Making the game more challenging for larger groups.

[Gavri3l]

After reading through the thread about difficulties others are having with the game with 2 players, I thought I'd pipe in and ask if any players have found the game to be too easy with 5+ players?

My group is on the last part of adventure 4 and we haven't really felt challenged since the first adventures. We are hesitant to make any changes as each scenarios' special rules make them all very different, which leaves us with little ability to guess at how hard the scenario is going to be before actually playing it. Anyone played through them all and have some suggestions on how to create a "Hard Mode"?

[Ironvein]

Probably should be in the 'homebrew' section rather than a rules question....

Lots of ways to ramp up difficulties; but here's a few ideas off the top of my head.

For Starting Groups

1) Leave ALL the upper deck cards in the box and just play as is. Extremely Hard; tried it on a playtest of some of my scenarios I'm working on. I don't really recommend it.

2) Base Set + The deck you're on only. The base set is necessary to establish the overall setting, but the individual decks are styled to that adventure. There will be NO middle ground; strong or weak.

3) Flat difficulty up: Simply make the checks higher; either by the a flat number, based of adventure deck, or maybe a die. Probably the easiest way to make it a challenge.

Other than that, it's a matter of tweaking details and how comfortable you are about changing or making your own rules to add to the challenge.

[agraham2410]

For four players game we set out the locations as if it was a five player game. The added location is all the extra difficly the game needs.

[Hawkmoon269]

I find 5 and 6 characters challenging enough as is. A group I am in with Calthaer had 5 guys playing (normally 6 but one guy couldn't make it) and did 3 scenarios Friday night. We lost the 3rd one (Them Ogres Ain't Right). We lost a few in Perils of the Lost Coast, and came close during a few in Burnt Offerings and Skinsaw Murders. I'm pretty sure Holy Candle was the only reason we won a few times.

And we've got a well rounded group: Valeros, Harsk, Merisiel, Ezren, Lem, and Kyra. So we've got at least a d10 in every skill and we have every skill you can possibly have in RotR.

[Gavri3l]

I suppose I should ask a real rules question then. Perhaps we have been playing it wrong, but are other players really allowed to each play a blessing and a spell (such as incendiary cloud and aid) to aid the person fighting the villain regardless of what location they are at? Most of our scenarios end with us spreading out to temp close the remaining locations and then putting so many dice into the final person's combat checks that they would succeed at all of the checks even on a roll of all 1's.

Gonna have to try it with the extra location sometime. Generally I think we'd like the difficulty level such that we generally fail one scenario out of every 3 or 4. Currently we haven't failed a scenario since Adventure 1.

[csouth154]

Gavri3l wrote:

I suppose I should ask a real rules question then. Perhaps we have been playing it wrong, but are other players really allowed to each play a blessing and a spell (such as incendiary cloud and aid) to aid the person fighting the villain regardless of what location they are at?

If location is not mentioned, then location doesn't matter.

[kysmartman]

Yes, you can play those two spells anywhere.

Once you get to 5+ players, the Villain isn't really the issue (other than the ones where you have to fight them twice or more) because you can get a large dice pool. The issue is time. You have to close locations immediately as a failure there can cost you the game. This means you can miss out on great loot that smaller parties have the time to pick up. Plus, you're banishing things at a much higher rate meaning those banes will be tougher. Yes, you might get better boons out of it, but again, you don't have time to get a lot of those.

Personally, I LOVE 5 or 6 character games, and it will be the only way I ever replay this game in the future because of the nerfing of difficulty in too many of the scenarios for smaller parties. Too many of my 3 character games have been absurdly easy to repeat that ever again.

[Hawkmoon269]

One thing I've seen people say they do is limit blessings. I've seen people say they only let the blessings be a d4. Or that they limit the number. Or that they limit them to only from the same location.

One thing I've thought of, but haven't tried since I'm happy with the game as is, would be "Diminishing Returns on Blessings". Basically, the first blessing adds the same die (or 2 if it is the right blessing), but the second one adds the next smaller die, and the third even smaller, until each one is only adding a d4. And the character powers would override that. So if your character always added a d12, it would always be a d12 and not effected by the diminishing returns.

Just something I've thought about. Maybe someone has suggested it before even.

[Gavri3l]

At the very least it feels odd that you can have your action blessed by every god with a stake in Golarion at the same time. How often do both Gozreh and Lamashtu sanction the same action?

An idea would be to put the alignment of the deities on the blessings and when blessings are played, they all have to share one alignment qualifier. (So all good, or all chaotic, or all neutral, etc.)

[John Davis 2]

Hawkmoon269 wrote:

One thing I've seen people say they do is limit blessings. I've seen people say they only let the blessings be a d4. Or that they limit the number. Or that they limit them to only from the same location.

The variant I recommend is that blessings played on other characters only give d4s (unless the character has some special power to give a bigger die, like Seoni's). I have played this a lot and it works well.

