datamancer's page

I felt like this scenario's timer was designed backwards - rather than having the difficulty count down from 30 I'd have rather seen it count up from 0. The point of the game is to ratchet up the tension and difficulty levels as the adventure continues, not to reward mindlessly plowing through to the bottom of decks then standing around waiting to close empty piles.

On the other hand, this does make a nice shopping scenario looking forward into the maw that is 0-6F.

This one stymied us for a while, something like 5 failed attempts between my Vika and my buddy's healer-built Bard. A big part of the problem was the loss of a few consistent players to game fatigue. (Also, apparently, in the time before I joined the group, they had swung and missed hard at Adventure 4A repeatedly, to the point where several people gave up.)

We finally got some of the old retired adventurers to come back after a week and a half of utter futility, including one notable attempt where on consecutive turns I found the villain twice, with the party scattered and no one able to close locations, singlehandedly costing us 8 turns off the blessings deck. (I was pretty salty about that afterwards.) Apparently tales of 2 manning missions which had hard-stymied the previous full party restored some morale.

On the successful run we closed one location, had the villain get scouted by a lucky spyglass, found one rum bottle, ran out of time to hunt for the other bottle, got into position with 4 blessings left. Valendron poked the Villain with 3 attack spells, a found Wand of Flame, and a found Rage in hand. Rolled 3, nabbed the attack spells but left the Wand behind alongside the Rage. We blessing up to go after a DC 35, get to 7d6. Rolled a 23. Drat.

Wait, the other returned adventurer is the bard who can reroll up to 2 dice! Yay! Wait, the dice we're rerolling were a 3, MAX(2d6)=12, we can only get to 32. Sad day.

We grump, and start to reshuffle the location and wonder how we're going to try and get this to work in the no time we have remaining, when Valendron reads the rest of the Wand. Yay, discard the Rage to get his d10 Arcane die!

2 rerolled d6+d10 = 6,6,8. #Rekt. Nowhere to run, the villain is dropped.

Finally. Sheesh.

My usual PACG group is temporarily out of commission for the Memorial Day and upcoming con weekends, so I got some people who I normally play tabletop games with, who played a bit of RotR back during release and no S&S, to have a go at it.

Biggest first impression? Three words:

Gorram
Tree
Barrier.

We hit two tree barriers and the demon barrier twice as well. (Someone only had one attack spell and had to drop two demons. This will be a common story about the demon barrier I think.)

Those two barriers are the biggest errata candidates I can think of. A barrier that pretty well unavoidably ruins the entire party's turns for a cycle regardless of location and can occur in multiples is not okay. I hate to see what will happen to 6 player groups that get to fight trees 3 times because of bonus temptation barriers or other shenanigans. 18 tempo loss because of lost attacks and damage taken out of 30 would pretty much equal scoop and redeal, and without a whole lot of mitigation possible other than "don't flip over the barrier on your exploration".