I am not sure if this was answered already but if you lose a scenario during an adventure(without people dying) do you restart that particular scenario or the whole adventure again which includes the other scenarios(without the rewards)
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
You rebuild your decks after the scenario then try it again. You do not need to restart the adventure and you do keep things you found in the failed scenario.
If you think this is too easy then my variant is gaining in popularity :)
My variant is: after a failed scenario each character should banish one random card for each unclosed location. E.g. if there are 3 characters and you run out of time with two unclosed locations left then each character has to banish two random cards from their 'pile' (deck, discards, buried cards + hand) before rebuilding their decks.
h4ppy, no disrespect, but it isn't gaining any popularity with me. Losing a scenario is punishment enough. You don't get the reward, and you have to find the time to play again (the latter is my problem).
Plus, doing that would fundamentally change the playing of the game (at least as we play it). Right now, on some of the losses, they were because we were trying to do all the exploration we could -- to get that last possible boon that was hidden somewhere in an open location. In other words, we already knew where the villain was (for a variety of reasons), and we were trying to maximize our take. To me, taking it to the last turn (last blessing card in the draw pile) is part of the challenge of the game, and sometimes we miscalculate (e.g. something causes you to have to banish the top blessing draw card or someone trips a Skeleton Horde and we lose a BoG we needed to defeat the villain).
I for one love h4ppy's variant. It puts pressure on a party when scenarios go poorly to try and still be heroes, fighting until the end to defeat the villain (save the villagers, etc...). Running down the clock is IMO not in the spirit of the game.
@Birdmaron, I understand your approach to maximizing loot, I'm sure most players try to do the same thing. But maybe greed should come with a price when, as a result, you fail the scenario and thus fail the people you should be trying to save from whatever evil or misfortune has fallen upon them. Sacrificing some of your loot in a failed mission only takes away what 'extra' loot you were selfishly trying to acquire in the last moments while the villain got away...
@Birdmaron, I understand your approach to maximizing loot, I'm sure most players try to do the same thing. But maybe greed should come with a price when, as a result, you fail the scenario and thus fail the people you should be trying to save from whatever evil or misfortune has fallen upon them. Sacrificing some of your loot in a failed mission only takes away what 'extra' loot you were selfishly trying to acquire in the last moments while the villain got away...
The problem I see (and I think Bidmaron was alluding to) is this: How do you separate those who lost because they were greedy from those who lost because they were ill-equipped, or just plain unlucky? If you force someone who has an under-powered deck to banish a bunch of cards and draw (potentially) lower-powered cards, you're making their situation worse, and probably more frustrating.
I also think it also punishes larger groups much more than smaller groups, and from I've experienced, they are already at a disadvantage. Large groups (6 characters = 8 locations) could potentially banish over half their decks, but they have much less opportunity to acquire cards; smaller groups have more time time to acquire cards, but have less to lose if they fail.
I realize it's a variant, and that it's purely optional... I'm just saying I see specific problems with it.
Besides, with it being an optional rule, do you really think the "greedy" groups are going to follow it? :)
|
Flat, you read my mind. We always play with 6 characters, and it's hard to get boons if you don't take it to the wire. And one way to view it is that we are being greedy, but there is no wealth in this game as in a real RPG -- we're trying to get the cards we need to be successful in the future, not hoard wealth.
Is there a post somewhere with optional rules? If there is, it should be stickied. I missed that there was an optional rule to banish cards if you run out of blessings.
It's not an official optional rule, it's a rule H4ppy has created to reduce the temptation of ' I'm about to die, let's stop exploring and run down the clock'
If you think banishing one card per open location is too harsh, how about just banishing 1 card per character if the blessing deck runs out?
Just to be clear, are you suggesting each character banishes 1 card total, or each character banishes 1 card per character (as in 1-6)? I think the former, but "1 card per character" could be read as either...
I've thought of another issue I see with h4ppy's rule (sorry, not trying to pick it apart): it punishes people for the actions of others. If I am giving the scenario my all, but the people I am playing with are wasting time not exploring, why should I be punished for their actions?
I still don't think it addresses the issue it was designed to address: prevent people from winding down the clock because they know they're going to lose anyway. I think you would need to associate the punishment with the specific act itself, not the (potentially) distinct condition of winning or losing.
I was thinking of an alternative: At the end of your turn, if you did not explore or affect any deck (other than the initial blessing discard) and your hand did not change during the course of your turn, you must banish a random card from your discard pile (if empty, banish a random card from your hand instead).
