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Hawkmoon269 wrote:

That is it. Once the villain is cornered, you win and do not continue with your turn. So you don't have to reset your hand. But remember the reason he has no where to escape is because his location closes when you defeat him. Which means you must apply the "when permanently closed" power on the location. And that may require you to draw a card.

So in nearly all cases you are good but at some locations you can die heroically!

Woah, I never considered this in my 30+ sessions of playing PACG. I always just let myself "win" as soon as I'd succeeded at the check(s) to defeat the villain and saw that all locations except the villain's current one were closed. I'm going to have to start doing this now.

All powers may only be used once per check. If a monster has multiple checks to defeat, Harsk could use that power once for each of those checks at most.

As long as we're talking about Jolly Roger...

It says something like "Display this card next to your ship. While this card is displayed and you are on the ship, add 1d6 to your checks to defeat ships." (Someone please correct me if I'm wrong about this).

Does Jolly Roger "remember" who played the card and only give the 1d6 bonus to that player? Or does it apply to any player who is on the ship?

Most similar trait-adding powers have been FAQ'd to include a "may", IIRC.

One possibility that we may not be considering is what location cards this scenario will use. It's possible there will be a special location card for this scenario with "At This Location" or "When Permanently Closed" text that affects how this all works.

Obviously, cards available in later adventures will add to this, but I'm just wondering how high of a combat check is possible as a lone character in the very first scenario of either set.

The best I've found so far is Damiel with the following conditions:

* Alchemist's Fire
* 1 other alchemical trait card
* 1 Blessing of the Gods
* Any 1 other card
* The top card of the blessings deck is Blessing of Erastil

Damiel plays Alchemist's Fire to use his ranged skill (1d8+2) plus 2d6. He discards an arbitrary card for Alchemist's Fire's ability to add his craft skill (1d10+3). He also turns his other alchemical trait card into another 2d6 via his character power. Finally, he plays Blessing of the Gods, imitating Blessing of Erastil, adding 2d8 more.

Final total is 1d10 + 3d8 + 4d6 + 5:

* Minimum of 13
* Maximum of 63
* Average of 38

Can any other character or combination of cards do better?

Only other characters I can think of who even come close is Amiri when discarding a weapon + raging.

The_Napier wrote:

I'm sure I just be missing something, but surely there's always an open location for the villain to escape to when it's undefeated because there will always at least be the location it was encountered at?

That's exactly what I am thinking as well. With the villain always able to escape to the same location you just encountered it at, it seems like its going to turn into another crap-shoot like Toll of the Bell, where you are hoping against hope that somehow all the villains get shuffled into the right spot with no real way to control it.

That's a really interesting point. Which also opens the question, when would the below line of rules on the scenario card ever matter?

If the villain cannot escape to an open location, shuffle the villain into a random location, opening it.

An undefeated villain always has a place to escape to, its own location that it just was found in. And if you defeat the villain, you immediately win, so it doesn't matter if all the locations are closed or not.

Here's a strategy hint for this scenario: attempting to close a location is generally optional.

Thanks, Hawkmoon. You are as swift and accurate as ever.

I just want to make sure I understand this scenario right.

"The Lady's Favor" has no standard villain, but it does make you randomly summon the villain Commander Kyan Kain at certain points. Notably, if you've just defeated the last henchman and closed all the locations, you are guaranteed to encounter the Commander one last time. That's the part that makes me question the intended win conditions.

The last sentence on the scenario card says "To win this scenario, the number of plunder cards must exceed the number of locations."

On first instinct, I thought that meant you win *as soon as* you have more plunder than locations. However, there's no word or phrase like "immediately" in that sentence. It occurred to me that the condition might have been intended as an additional requirement on top of defeating the villain when there are no open locations left, which you will always get one opportunity to do after encountering all the Enemy Ship henchmen.

Any thoughts on this? Has it been addressed before? How did you play it at your table?

I pulled Pilk four times in a row on the top card (after reshuffling each time, on different turns). At that point, I retired my characters to a swank apartment in Azir and put the game away.

I had a similar experience on my first attempt at this scenario. After losing to Pilk around 4-5 times and still having plenty of cards left in each location, I ran out of cards in the blessings deck.

For the next attempt, I got stupidly lucky - Pilk was literally the last card I encountered in the scenario, by sheer coincidence.

I haven't played any of the RoTR adventures after Deck 2, but of all the PACG secnarios I've played, I think this is one of the hardest, mostly due to how dependent it is on where Pilk ends up in the decks.

I just looked through all the monster cards in S&S sets B, C, 1, and 2, and there are NONE that are made easier to defeat by having the Fire trait.

Is there some other use for Alahazra's power feat to add the Fire trait to her spells that I'm missing? Are we going to get monsters who are weak to Fire eventually?

