After playing from Perils through to the end of Hook Mountain with a party of 5, and rarely encountering a situation where we felt we could lose the scenario, we've come up with the following house rules to bump up the difficulty. I'd be interested in hearing thoughts on these - too much, too little, off the mark?
0B/1L/2BL House Rules:
0B:
The rules state that if you have no cards left in hand, you ignore any extra damage you take. This means there is little to no risk in exploring with an empty hand, since you cannot really get hurt.
House Rule 0B: If you end up with zero cards left in your hand when taking damage, and still have at least 1 point of damage remaining to take, bury the top card of your deck and then ignore the rest of the damage.
1L:
We found the turn limit imposed by the Blessings deck was not limiting for our 5 player group. We never came really close to losing on time.
House Rule 1L: Add an additional location.
2BL:
We found that with 5 players there are too many Blessings being thrown in the key combats, against the henchmen and villain, making them far too easy.
House Rule 2BL: Limit of 2 Blessings in a combat.
I've not had the problem of the game being too easy myself. In the various different groups I'm in, we've failed a scenario or two as well as had characters come close to death (usually thus resulting in us electing to let the blessing timer run out and fail).
But I wouldn't say your rules are overkill. You might want to make 0B (I'm a bit confused on your numbering system) be just a discard instead of a bury though. There are quite a few banes that make you discard the top card of your deck. Burying can be too harsh. (What if that was Ezren's one weapon or one of his few attack spells?)
I don't quite personally understand how the situations you mention being the cause for the two other rules could exist. In a 5 character game, you'll have 7 locations to explore through your 30 turns. If your players are discarding blessings on henchman and villains to help others for combat checks, that would seem to mean they aren't using those blessings for exploration. Which would make it even harder to get through 7 locations in 30 turns. And if you are saving all those blessings for combat, then it also means you aren't using them to acquire better gear. So when Sajan stumbles across a sweet sword that Valeros would want, if no one spends a blessing he probably won't get it. So I'd also think that your gear would tend to be more sub-par.
I'm in a 5 player group (and I also do a six character group solo) and we are often on our last turn or two when we get to the villain. And almost always with in the last 5 turns.
And before anyone starts in on it, I'm not at all accusing you of not playing correctly. I'm just stating my experience is different. It is possible the differences in outcome is random. Maybe your characters tend to encounter cards they are good at acquiring and defeating while mine don't so we have to spend our blessings if we want them better gear and to defeat more banes. Or maybe you just have more favorable dice rolls more often than I do.
As a side note: I think an interesting rule that would up the difficulty would be to maybe force characters to team up at locations more. So maybe something like you could only play a blessing if you were at the same location. Or lay the locations out in a certain order and treating it like a circle (so the two on the ends are treated as adjacent) say you can only play blessing if at the same location or one of the two adjacent locations. That would mean you might team up more, which would give the villain more escape options when he flees. And it would also serve to limit your feeling of being overly-blesses.
Or maybe make a punishment for failing to acquire a boon. Say discard 1 card from your hand. That would make you probably spend blessings to get boons and therefore not be as able to power up your combat with banes.
I tend to agree with Hawk here. I don't find the game terribly easy or difficult. Some games we get lucky, and others we don't. We've gotten some good card and the last couple of sessions have seemed a bit easier to me, but I also have seen a game where the villian escaped 4 different times and I've lost scenarios.
I think a lot of it is risk vs. reward. Lately we've been focusing on less risk but we've gotten less reward for it. Still luck plays a part. We started pretty spread out last night and drew the villian on the second explore of the first turn. It narrowed things down real quick.
Also, it seems that focusing the characters a bit more helps. We have a lot of spyglasses and augury right now, so we tend to look through decks easily. Keep Lem away from combat and the same for Kyra, keeps people going. It works well.
Still, these alternate rules don't seem to over-reaching. I actually like the concept of burying a card as a punishment instead of discard. If you feel that things need to be a bit tougher, then I think these work. Good ideas.
