For people without their cards handy -- Impossible Bottle is an S&S deck 4 loot item. Its text is:
Display this card. Reduce Structural damage dealt to your ship by 2. Discard this card if your ship wrecks or is banished.
Bury this card to repair your ship or to recharge 1d4+1 random cards from your discard pile.
After playing this card, succeed at a Craft 9 check to recharge this card instead of discarding or burying it.
The rule is, cards you play must come from your hand unless otherwise specified. Does this specify otherwise?
I don't think it does. If you choose to display the card, you have foregone the use of the bury powers. If you want to use the bury powers, don't display the card.
But even if I'm wrong about that, I think that only the character who originally played the card can make use of its powers.
I think you are right on both parts.
I see little reason to ever use the display ability over the healing power. Pretty much everything would have to do Structural Damage to make me want to use it that way.
Well, if you draw this card on your hand early, and then your ship takes damage, you may want to display it.
Or if you are at a location where your ship is dealt damage as part of your turn, you may want to display it.
Or if a future scenario says you take structural damage on a regular basis (Each turn? For failing a check?)
And if you know the henchmen are enemy ships and you'll be able to seize other ships, that would let you banish your ship and then attempt to recharge the impossible bottle. So you can use both powers in a scenario.
I am playing in two groups, one with Jirelle and one without. The non Jirelle group (6 players) has already had to do some serious discarding for structural damage in only 3 scenarios played, so I think they would welcome this card to help with that. We have 2 characters stocking cure, so we could probably be ok without the heading from it.
Even my Jirelle group of 4 has had to let our ship wreck multiple times through deck 3. Ands since Merisiel has our best craft check, fixing it isn't an easy proposition. We have Oloch in this group, so the healing isn't as necessary.
All that to say, I think the power to reduce structural damage might be more appealing depending on the makeup of your group.
Plus, if your "inner Ranzak" just loves plunder (I know mine does j, you will definitely not want to let your ship wreck. I can envision kicking myself for using the heal power and then watching some plunder float away on the next turn.
I think its even more powerful than that Hawk.
Anyone can discard cards to prevent structural damage to the ship right?
I don't think the ship has to be damaged on your turn to utilize this. It does not say on your turn or at your location, you could play it on anyone's turn that the ship is damaged.
Same goes for the bury you can play it to repair a ship just after someone failed the check to repair a ship.
I think its even more powerful than that Hawk.
Anyone can discard cards to prevent structural damage to the ship right?
I don't think the ship has to be damaged on your turn to utilize this. It does not say on your turn or at your location, you could play it on anyone's turn that the ship is damaged.
Same goes for the bury you can play it to repair a ship just after someone failed the check to repair a ship.
Yeah. I think so too. Though that wasn't clear in my post, since I kept using "you" instead of "anyone". But yeah, it should help anytime you ship is dealt damage no matter who displays.
... But yeah, it should help anytime you ship is dealt damage no matter who displays.
Hi Hawk, speaking about that, I have one remark:
{OK we only play 4-6 characters, maybe it's different if less but...}In our case we NEVER had our ship wrecked and we are 1 scenario away from finishing AP4. With 4+ characters, there are always 4-5 cards we can spare even in the worst cases (we did encounter Hirgenstuff at least thrice), plus at least a couple of characters have structural damage reducing items, armors or character powers.
So my point is do you agree that the whole ship wrecking S&S rule only makes sense for small parties - or am I missing something?
You're lucky that you always have 4 to 5 cards to discard. Our group gets pretty battered in nearly every scenario of S & S so we sometimes have let our ship get wrecked. And that's with Jirelle.
I can attest to this that yes small parties get wrecked quite a bit. Me and my fiance play Feia and the class deck combat bard (I forget her name) and we regularly don't have the cards to discard to reduce the structural damage.
Especially when the storm barrier comes out to play. You can easily kill yourselves trying to keep the ship up. It's better to just let feia try her craft check to repair the ship.
If I were playing a character without craft we'd really be in for it.
Also storm is rather harsh on two character games. Trying to keep up with it's damage is a fool's errand. We lose any scenario that it comes up in without question. If it isn't character death its the blessing deck getting obliterated. When there aren't as many areas it can go in a two player game it gets encountered A LOT.
I'm playing with two groups right now:
Group of 4 that include Jirelle.
Group of 6 that doesn't.
The group of 4 is in adventure 4, while the group of 6 is more recently started. But structural damage is much more of a problem for the group of 6 than it is for the group of 4.
I think this is for a few reasons. Jirelle helps. We've also got good skills for handling ships, with Oloch (3 skill feats in Wisdom), Lirianne (d12 Wisdom + 2 skill feats), Jirelle, (d8 Wisdom +3 Survival, multiple skill feats), leaving Merisiel as the only major weak spot for us against ships. In other circumstances where our ship might take damage, Jirelle is reducing it by 1. But we have at times let the ship wreck when we deemed the cost of reducing the damage too much (i.e. we liked the cards in our hands too much). We are pretty weak on Craft (only Merisiel has it) so we generally favor doing everything we can to stop it from wrecking.
The group of 6 is Lirianne, Lini and 4 characters with nothing above a d6 Wisdom (Seltyiel, Feiya, Damiel, and Olenjack). So I think we will fail to defeat ships more often. We'll have to worry more about fixing them with our Craft skills.
So, I think it depends. In my group of 4, we've only actually encountered one of the items that reduces structural damage, it sounds like you've encountered and acquired more.
And I also think that making you discard up to 4 or 5 cards means that ships/structural damage/getting wrecked is doing exactly what it should do. For some groups, like jones314's maybe, the challenge of structural damage is that your ship will get wrecked and you'll have to deal with the negatives that come with that. For others, like Frencois', the challenge is that structural damage will make you discard lots of cards to prevent it. Whether that is because you are willing or able to do so, the aspect of the game is making the game more challenging for you both, just in different ways.