Thinking about my second run-through of RotR, and a simple way to make it hardcore difficulty without playing any differently; only setting up slightly differently later in the Path.
Normally, you start removing Basic and Elite cards starting with Adventure 3 and 5 as you encounter them, and you can still find wimpy first-adventure level cards by the end of the game.
What if, before starting Adventure 3, you removed ALL Basic and Elite cards from the game. And before starting Adventure 4, you removed ALL Adventure 1 cards from the game. For Adventure 5 remove all level 2 cards, and for Adventure 6 remove level 3s. So, you only ever encounter cards at most 2 levels lower than your current Adventure.
I'm going to try something like this. I know it's super hardcore, but I think I would get bored if I kept running into low-level cards later in the Path. Plus, I would get to see more high-level cards I am sure that I missed in the first run.
Anyone one else want to try this? Or do you think this would be crazy hardcore?
We find just adding an extra location ups the chalange just enough.
when you say all cards, do you actually mean all cards, or just all banes?
I think automatically getting rid of all the shortswords and leather armour at the start of adventure 3 would make the game a lot easier- as you'd have much better odds of acquiring decent boons.
I did mean ALL cards. I suppose I hadn't thought about how it would balance out. Maybe 'hardcore' isn't the right word. Perhaps 'ultra'.
Something else to keep in mind is dealing with Blessings. Since you're removing all of the BotG, and potentially the other starter blessings (I can't tell from the description if you plan to remove base set or not), you are going to have pretty much no blessing deck very quickly. You probably want a contingency plan.
Something else to keep in mind is dealing with Blessings. Since you're removing all of the BotG, and potentially the other starter blessings (I can't tell from the description if you plan to remove base set or not), you are going to have pretty much no blessing deck very quickly. You probably want a contingency plan.
This is a valid warning. The idea of mass-banishment was raised months ago (I'm not going to search for it; I'm lazy) but I believe it was determined then that there are literally not enough blessings in the game and the expansions to fill character decks, locations, and the blessing deck if you remove them all from the game (it may not be an issue with fewer characters though).
Also, the points above about affecting the balance of the game are absolutely true; I think Mike himself said part of the difficulty is the ratio of good:bad boons and rarity of the better ones. By removing the weaker stuff, your diamond-in-the-rough is going to be much more common.
If you're looking for ways to increase the difficulty, search the forum; there's probably a dozens of threads from people with ideas on ways to make the game more challenging, and usually lots of very good feedback in favor and against each.
That said, adding locations is generally the most widely-accepted mod, since it doesn't affect game mechanics or balance.
If you really wanted it to be hardcore difficulty mode, you could remove the Base set monsters and barriers with the basic trait as you entered deck 1, then remove elite trait monsters and barriers as you enter deck 2 and progress like that, but I wouldn't touch the boons... removing those basic and elite boons early would give you a much more powerful deck than intended throughout the course of the game. If anything, regardless of anything you did with the banes, it would play like easy mode, just on the basis of having so much better boons in play all the time.
OK, I've revised my thinking thanks to all of you guys' good points. I want to increase difficulty somewhat, but I primarily want to see more of the cards and challenges. So let's change the idea to the "Ultra Adventure Path".
What we may do is starting with Adventure 3, after encountering a bane from deck B, banish it. Starting with Adventure 4, after encountering a bane from deck B or 1, banish it. Starting with Adventure 5, after encountering a bane from deck 2 or below, banish it. Starting with Adventure 6, after encountering a bane from deck 3 or below, banish it.
By "after encountering" I mean after it has been dealt with and would be returned to the box or banished in the usual sense.
Does this seem more balanced?