My thought process: Ultimately, what I am trying to define is not participating. Exploring is the most obvious example of affecting a location deck, but there are times when exploring you know exploring is a bad idea (exploring with an empty hand is not taking a risk, it's being stupid); you may have a plan you're setting up for, and shouldn't be punished for thinking strategically. If you do not explore, you need to do something else that is considered 'helping' (Augury, Spyglass, Holy Candle, Cure, etc) or 'getting ready' (such as discarding/drawing card from/to your hand to get better cards). Moving could be considered getting ready, but I don't want "musical chairs" to be a free pass, so I've excluded it. Basically, if you're low on health and sitting on your hand, you're going to start banishing (bleeding) cards if you choose not to act. You are not affected by what others do, and it scales to the size of the group (less risk with larger group/fewer individual turns).
Disclaimer: I don't see the need for these rules, so I am not likely to employ any of them (not even my own); I'm just adding an alternate point of view. That said, you are welcome to use or ignore my ideas entirely.
As this is an unofficial rule, therefore completely optional, I'm not going to press my point too much as I was just trying to state that it improves my own group's game play.
I agree the heart of this rule is to reduce the temptation of 'not participating'. Thematically, failure to the scenario should generally result in some loss for the characters.
I don't think this penalty can ever be considered too harsh and create a situation where the game becomes frustratingly difficult. The game designers allow for characters to pick up Basic cards or cards two adventure decks lower than your current scenario if you somehow end up with less cards than are required to rebuild your character decks. This includes the act of dying! Following the optional rule will always leave you in a better situation than starting a new character after dying because you will still have all your feats (and most likely better cards).
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Didn't expect to find such strong feeling about that one!
The comment about gaining popularity was because somebody (on another thread) mentioned it as a valid variant and it was nice to see something I had thrown out there (on BGG) coming around back to me with a positive spin on it.
FWIW, I almost always play with six characters and always use the variant mentioned above. It's never been a problem and the worst we got hit was 1 card per character. It's amazing how many locations you can close when you are incentivised to do so!
Although you have a certain amount of time pressure when exploring with more characters, you also usually find a fair amount of loot. The aim of this variant is, for those that wish to do so, to provide an in-game risk to the otherwise painless (except for the real-world time cost) of exploring with no regard for the task in hand.
If you want to push the limits and explore a bit more than you think is 'safe' then go ahead... but know that there's a risk that the villain's plans will come to fruition and you'll drop a few items being chased away before you can regroup.
It's optional, it's a variant, it works well in my limited play-testing and several people have told me that they enjoy using it. That's rewarding enough for me!
That's what generally happens in team sports, or in a role-playing game...
Not necessarily true. In the RPG, if one party member decides to poke the sleeping dragon with a stick, the others can decide they want no part of it and walk away before it happens. :)
I don't think this penalty can ever be considered too harsh and create a situation where the game becomes frustratingly difficult. The game designers allow for characters to pick up Basic cards or cards two adventure decks lower than your current scenario if you somehow end up with less cards than are required to rebuild your character decks. This includes the act of dying! Following the optional rule will always leave you in a better situation than starting a new character after dying because you will still have all your feats (and most likely better cards).
That's a really good point. Given the choice between character death or banishing my entire deck... I would banish my deck.
I can see the appeal for h4ppy's variant to some people, but for us we're looking for things to amp up the challenge, not apply punitive measures once the challenge has been failed. Then again, this is a really easy game to avoid losing cards in. As long as you're smart with regards picking up crap boons before you close a "Banish a card" location, you're pretty much cool. Maybe some people like the risk. My attachment to Shalelu Andosana does not. :D
To that end, I like the idea of shuffling wandering monsters into the Blessings deck. This forces you to keep on your toes, and keep your hand in order, instead of just going for broke with the knowledge that the game can only hurt you if you let it hurt you (by exploring).
We actually had what was our first (maybe second?) loss last night. I think it was Approach to Thistletop? We encountered the villain 3 times in something like 5 turns, and my Seoni deck couldn't keep up. It's made me really feel not having a weapon as Seoni, and only one attack spell, because I ended up burning more than 5 cards on fireball. We cashed out when I emptied my deck on Lem's turn. We realized, of course, as we were cleaning up the piles that Lem was pretty likely to draw his Cure during his hand reset, and therefore would've kept us in the game, but at that point our new PS4 had finished downloading its updates and we decided to move on to other things.
Of course, this loss might not have been a loss if Lem had gotten his Heavy Crossbow as a favored card, which we always do, but forgot this time and just decided to roll with it, which led to us burning two blessings against a Goblin Raider so he could roll his 4d4 Melee against it. He won! ...and then we realized we'd need to beat a Bandit henchman to close the area, and backed off. The game was full of stupid mistakes like that, like not thinking about the fact that the Waterfront requires you to discard a card when you close it, etc. We were really off our game.
Brief comment I have about compelling players to actually participate through rules instead of letting them twiddle their thumbs... maybe the solution in many of these cases is to get better friends...? I can't think of a co-op single board game I've played where some fussy player has ruined it by not working with the team. I know it's part of the "geek social fallacies" that you don't call people like that out, but that complaint seems far more like a social problem than it does a game design problem.