Every other power I've seen in the game at least has a use, even if it's not very good. This one seems to do absolutely nothing at all.

Seltyiel's power to get an extra d6 on his combat check requires a spell with the Attack trait, actually, so you can't use Strength or Magic Weapon for that effect, IIRC.

I believe Rage is a Display card, as are Strength, Speed, and several spells, including Sphere of Fire. I would be interested in hearing how these are handled in general.

I've noticed sometimes that I'll end up with a particular character or group that has easily acquired a lot of upgrades for one type of card but few or none for another type. I'm wondering if other people have noticed this, and whether there's a consistent pattern for which types of cards are hardest to acquire.

Some thoughts...

* Items tend to have a pretty wide variety of checks to acquire, both in terms of how high the check is and what skill it requires.
* Weapons seem to have rather high checks to acquire, especially for the best ones in a given adventure deck.
* Allies generally aren't high difficulty, but are more commonly Charisma/Diplomacy than any other skill, so low Charisma parties may have trouble getting them.
* Armor isn't very commonly available, but it's also not a card type you often want a lot of, so that's okay.
* Spells seem very hard to acquire, not because of especially high numbers, but because non-caster characters often don't have the Int or Wisdom to get them for their buddies, and because spells don't appear at all in a lot of locations. The exception is certain magic-heavy locations, but those often don't show up at all in games with fewer than a certain number of characters.
* Blessings usually aren't too hard to make the roll for if it's a type you'd want for your character, but they're probably the rarest type of all to show up in locations (unless you deal with escaping villains more often than I do). Also, you can't get Blessings as Plunder.
* There are barriers that result in acquiring new cards if you beat them, but they seem to be much more likely to be weapons, armor, or items than anything else. There's Mystic Inscription for spells, but it's not very common. Is there any barrier at all that rewards you with an ally or blessing?
* End-of-scenario rewards vary, but spells and blessings are the least common. I don't think I've seen any spell or blessing Loot yet, either, and there's only one ally Loot card that I know of.

Well, you aren't defeating the ship that Enemy Ship summons, since you're not even fighting it; you're fighting Devil's Pallor instead. So you can't seize it.

I thought about that interpretation. The thing I don't like about that is, if you technically didn't defeat the ship summoned by Enemy Ship, then you also didn't defeat the Enemy Ship henchman and can't attempt to close the location either.

In the first scenario of Adventure Deck 2 for S&S, Give The Devil His Due, you have the ships Sea Chanty and Devil's Pallor roaming around. The special rules state that when you would encounter a random ship, move Devil's Pallor to your location and encounter that instead.

The Enemy Ship henchman used in the scenario indicates that if you defeat the ship it summons, you can seize it.

So, should you be able to seize the Devil's Pallor?

I think the obvious common sense answer is no way. It would cause weird interactions where you end up encountering your own ship! I'm just wondering if anyone else has thought about this and what the technical explanation would be.

yeah, this threw me as soon as they released the rule book

but don't read Vic's response though, as the plan sounds like it has changed...

That's exactly the comment from Vic I was thinking of.

I believe one of the designers said something like, "Yeah, we know it's repetitive. We had to put something in that box, though, or people would complain that there's nothing in the box."

You only apply the effects of the card text when you play the card. When you reveal-then-discard the card for a power like Kyra does, you haven't "played" the card, so you don't get to use any of the abilities on the card, including the recharge check.

I've only played with 3 players so far in S&S. However, my intuition says that structural damage is balanced across group sizes by the fact that there's more turns between each of a given player's turns. I'm sure people have noticed those situations in a 5 or 6 player game where someone uses a lot of their cards to support other players (blessings, Harsk/Lirianne/Lem support powers, etc.) and ends up having very little in their hand with which to take their own turn. Structural damage spread out across a large group will still contribute to that effect. In a 2 or 3 player game, you can sometimes afford for a player to dump most or all of their whole hand to prevent structural damage, assuming they'll just not explore on their next turn and draw up. In a 5 or 6 player game, you're up against the clock too much to do that.

Any thoughts on Seltyiel, the Magus? His ability to combine spells with weapons should make him a combat beast, but it discourages him from wanting to pack utility spells since it only runs off Attack-trait spells. Combining that with recharging spells from his discard pile and he should almost always be prepared to dish out a beating. I'm just worried he'll have issues dealing with barriers and acquiring boons other than spells and weapons due to low skills elsewhere.

I'm thinking about pairing him up with Oloch, the WarPriest, since they're both warrior-mages, which is a trope I love. Anyone else find it odd, though, that Oloch is such an amazing support character while having a theme of being a loner and keeping no allies in his deck?