We did find that we can spread out the group quite effectively, with everyone focusing on locations they are strong in. So it wasn't as much an RPG adventuring group, as a blitz of many locations at once by individuals or pairs of characters. When necessary, we'd join up again for healing or support. We also tended to explore as often as our hands would reasonably allow, and we didn't focus much on making sure we got all the boons from all location - we tended to close them when we could.
I like the idea of location-based Blessings - but it seems then one should do that for spells as well.
PS - the nomenclature was for easy remembering: 0 1 2 B L BL
@Harald - I posted some info on how we make the game more difficult
My "bury for damage" rule is a bit different to yours (only if you have an EMPTY hand when you take damage, not also for 'remainder' damage)
Putting the henchmen and villains in the bottom half of the decks also (IMHO) makes the game harder (it's usually a real disappointment to find a henchman on the first 1 or 2 cards of a location deck).
I think I've only run out of time once and nobody's died so, for us, these are all perfectly workable additions to the challenge.
On reflection, I've recently thought that the game doesn't scale so well up to 6 characters. There are just too many blessings and powers available to help with Villains.
Have been kicking around some ideas, but I want to finish the whole AP before commiting to these (since Hook Mountain has been significantly more challenging and fun)...
- some kind of adjacency rule (e.g. ranged weapons, spells and/or blessings can only be played on encounters at adjacent locations)
- the party can only 'pray' to one (or x) god(s) per check (i.e. only one/x TYPE(s) of blessing can be played per check)
- if you 'spot' the villain then there's a limited amount of time before he runs and hides (stops you spending several turns preparing an all-out assault)
- add a Mammy Graul style "the first time this villain is defeated, consider it undefeated" power to all villains. That was the scariest thing we've found so far!
My wife and I have been playing 6 player locations with 2 and 4 player groups. Has made things more interesting. Our 4 player game had an epic Blackfang's Dungeon adventure where we pulled through on the last turn.
@Nathaniel - this is spot on. If you have any bright ideas to help mitigate this let me know!
If your experience is that the villain doesn't scale, then given the increase in two check villains, what about not letting a second character take the second check against the villain? Or that characters can only assist with one of the two checks?
And I wonder if we'll be seeing villains with more than two checks?
@bidmaron - I really don't think that's what happens... we explore as fast as we can, whether or not we've already seen the top 5 cards. (And I played the first Adventure without putting villains in the bottom half, so I have some experience of the 'normal' way too)
The point here is that, with 5 other characters around, you're going to get a LOT of help whenever the villain shows up. Even Seoni fighting against the villain with her bare fists (happened to me in one of the (3) scenarios) still won.
1d4 STR + 2 'normal' blessings + 2 'situation' blessings + Harsk's ranged strike + plus Harsk discard a bow + Poog was something like "9d4 + 6" - we just made the required roll.
That's an extreme case but with 6 characters it's normally easy enough to put together a roll with an expected average of 35-40 (especially when your base die is bigger than a d4!).
One house rule I've used to increase difficulty is that dice added by blessings played on other characters are always d4s.
You're going to have fun when you get to the role cards (which turn blessing dice into d12s in some situations)!
@Derek - I don't think there's a direct correlation between V&H in the bottom half of the decks and hoarding stuff for the showdown. Hoarding/preparation happens when you know where the villain is, which is not the same thing.
The reasons I switched to this method were twofold:
1) Too many first turn -> Augury -> oh, there's the villain, we'll leave that deck until last moments.
2) Finding a henchman as the first/second card in a deck massively reduces time pressure (if you defeat it and cloes the location) and lets you close a location -> which means you have more knowledge of where the villain runs to when you finally find him and defeat him the first time.
Note also that as soon as the villain runs he's no longer (necessarily) in the bottom half of any deck so the changed set-up does not affect the whole game, just the early encounters.
However, having 'play tested' this for a while it may be better just to add more locations (even to a 6 character game, although I'm not sure my table is big enough) and/or roll a die each turn after you scout the villain. If the die roll is x the villain will run - this removes the ability to 'power up' before facing them and hopefully add some fun tension to proceedings.
