When the Blessings deck runs out do I lose the scenario AND my character dies or do I just lose the scenario?
You just lose.
Your character don´t die, and you can keep everything you found in the scenario to rebuild your deck.
Indeed. Failure and death are two completely different things. Your team can actually succeed even when a character dies. And you can fail when everyone lives.
I've said before that every time I've come close to dying, failure was always a viable alternative. I love my characters, so I'll just let them fail if it means they can stay alive.
Though I do have a house rule (though as of yet unused) that if a character were to die, the scenario will be ruled a failure (barring the later introduction to the game of bringing characters back from the dead) and the punishment will be to not be allowed to keep what was acquired. Fortunately, this has been unnecessary so far.
If a character dies I have resolved that there will be no do-overs. I have to do everything possible to keep them alive and get a lot of enjoyment from the tension. (I might change my mind if Seoni bites the dust)
I also play that if you run out of time then every character has to banish one random card from their deck for every unclosed location. I don't like there being no penalty for failure, even if that failure is just a temporary set-back.
I find this rule encourages everybody to keep playing and trying to close locations right up to the end of the game. And we even won one scenario that we thought was lost on the last turn because of this.
More info (and discussion) on my house rules can be found here:
The one time I had a character die we did a do-over. Harsk made a heroic attempt to save the game but we failed anyways. We took it as a learning experience and tried again. The game is fun for us and we didn't feel that losing a character was for the best. If we had won the scenario I'm not sure how we would have gone but since this is a game we felt that it was the right thing to do. Still it felt better not to give up just to save the character, that kept the tension in the game as well.
Still every plays there own way. As long as everyone is having fun I say go with it.
My one problem with h4ppy's rule is that if you failed because your cards just aren't strong enough and not from a lack of going full tilt in exploration, this could potentially weaken your characters even more, making the scenario even more difficult.
Plus it could permanently cost you a loot card since its random (ok, I guess that is two problems).
I get the need to incentivize your characters to try to complete the scenario and not simply let the timer run out, but I feel I have that incentive anyway. It comes from the fact that I don't have a lot of time to setup and play the game. And its even harder to find that time with my wife or the groups of friends I play with. So if we let the timer run out, we have the sting of not having progressed any further.
I'm in one group that can only seem to play about once per month. We've played 3 times together, 5 scenarios total, but we only just finished Perils of the Lost Coast due to the timer running out. Its killing me that we haven't even started Burnt Offerings and 2 more decks are sitting there waiting for us to play. So for us, failing a scenario is almost like wasting half a month of playing the game. So far our failure has been mostly due to learning the game. We started as three and each time we've played we've brought in a new player that was learning the game and everyone was also experiencing the feel of having an additional, it wasn't because we were just sitting back unwilling to risk death.
In fact, a huge part of it was that early in the scenarios we didn't realize how much we needed to spend blessings and allies on exploration because of the additional locations and instead over-used them to defeat and acquire. Then near the end of the game we'd realize we didn't leave ourselves enough turns. I've played the game considerably more since the last time we got together in early November (and Calthaer is also in the group and has played more than I have) so I don't think the learning curve with the group size will continue to be an issue.
Now if others in my group start to hold back too much because they are worried about death, maybe I'll come up with a more severe punishment to propose, but until then we are playing by the standard rules for failure. If I did, I might be interested in tying the punishment to the number of times in the last "round" or two that the character doesn't explore or evades an encounter for non-strategic reasons. (i.e. if Merisiel evades the Villain so that we can know where he is and can set up our final strike by spreading out to be able to temporarily close all the other open locations, but then we fail to close the open locations and the villain flees and there aren't enough turns left to find him, I won't punish Merisiel for that.)
But if this house rule makes you happy like h4ppy, then I'm happy for you too. It is a truly great game that is meant to be enjoyed, so I say by all means, make it as enjoyable as possible for you.
But if this house rule makes you happy like h4ppy, then I'm happy for you too.
I see what you did here :P.
As I said in the other thread, I use these house rules because they work in my house :)
Other people's experience of the game (especially with different numbers of characters in their parties) will differ.
Have a great 2014 everyone!