No they don't, blessings add your die, not your skill.
deathbane crossbow would leave you with Dex Die+ 1d8+ ranged skill +1 with an additional D8 vs undead.
As for the second question, not cheating but intentionally exploiting the system for your benefit, granted you'll only have b/c/p grade cards, so it's not too big of a deal.
For reference:
Add Only What You Are Told to Add. If a card adds another die, that’s all it gives you: a die. It doesn’t give you your bonuses again.
This longer explanation explains why, when the Deathbane Light Crossbow says "your Dexterity die" you get to add the skill feats, but that when a blessing adds "a die" you don't.
One thing that can sometimes be done wrong with Seoni is her powers.
For your combat check, you may discard a card to roll your Arcane die + 1d6 with the Attack, Fire, and Magic traits. This counts as playing a spell.
You automatically succeed at your check to recharge a spell with the Arcane trait.
Power 1 doesn't interact with power 2, even if you discard a spell to use power 1. You only get to attempt to recharge a card if you play that card for that cards power. So if Seoni uses a spell for her "fireball attack" power, she isn't playing the spell. Therefore she can't recharge it.
No idea if that is something you might have been doing or not, but since you mentioned playing Seoni and finding the game easy, I thought I'd mention it. Discarding a card for her power has the same effect as taking 1 damage: 1 card in your discard pile. This is true of all things that might put cards in your discard pile. While many people find Seoni very powerful, she also tends to discard lots of cards, whether for her "fireball" power or to play the blessings she has.
If I have a modified skill, say Dexterity, with a bonus of say +3
Just to clarify, you earned the +3 to Dex by completing the base set scenarios, Burnt Offerings, and Skinsaw right? I had a friend who didn't understand how upgrades worked and thought Ezren got a +4 bonus to everything based on Intelligence.
If I play a blessing of erastil on a combat check, adn I'm using a Deathbane Crossbow, am I really now rolling 3 d12 +9 + a d8 (and whatever else I care to add).
= 1d12 (Dex) + 2d12 (Erastil) + 3 (skill upgrade) + d8 (xbow) + 1 (xbow)
= 3d12 + d8 + 4Like the others said, the skill bonuses are added only once.
We also played Blackfangs dungeon 3 or four times before completing it
YMMV but failing it 3-4 times in a row doesn't sound like the game is a pushover to me... how many times do you want to fail?
As a result of repeating Blackfang, you got lots of blessing upgrades, so you reaped rewards so that future scenarios will be a lot easier. Sounds fair to me.
This is a legitimate way to optimize your decks? I gathered that getting rid of your Blessings of the Gods Asap and replacing them with character specific blessings is the first major goal in making a character strong
Yeah, it's a legit tactic but it's boring to do unless you are legitimately failing.
Don't worry, the game gets harder. There's going to be times when your characters will take damage and you have nothing to soak it, and you have no healer.
But yeah, I'm not sure the game is as hard as you want it to be. I believe organized play is a lot harder, if you're looking for challenge.
Btw, make sure healing potions end up back in the box, they don't have the "basic" trait so they can't be re-added to your deck at the end of the scenario.
If you find the game too easy, perhaps you could refrain playing easy scenarios multiple times to optimize your blessings.
The idea behind the fact that when you redo a scenario that you have failed, you get to keep what you've acquired during the first try and add what you'll get during the second (to the limit of your starting hand size) was to enable characters who made a poor choice of deck or were very unlucky in encountering boons to be able to catch up.
The way I see it, it wasn't meant for you to redo a scenario you have won (or could have won easily but decided not to in order to "loot a max") in order for example to get all the AP3 boons after the first scenario of AP3.
Problem is that there is nearly no risk in avoiding villains and just looting and letting the blessings clock go to zero - and then redo again.
True, nothing in the rules controls that but you are just spoiling your own fun.
To mitigate that, we decided that after any failed scenario one of the character in the group had to - AFTER rebuilding decks - REMOVE from the game a single LOOT and replace it by a BASIC card of the same type. And if no one has LOOT, each character has to REMOVE from the game a card from the highest AP value in her hand and replace it by a BASIC card. Experience has proven that since LOOT cannot be re-encountered, it's a sufficient incentive to avoid misbehaving (i. e. having people back to objective to win scenario goes before looting). And obviously if a character replays a previouly won scenario - for eample to party with new players - , if she survives she MUST rebuild the exact same deck at the end of the scenario that she had at the beginning (and then take the above hit if the scenario was lost).
Data Entry Cleric of Abadar
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Also note that when replaying a scenario you only earn the scenario reward for successfully completing it once, so replaying scenarios that reward additional powers or skill feats do not increase those bonuses. And you only receive the reward for success, and letting the timer/blessings deck run out counts as a failure.