This is more of an idle thought than an actual rules question or anything, but I'm wondering...
Given that the Character Addon Deck gives you a bunch more like, short swords, maces, chainmail, cure spells, I'm wondering if the suggested decks for all/most characters should be prepared even if you're not playing as them, to reduce the rate of appearance for common weapons/items/allies to something more reasonable.
I would assume no, but given that, having the Character Addon Deck makes you more likely to gain trash you don't want. There are, what, three half-plates in the armor deck? It's hard to count how many times we've found a wooden shield or short sword in our many adventures, but we only saw Poog once (we got him, thankfully, but we spent our blessings!)
Of course, some of the thrill is in having the appearance of these cards being a rare occurrence. We would not have burned our blessings on Poog if we'd seen him six times before (actually, we "cheated" that game and scanned the leftover allies to see if he was in there, when we found that he wasn't, we stopped closing locations until their decks were empty/obviously exhausted of allies, so we made the scenario quite a bit harder!)
The flip side is that the game feels less exciting when every weapon is a long sword, and every armor a leather jerkin. Almost wish there were some way to guarantee a 'rare.' As it is, the mechanisms of the game are fun -- fun enough to play most adventures more than once, and to then start making random adventures of our own -- so I don't mind the lack of new loot, but when your third item draw in the deck is a potion, again, which you never want (and as Merisiel, are unlikely to acquire anyway) it can get you a little bummed out.
The rules, as written, don't allow for this, and it does alter the distribution if you decide to do it.
But, as I'm sure Mike would say, it is your game and it's meant to be fun. If you feel that the distribution of cards is causing you to dislike the game and get discouraged, then take the time to set up some house rules for you and your group that can help you enjoy the game more.
Just keep in mind that the adventures are based around a standard distribution of cards that doesn't take into account that characters will only be gaining powerful stuff with every draw, and as such, later on, your characters may be a little overpowered since they were able to acquire so many more nifty items compared to the expected loadout.
And I know you're being a bit exaggerative concerning the 'every other weapon being a longsword' since there's only 4 longswords out of the 52 weapons available, but I can understand the frustration with only finding mundane stuff over and over. Just keep in mind there's only 12 'super' weapons in the base game and character add-on deck.
There are 16 potion cards in the 52 item cards (30.8%), too, so that one I can definitely understand. Currently, potions seem to be a downplayed item that people seem to want to avoid. There's even a post somewhere here on this forum concerning them.
I think (hope) in the future, though, there may be more benefit to using potions instead of treating them as throwaway items or just extra health during a scenario until you banish them back to the box at the end because nobody wants them.
I've been thinking about this too. I had my gaming group come round and it took me a while to make the starter decks. Everyone was still chatting and catching up,many we talked about the basic rules of the game too. I gave each character their weapons and talked about combat as they read their cards. Then I gave armour and talked about damage types. Then items and talked about making checks to acquire or checks to defeat barriers etc. so whilst it was time consuming it was good too.
I'll be taking it to a new group of players soon, and wondering if I should have pre-made decks or spend the time explaining again.
