you have less cards you are required to discard if you take a lot of damage and more cards left in your deck to draw after being hit. However, your options are more limited. Large hand sizes are the opposite where you have a lot more flexibility/options at your disposal but you get hit harder and die faster as a result.
To address your other point, staying alive until you have no cards in hand makes no sense whatsoever from both a flavor and mechanic perspective. From a flavor perspective (think in RPG terms here), me taking 4 damage when I'm at 3 HP will still down me, even though I'm carrying around my sword or holy symbol or whatever. Mechanically, I just need to ensure I carry 1 card in my hand that I can recharge on someone else's turn and then I would never die; I'd recharge it as soon as possible after resetting my hand so I either have 1 card in hand and thus am not dead by your rules, or 0 in hand but 1 in my deck in which I'm not dead by official rules.
The rule as written has a lot of thought put into it, I encourage you to keep it as-is in your games.
Your HP is your whole deck. Everyone starts with equal health (15 cards). And the hand size is the limit of how much damage one can take at a time. So tankier characters (hand size of 4) can only get damaged 4 at a time. They will never have to discard more than 4 at a time from damage. This means they will have to receive damage equal or greater to their hand size a total of 4 times in order to die, while squishier characters (hand size 7) cannot afford to have their hand wiped out more than twice.
Let's give an example:
Valeros has a hand size of 4.
Ranzak has a hand size of 7.
They both have 15 cards in their deck.
A monster deals 7 damage to each of them.
For this example, neither of them deal any damage back to the monster and they do not use any cards or powers.
Valeros only loses 4 hp (discards 4 cards)
Ranzak loses 7.
Valeros still has 11 cards.
Ranzak only has 8.
Both of them draw back up to their hand size.
Another monster deals 7 damage to both of them.
Valeros only loses 4 hp, bringing him down to 7 cards.
Ranzak loses 7 hp, and now only has 1 card remaining in his deck.
When Ranzak tries to draw back up to his hand size, he isn't able to. He is now dead.
Valeros is still alive.
I think the widespread explanation of "whole deck = HP" is what is causing the misunderstanding in the first place. In your example, bbKabag, Ranzak only lost 14 of his 15 HP to damage yet is now dead. He could have lost 9 cards and still be dead, so his actual starting HP is 9, while Valeros' is 12.
If you call the whole deck his HP and say everyone has an equal 15, people will naturally wonder why they are dead when they still have some part of that 15 HP left undamaged.
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I think the widespread explanation of "whole deck = HP" is what is causing the misunderstanding in the first place. In your example, bbKabag, Ranzak only lost 14 of his 15 HP to damage yet is now dead. He could have lost 9 cards and still be dead, so his actual starting HP is 9, while Valeros' is 12.
If you call the whole deck his HP and say everyone has an equal 15, people will naturally wonder why they are dead when they still have some part of that 15 HP left undamaged.
But your deck is equivalent to your hit points. The issue is that the hand size is how exposed you are to damage (potentially). As you discard, bury and banish cards, you are losing hit points. However, if you recharge cards, you are just cycling your deck. The reason Ranzak was dead after losing 14 out of his 15 cards was that they were in his discard pile and the rules required him to draw up to his hand size. Since he only had one card, he died.
Your HP isn't just your deck size and that is what your post is suggesting. Your (current) HP is your hand and your (draw) deck. That's why when you are Cured, you are gaining cards from your discard back to your (draw) deck.
You have to understand that you don't die just because you have no cards in your draw pile, but that at the end of your turn when you must reset your hand, you have no cards to draw from.
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I'd think that your HP is your current draw deck size, and nothing else.
That reflects the number of points of damage you can take. It doesn't matter whether your hand size is four or six - if you take one point of damage with nothing in your draw deck, then as soon as you have to reset your hand you're dead.
You have to understand that you don't die just because you have no cards in your draw pile, but that at the end of your turn when you must reset your hand, you have no cards to draw from.
I agree, and that's why I said Ranzak has 9 HP and not 8. He can lose that 8th card and still be alive, but when he loses what would be the 9th, he won't have enough to reset and will die at the end of the turn.
I'm very much suggesting that the cards in your hand are never part of your HP. Once you draw your starting hand, that number of cards is permanently subtracted from the number you can lose overall and still be alive, since your hand will always reset up to that many.
Put another way, if Ranzak has 8 cards in his deck and 7 in his hand, he would be considered "fully healed", yes? No amount of Curing alone can make his safety net bigger than 8, because he is forced to reserve 7 cards away from his deck at the end of every turn.
Put another way, if Ranzak has 8 cards in his deck and 7 in his hand, he would be considered "fully healed", yes? No amount of Curing alone can make his safety net bigger than 8, because he is forced to reserve 7 cards away from his deck at the end of every turn.
At the start of the scenario, sure. But once you start acquiring boons, you'll have more cards to deal with, and potentially can end up with a bigger "safety net".
+1 from me on the notion that your deck pile itself (so excluding your hand) represents your current HP. The act of resetting your hand doesn't really have any counterpart in the RPG as far as I can tell, it's an abstraction to simplify the rules and have the game flow more smoothly. The closest thing I can think of is that if you take more damage than you have cards left to draw, you are in a "bleeding out" state where unless you get stabilized before you end your turn (by being cured to 0+ HP remaining after you would reset your hand), then you finish bleeding out and die at the end of your turn. It doesn't explain why you lose out on certain resources but regain others, but it at least offers an explanation for why dying is delayed until you reset.
This is why the game never mentioned the whole deck as actual total HP. It is a unique mechanic in itself.
There's several ways you can try to interpret it.
Instead of thinking Ranzak only has 9 HP, you can think of it as everyone still has 15, but 9 damage is lethal for Ranzak. He goes into something like what skizzerz mentioned as "bleeding out" state where he still has life points, technically still alive, but 0% chance of survival and is as good as dead.
But yes, I agree with Fendaso in identifying characters' actual HP (or of you don't want to call it HP, the amount of damage you can take for it to be lethal). Every card in your deck is a life point, but actual HP is draw pile + 1.
Bottom line is, it still shows that even though everyone starts with 15 cards, some characters are tankier, and their hand size is what affects said tankiness.
This is why the game never mentioned the whole deck as actual total HP. It is a unique mechanic in itself.
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Mostly because the game doesn't use at all the notion of HP (as per standard RPG game). True the number of cards remaining on deck with/without size of hand somehow mimic the notion, but it's just "somehow".
If you wanted two real HP "formula" (but why bother), one for current HP and one for max HP, it would be a subtle combination of four data :- number of cards in deck
- number of cards in hand
- hand size
- number of cards in discard
And this is not a straightforward calculation with plus and minus.
Bottom line the fact that all characters start with the same number of cards, but tanks have smaller hand size than casters quite well mimic the fact that in RPG tanks have more HP, but that's pretty much all that can be said without brain locking on the maths.