A) When you need to draw a card for what ever reason and you have no cards in your deck then you die.
B) There is a Raise Dead spell that comes with senario pack 5 which is what I beleve the rules were refering to. So until pack 5 comes out death is final.
Andy
Yep, how a character dies is very simple, as it is stated with the first sentence of the Dying section on page 13 of the rulebook as Lostblade quoted and agraham2410 put very nicely in a single sentence.
And yes, dying sucks, especially if you are far along in an adventure path. Pretty much all of your progress is lost and you have to build a new character from scratch (which can be a rebuild of the character that just died). You would then be behind in feats and powerful cards compared to the rest of your party. The cards aren't that big of a deal since you can catch up pretty quickly and the rest of the group can help out with giving you better gear, but the feats are the big problem. Pretty much the only way to catch up and have the same number of feats as the rest of the party again is to replay every scenario with the new character.
How death works can hurt the fun of your game, making it really tedious to catch a character up or just suck it up and be behind if you don't want to deal with replaying the game. Or catching up a character could provide some fun replay value for some people. If you feel that you may be part of the former, you probably shouldn't let this ruin the game for you. A few people have been thinking of alternate, less harsh rules for death, like in this thread.
Personally, I would probably just make a player rebuild a new character deck, but let them gain the same number of feats of each type that the rest of the party has. I would probably also not let them pick them same character that just died. I think that would be enough of a penalty and would make it a little more thematic. Players would be especially wary of death if they really like their current characters.
...I would probably just make a player rebuild a new character deck, but let them gain the same number of feats of each type that the rest of the party has. I would probably also not let them pick the same character that just died.
That would be my route too - thematically allowing the party to pick up a new companion of equal 'level' and go about their merry, blood-soaked way.
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...I would probably just make a player rebuild a new character deck, but let them gain the same number of feats of each type that the rest of the party has. I would probably also not let them pick the same character that just died.That would be my route too - thematically allowing the party to pick up a new companion of equal 'level' and go about their merry, blood-soaked way.
Kinda hard to just leave Kyra on the wayside when she dies.
My group keeps the same character, but gets none of the boons he/she got during play. They get resurrected but at where they were when the scenario started. Luckily, Kyra only died once and the only thing she lost was a random boon.
It's not like losing save files on a game.
It's like losing a well loved comrade in arms that you have fought side-by-side with through numerous adventures, only to see them fall fatally just when you were beginning to think yourselves invincible. Cherish their memory but press on, brave party, because the people need you to prevail.
Recruit a new rookie to join your party and try to enjoy the new experience of protecting and sheltering them as they try to learn on the job and quickly build their deck and powers to compete with the nefarious beasties, banes and villains that you encounter.
B) To the best of my knowledge, once the character dies you have to burn their character cards in memory... KIDDING!! DON'T DO THAT!
The rule book explicitly forbids cremation, you must bury all your cards and hope for a cardboardy resurrection.
I should buy another copy of the game so that next time someone fails to acquire the sabretooth tiger I can burn their character in effigy.
I get that you can rebuild your deck with cards 2 levels lower than your current adventure.
But it seems unbalanced to rebuild a character with no feats.
So our group decided that you can keep 1 feat per Adventure Deck completed.
So if you die in Adventure Deck 1, then you lose all your feats. But if you die in Adventure Deck 2, you get to keep 1 feat.
We also allow players to regain lost feats by forfeiting the current scenario reward for a feat that was lost due to character death.
So far, we've found this to be a fair and balanced approach.
I've played a few games from 1 to 3 players and so far no one has come close to dying. I'm starting to get worried that maybe I'm playing it wrong. More often than not the timer runs out long before our health pool becomes a serious concern. Maybe some people are getting some serious strings of bad luck....
I haven't had anyone die yet either. And I personally don't think that if you play by the rules it has to mean you should be risking death on a regular basis. I think that for death to occur you need some combination of the following:
1. Bad dice roles. (ex: Low combat roles that cause you to take nearly your full hand size in damage).
2. A "squishy" character. (ex: High hand size)
3. Risky play. (ex: Pushing on to explore more even when you have few cards left in your character deck. Regardless of whether you know it or not.)
4. Unfortunate deck shuffle. (Ex: Seoni gets 1 spell in her hand when she starts the game, but its Detect Magic. All her other spells are on the bottom of her character deck. She's going to be forced to discard a card to use her power for combat.)
5. Unfortunate encounters. (Ex: Sajan is in a part with just Merisiel and you encounter a monster that can only be defeated with magic in the check. And so you keep running into him again and again and again.)
The closest I ever came to dying was with Seoni and it was a combo of 1, 2, and 4. Maybe 3, but I didn't think so at the time. In fact, I quite exploring and chose to fail the scenario rather than die. Another time I was Sajan and it was a combo of 1 and 5. And even then I knew where the villain was, but I knew that if I went against him there was a chance I'd die. I chose not to explore and fail the scenario. My wife (playing Merisiel) was also compliant in our failure since she didn't want Sajan to die.
But I've played Seoni and Sajan more since then and don't usually come close to dying. I've failed more than a hand full of times. But have only came close to death twice.
I've played with others (including another game owner) and no one has informed me I'm playing wrong.
And I don't think Mike and the design team want you to die. They probably want you to be successful the vast majority of the time. They want death and failure to be possible so that there is a challenge that makes the game fun. If you just waltzed through the game and the scenario counted as successful regardless of whether you had cards in your deck or the villain was defeated, then the game wouldn't be fun. And to keep you from exploring with no cards in your deck, the penalty for no cards in your deck is "death". And death is a very serious penalty. Much worse than failure. And every time I've seen so far, failure was an option when death seemed imminent. If you care about your character, you'll choose to fail if death is too much of a possibility.
That being said, the group I've played with has already decided to make a house rule that if we should die, we will simply stop the scenario, count it as failed, reset all characters to their pre-scenario decks and try again. We still don't play risky and decide to avoid death, because its a pain to have to dig out our character sheets to see what we had before the scenario. But at the same time we don't want to loose a character during deck 2. And we could "theoretically" have that character solo all the scenarios up to where the group was and rejoin us.
But to recap: In my opinion, death should NOT be a common occurrence.
It depends on the character(s) you choose and your play style. If you play very aggressively, you can run out of cards without ever seeing combat.
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It hasn't come up yet, but if someone were to die at our table, this is how I'd argue we should house rule:
Start a new character. Use the normal rules for deck construction (Basic only until Hook Mountain Massacre, I believe). This is a new character, so don't count card feats when building this deck. Then, collect the rewards for each scenario/adventure the party has completed.
Most of a player's deck contents comes from exploring during adventures, so forcing a reset gives a good enough penalty in my opinion. Giving the rewards from the scenarios removes some of the busy work of going back and earning the rewards a second time. Plus, it gives the player a chance to rejigger their feats if they want and the card rewards have a small chance to help recover from the death, but not too much.