Structural damage; smaller parties; maintaining fair difficulty

[The_Napier]

(Caveat: this is largely just thinking out loud, since my group haven't started S&S yet, and even when we do, we play with four/five people...)

I've always been really impressed with the blessings deck-location number mechanics in PACG as maintaining a fair difficulty level no matter the size of the party, to the extent that it's always really upset me when the occasional person has missed the point and come up with the false 'shouldn't a larger party have a larger blessing deck?' observation.

However, it feels to me that structural damage must really surely favour a larger party, and I was therefore wondering if something else had been introduced in S&S to balance that effect.

I have already noticed that infinitely more locations close with methods other than skill checks, which I think will certainly make things easier for smaller parties, but which I assume will also make them easier for larger parties, hence it's not the kind of 'balancing' that I was looking for.

Thoughts?

[Andrew K]

I like the way the structural damage works, especially for thematic reasons, regarding party if size. If you have 6 people working to man your ship in combat, and protect your ship, you'll 2 people running around trying to put out fighters. The only time I think it'd really hurt is if you are only playing small hand size characters. Otherwise, I don't think there's an issue with it.

One thing about this game is that some things help larger parties, some help smaller. For example, the blessings deck size that you mentioned. I don't think it should be modified based on party size, but 30 turns for 4 locations is clearly easier than 30 for 8 locations, and allows for using more blessings and allies on your checks. So, not only do you have more time per card, but those cards are also now easier to defeat/acquire.

On the flip side, you have things like structural damage that are easier for larger parties to handle, but considering the small amounts you tend to take, isn't really that bad for small parties.

[csouth154]

The balancing factor seems to be that larger party size means more instances of structural damage.

[MightyJim]

Larger party also means more calls on your hand between opportunities to reset.

Structural damage doesn't come up that often, but combined with everything else, it can definitely whittle away at you.

[Captain Bulldozer]

This is just my recollection from the S&S playtest, so take that for what it's worth; the base set cards have already undergone some significant changes since then with a general trend of making things slightly easier than the play-test. All that being said, I found playing with fewer than 3 characters to be far more difficult in S&S than it was in RotR.

I found that when trying 2 character runs many pairings of characters were just hopelessly behind the difficulty curve, but there are still some pairings that can pull through (Valeros and Lem was one of the best I found). At the time, structural damage was far less prevalent than it seems to have become, and it was already bad enough.

In general, though I didn't know it at the time of the play-test, my feeling is that Chapters 3 and 4 of S&S were roughly on par with the difficulty I've seen in Chapters 5 and 6 of RotR. I can't say with certainty, but I do have the impression that the game is designed much more for larger groups than it is for smaller ones. If that is indeed the case, it would make sense, but for me one of the biggest appeals of PACG has always been to ability to sit down and play solo with a couple of characters as well as play in bigger groups. While S&S still has that feature, I tend to find playing some of the scenarios with small parties far more like work than fun. But hey, to each their own, right? ;)

[Calthaer]

Everyone whined about the game being too easy. Maybe they were hoping the now-higher difficulty level will get the illustrious Frenchman back in the game? We'll have to wait and see weather some of the more difficult parts of S&S make it quite as fun as Runelords was.

[Edge of Dreams]

I've only played with 3 players so far in S&S. However, my intuition says that structural damage is balanced across group sizes by the fact that there's more turns between each of a given player's turns. I'm sure people have noticed those situations in a 5 or 6 player game where someone uses a lot of their cards to support other players (blessings, Harsk/Lirianne/Lem support powers, etc.) and ends up having very little in their hand with which to take their own turn. Structural damage spread out across a large group will still contribute to that effect. In a 2 or 3 player game, you can sometimes afford for a player to dump most or all of their whole hand to prevent structural damage, assuming they'll just not explore on their next turn and draw up. In a 5 or 6 player game, you're up against the clock too much to do that.

[Throknor]

On the flipside, for a small group the character(s) with good Craft abilities will have their turn more frequently. This may change later but through the intro five with three characters I rarely prevented the damage. It just seemed easier to let it go and fix it within two turns.

[Raynair]

We've been playing with a full group of 6 and have already finished the base adventure + The Wormwood Mutiny and we found that structural damage was pretty much non existent. When we did have any, everyone worked it out to where no one discarded more than 1 card to prevent it. Can't speak for how much that changes with a smaller group.

[Reptilian]

A smaller party can probably let their ship get wrecked a bit more too. Sure, you lose out on some plunder but you're less short on time so you can affort to lose some of the blessing deck.