For your proposed help-only-from-the-same-location variant you'll need to have a think about some of the existing powers (e.g. Harsk's character powers to help combat checks at other locations) but it definitely make for an interesting variant - albeit one which runs against the grain of the designers' intentions!
I think a "same location to help in anyway" would totally break the rule. Here are a quick lists of things in the game that would no longer work (and therefore I'd say would be broken):
- Harsk's power.
- The second power on bows and crossbows.
- The ally Jakardros Sovark
- Scrying (its no better than Augury and harder to recharge)
- Valeros has little reason to take the Weapon Master role (that is one is more subjective)
And that is just off the top of my head. Plus forcing team up too much hurts Merisiel and also weakens the Villains that say something like "If you are the only character at this location, the checks to defeat blah-blah are increased by 3."
If you want to do something like this, I'd first try laying the locations for the scenario out randomly in a row/circle. Then say that you can only help from the adjacent locations. If you laid out in a row, treat the end two locations as touching. I haven't tried it, so I have no practical experience on how it would work. You might want to vary it slightly by treating closed locations like they "disappeared" so that all the open locations are always able to be adjacent to two other open locations as long as there were three open locations.
That forces team up a bit more than the standard game, but doesn't eliminate the usefulness of all those things I just mentioned.
The other thing I would maybe try would be to take the same goal has h4ppy's variation, which is to not make the game too easy by encountering henchmen early. I'd shuffle everything normally. But (maybe just for henchmen and not the villain) I'd add to the check to defeat how ever many cards are below them in the location when they are encountered. So if the henchmen was the top card, he's a +9. If he's the last card, he's a +0. That would make the henchmen pretty difficult in the early encounters and nerf the over use of blessings early on. You might need to scale it down and divide the number of cards in half and round up so that the max would be +5. (Again totally untested theory here.) Maybe allow someone to bury a blessing to remove the henchmen bonus.
I'm just brainstorming here, so feel free to poke holes in that. But remember there is no judging in brainstorming. And I'm not saying to try those two things together (necessarily).
And disclaimer: I don't personally do anything to make the game easier (except maybe be unlucky/untalented at it). I'm just more curious on the mechanics for increasing the challenge at this point since its so commonly discussed.
I double check the things I mentioned. Jakardros Sovark wouldn't be totally broken if you couldn't play him except when helping a character at your location, but he'd be seriously nerfed. He's 1d4 to another character's combat check, so he'd be near useless (except for exploration) if you made that change but still spread out in order to trap the villain.
The other thing I would maybe try would be to take the same goal has h4ppy's variation, which is to not make the game too easy by encountering henchmen early. I'd shuffle everything normally. But (maybe just for henchmen and not the villain) I'd add to the check to defeat how ever many cards are below them in the location when they are encountered. So if the henchmen was the top card, he's a +9. If he's the last card, he's a +0. That would make the henchmen pretty difficult in the early encounters and nerf the over use of blessings early on. You might need to scale it down and divide the number of cards in half and round up so that the max...
This is an interesting idea! The one thing that has concerned me with h4ppy's variant for concentrating the henchmen/villain towards the bottom is that over time you are essentially allowing more opportunities to acquire boons and making the game easier not harder.
The brilliance of this idea, potentially, has the flexibility to either make you spend your resources exploring through the location decks quickly (the essence of h4ppy's variant) or to make you spend those resources early to overcome the henchmen. If you beat the henchman early, you still have the option to not close the location and try to acquire the rest of the boons. This maintains a strategic element originally built into the game (nerfed by h4ppy's variant).
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I am a long time gamer (started with original d&d, but new to Pathfinder. My wife got the Pathfinder Adventure Card game for us on Christmas. My wife, 19 yo daughter and I have played it almost every night since Christmas. We have made it through the Skinsaw Murders and are about to start on the 3rd adventure pack. We have kept our games focused on getting through the story, and I try and add some context and make it as much a role playing game as I can given the constraints. I like the game and we have had a grand time, but have only come close to running out of time once (got to the last 3 cards of the blessing deck) and only one character came close to death and she simply flipped her blessing card over and bided her time while my wife and I finished the adventure. While I do think there is room for making the game more challenging, I would suggest there is a way do do this and add more to the role playing aspects and player interaction rather than simply making it harder. Here are my suggestions.