Quote:

One thing I've thought of, but haven't tried since I'm happy with the game as is, would be "Diminishing Returns on Blessings". Basically, the first blessing adds the same die (or 2 if it is the right blessing), but the second one adds the next smaller die, and the third even smaller, until each one is only adding a d4. And the character powers would override that. So if your character always added a d12, it would always be a d12 and not effected by the diminishing returns.

I don't think this would have much effect. It is pretty rare that I see more than one or two blessings played a check (except when everyone's throwing one in to defeat the villain at the end).

[Hawkmoon269]

Well, admittedly I've never tried any of these things, so I can't speak to their effectiveness. Can I ask a few questions though:

1. What size groups are you using this in and what are their make up? (I'm wondering if you have any "weaker" skills where the highest in the group is only a d8 or less.)
2. Are you through deck 5 yet? If so, how has this worked with some of the really high closing requirements and other higher checks?
3. What was the reason you felt your d4 rule was necessary? I'm surprised you implemented this if you didn't usually see more than one or two blessings.
4. How often do you feel you fail a non-combat check? (Either to defeat/acquire or as part of an encounter or closing requirement.)

I play with the standard rules and we also tend to not spend more than a blessing or two on a check, other than the villain. But I was under the impression people using the d4 rule did so because so many blessings were being played. Basically, I guess I'm wondering if we'd experienced the same thing in the standard game but had different levels of desire for success rates. I'm just curious how it works for you. Thanks for sharing.

[Gavri3l]

What about straight up reducing the size of the blessings deck? That seems to be the most straightforward approach. My only question would be how much to reduce it by before the game becomes impossible. I assume the 30 card deck was designed with thought in mind to how many turns the designers think it takes to close a location. But my group's approach has been to bomb down the decks that we have the hardest time closing, then spread out and search for the villain in the decks we have the easiest time closing temporarily so we can defeat him as soon as he's discovered, meaning we usually finish with 7-12 blessings left in the deck.

Dropping it to 25 cards sounds like a good start, but has anyone tried this and noticed the difference? Too much/Too little?

[Ironvein]

Gavri3l wrote:

What about straight up reducing the size of the blessings deck? That seems to be the most straightforward approach. My only question would be how much to reduce it by before the game becomes impossible. I assume the 30 card deck was designed with thought in mind to how many turns the designers think it takes to close a location. But my group's approach has been to bomb down the decks that we have the hardest time closing, then spread out and search for the villain in the decks we have the easiest time closing temporarily so we can defeat him as soon as he's discovered, meaning we usually finish with 7-12 blessings left in the deck.

Dropping it to 25 cards sounds like a good start, but has anyone tried this and noticed the difference? Too much/Too little?

There's an actual scenario like that, but I think we blew through it rather quickly (henchman and villains near top).

I think it would be hard to make a way to guarantee a higher difficulty, due to randomness of cards and dice. The scenarios were designed to challenge, not murder the players. You'd have to come up with your own adv path/scenario/location/etc to really up the challenge.

I'd have to say overall, the average level-up per deck seems small (around 5pts give or take); maybe if it was more like 10 per deck would it be harder.

[John Davis 2]

Hawkmoon269 wrote:

Well, admittedly I've never tried any of these things, so I can't speak to their effectiveness. Can I ask a few questions though:

1. What size groups are you using this in and what are their make up? (I'm wondering if you have any "weaker" skills where the highest in the group is only a d8 or less.)

Various groups of 2-4 characters.

Hawkmoon269 wrote:

2. Are you through deck 5 yet? If so, how has this worked with some of the really high closing requirements and other higher checks?

Yes. Only really an issue in scenario 5 which doesn't have too many locations to close. But you do need to play for closing more, rahte rthan just relying on blessings to do all the work.

Hawkmoon269 wrote:

3. What was the reason you felt your d4 rule was necessary? I'm surprised you implemented this if you didn't usually see more than one or two blessings.

One of the biggest improvements is ha it encourages characers to carry the blessings they actually want to use for themselves. Without this rule, the blessings are effectively a single pool shared by the whole party and it doesn't really matter much which character has which blessings.

Apart from that, knowing other characters can only add d4s to your checks means you have to think more about what your character can deal with on their own. Additionally, all the non-blessing boosts are relatively more useful - this helps the Aid, Find Traps and Cloud spells, Lem and Valeros' powers, Wand of Enervation etc.

Hawkmoon269 wrote:

4. How often do you feel you fail a non-combat check? (Either to defeat/acquire or as part of an encounter or closing requirement.)

Hard to say. Maybe 1 in 3? apart from sme of the really hard checks with little downside which we wend to fail all the time ("Dexterity 12 check or take 1 damage", "Wisdom 8 chack or difficulty of checks is increased by 1" etc)

Hawkmoon269 wrote:

I play with the standard rules and we also tend to not spend more than a blessing or two on a check, other than the villain. But I was under the impression people using the d4 rule did so because so many blessings were being played. Basically, I guess I'm wondering if we'd experienced the same thing in the standard game but had different levels of desire for success rates. I'm just curious how it works for you. Thanks for sharing.

Hope this helps,

John