How to introduce a new character into an existing playgroup?


Homebrew and House Rules


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Myself and four friends have been playing through Skulls and Shackles for the past year. We just finished adventure 3 and chose our role cards.

Our party:

Valeros the Tactician
Alahzarah the Stargazer
Damiel the Grenadier
Lini (role not chosen yet)
Jirelle (role not chosen yet)

Lini and Jirelle cannot attend every time so many times we play 3-player or 4-player.

It can get a little stale playing the same characters for a year straight. I am looking for a way to spice up the adventure by every now and then having someone change characters just for one scenerio.

What is a fair / balanced way of doing this?

Here is my thought. Let's say Damiel will be changing characters for the next scenerio. He will now be playing Feiya for this next scenerio.

- Examine Damiel's skills, powers, card feats
- Check off the equivelant totals on Feiya (and choose a role)
- Examine Damiel's deck and add up the total number of base cards, A1 cards, A2 cards, and A3 cards.
- Draw double of A# from the box (random), then allow Feiya to choose half of them to build the new character deck. (basically this doesn't allow Feyia to pick anything from the box to build the perfect deck, but it does allow her to have a nice mix of comparable cards to choose from.

I am just looking for ideas on how to make this fair. It is not that big of a deal because it is not a permanent charact change, it would just be to allow people to experience other characters for fun.

thoughts?

Thanks!


bluestacks wrote:


- Examine Damiel's skills, powers, card feats
- Check off the equivelant totals on Feiya (and choose a role)
- Examine Damiel's deck and add up the total number of base cards, A1 cards, A2 cards, and A3 cards.

Sounds legit.

However, these number of AD# cards are the Damiel-ADEQUATE cards! So, he may have 1 AD3 item - but that could mean he has sifted through -and thrown away- 10 other non-compatible AD3 Items. In you example - if you draw two AD3 spells for Feya, and they're both Divine - would you really give her 1 of them, something that would NEVER happen in normal game?

So, what I'd do is: first, let the players select ALL the AD# cards they would actually want in their deck, then, from that selection:

- Most beneficial method: Let them *choose* the appropriate number of cards (this actually makes Step 1 irrelevant)

- Medium approach (closer to your idea): let them draw at random 2x number of cards needed from each AD and pick half of them for their deck

- Harshest approach: let them draw at random exactly the number of cards required per AD#


Thanks, Longshot. It sounds like my idea is on the right track and I appreciate you giving options to optimize it even more.


bluestacks wrote:
Myself and four friends have been playing through Skulls and Shackles for the past year. We just finished adventure 3 and chose our role cards.

Yeah, some of us that have been playing the same adventure forever because we play in 4-5 player games.

In our 5-player Mummy's Mask campaign, this is what we did originally:

- we would only play if everyone could make it (meaning we rarely played)

- we would only play one game per evening, because some players had to leave early and some had to arrive late

- we would replay lost scenarios, per rules

In hindsight, should be obvious: Getting five adults together - many w/ kids - to play a full campaign is almost impossible. As you can imagine, it took us forever to make headway.

This is what we did to fix it:

- we schedule two games per night (one 7 pm, one 9 pm) and play with whoever is present at the start of the game. If you can't make it, no problem. Real life happens.

- everyone gets the rewards, feats, etc., regardless of who is actually present; no one gets left behind

- if we fail a scenario, we take the reward and move on; no repeats

As a result of our fixes, we're now going progressing though the campaign at least 5x faster than before. The end is actually in sight!

Note: This is the only PACG campaign where I've ever "cheated", and I've played many. All of my games w/ family members are played 100% by the rules because we live together, we can play as often as we want, we can all be present, etc.

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