To add a sense of the party being together, have the party all start at the same location. I always lay the locations down in a straight line. That location can be selected by the party and is always the left most location in the line. I also like the idea of the locations reflecting some distance, but instead of making the characters have to move to only adjacent locations I wanted to make create a sense of distance and with increasing distance comes greater risk. So the following rule,is added.
To move to a new location roll a D6. If you roll the distance traveled or less on the D6 you encounter a random monster from the box. So if you move to the adjacent location your distance is a 1 and the monster only appears if you roll a 1 on the random move monster die. If you are moving over two locations then the monster appears on a 1 or 2' and so forth. I would keep the locations in a straight line until you play with 6 or more locations and then I would make then in a circle.
If the monster is not defeated then the character can't move nor can he explore that turn. If he defeats the monster the he continues his turn as usual.
Also the levitate spell allows you to move without making a check.
This increases the challenge by adding additional combat checks and the potential loss of a turn if not defeating the monster. This will cause you to use up some of your items and or possibly another chance to take damage. It also makes it a little tougher to have the occasional situation where you turn up two or even three henchmen on turn one.
We tried this on the "angel In The tower scenario and made the tower the 4th location in the sequence. This made it so we had to try and get someone there to avoid turning over the top card of the discard. The first character ran into a monster and did not defeat the monster, but the second character made it there. It added an interesting twist to the start of the game. In the end we barely defeated the Angel with only two cards remaining in the blessing deck and it was fun having to make an additional monster check for each move. It certainly added a new level of tactics to the game as we tried to figure out how to cover all the locations and reduce our risk of running into a random monster during traveling between locations.
@Sehyo - this is a really interesting idea. I'm busy with the S&S playtest for the rest of Jan (using the RAW) but I'll give your variant a whirl with RotR when I get a chance.
P.S. if early testing is anything to go by, there aren't going to be many people wanting to increase the difficulty of S&S...!
Thanks h4ppy. Making a game more difficult is not what this game needs. You need to make it more interesting by offering another "dimension" to the tactics. I am not meaning dimension like planes of existence. I mean make it more challenging by adding something that makes it feel more like an adventure and less like a dice rolling card game. Add something like the movement rule and random monster generation I mention above this adds dimension by makizng the distance between locations add a sense of depth and a sense of risk and adventure to traveling between locations. In other words it's not just a blank space between cards on a gaming table, but a harsh world where something bad can happen.
I think you need something that makes the party have a tougher decision between splitting up and staying together. Perhaps limit assistance to blessing cards only unless you are at the same location. Seems odd that it can cast a strength spell on someone out in the woods when I am in the tavern. But blessings are from the gods and seem more likely to have far reaching effects.
I like this game a lot and look forward to the next adventure. I think it is good that the initial releases of the game were not over powering. It introduces the concept (which is great) and allows new game players an opportunity to get hooked on the game and learn their characters without having to die multiple times.
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I'm honestly more in favor of having whatever "add-on deck" gets released with a base set have more difficult banes (along with new characters and whatnot) in order to up the difficulty level. This could involve additional, harder henchmen for scenarios, more challenging barriers, and monsters with nastier tricks or higher checks to defeat. Those who want the extra challenge can then incorporate those cards; those who don't, won't. Makes it optional, lets players choose.
I'm still kinda up in the air on the difficulty of the game, which prolly means that it's in the middle. I definitely think it can swing really far one way or the other depending on the characters you have. Having an high octane offensive group (harsk, Merisel, valeros, and seoni) can lead to thinking it's too easy: you brutalize the poor monsters and then call it a day.
The same missions run with lem, Sajan, Amiri, and Ezren are probably scrambling a bit more, and exploring a bit less.