| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I know there has been a lot of talk recently about the difficulty of this game, both in general terms, and in relation to specific characters (i.e. Alain).
I wanted to take a bit of time to think about this, both in terms of the general issues, and in terms of how the different approaches to the game differ, and how people - both players and designers respond to that.
It ended up being somewhere over 4,000 words, so I've turned it into a Blog Post over at Fistful of Meeples but I'd really appreciate it if people had the time to read and share their thoughts - as I say in the article, not just a thought on whether X is too easy/powerful or not, but how this sort of thing cna best be dealt with?
That's incredibly spot on in my estimation. Very well said.
Interestning blog, although it does mix (good) subjects that should somehow be addressed independently (as they were in these forums):
1- Overall difficulty/difficulty curve of an adventure path
2- Specific case of the "0-adventure(s)" or "0-senario(s)" included in the base set
3- Balancing the game difficulty as well as the game fun for both small and large parties
4- Should some characters be able to explore much more than others
5- Specific issue of a given character
To summarize my humble own experience (as explained in more details elsewhere).
1- I have no issue with overall difficulty/difficulty curve of an adventure path, especially as I can always fine tune it if needed
2- I really hope starting with mummies we have both in the base set one adventure for beginners/low level characters using non-optimized basic decks AND one little adventure with difficulty rising much more than can be played as a full game for people only buying the base set. Each being clearly presented as such.
3- Any new mechanic/card that potentially makes the game much less fun either for small or large parties should be if not avoided, at least balanced by some way to deal with it restoring the fun within reach of the players.
4- Any character that lacks the opportunity to explore as much as the others should have a mitigating rule/power/stuff that compensate by a mega increase of fun somehow. Any character that has the possibility to explore much more than the others should have a mitigating rule/power/stuff that punishes using it too often or strong incentive to allow others to explore instead.
5- Any broken card/character... should be FAQed, any non-broken shouldn't.
Obviously, you're right that they are different issues - but part of the reason for putting the article together was that I think they do all impact on each other, and "solving" one issue in a vacuum could have implications for other areas of the game.
To my mind, errata-ing a character from a main AP box would be a big step, and could have some major implications for the future of the game. I think when making decisions about that sort of thing, questions of how difficult people have found the game up to that point - and whether differently-sized parties have significantly different experiences of that perceived difficulty - DO make a difference.
I think having 2 different base adventures would be brilliant - less daunting to the new player, but more value for the experienced.
Balancing fun vs power also seems logical - but could open up whole new cans of worms...
Agreed.
Well, the B scenarios were more difficult, but I don't think it had much to do with scenario design (yes, even including B2 with more difficult closes). It has almost everything to do with 3 specific banes: Arboreal Blight, Carrion Golem & Demonic Horde. If you don't encounter any of those, B2 isn't that hard. While Demonic Horde is painful, it would not have been that bad if it was closer to Skelton Horde where characters at closed locations didn't have to worry about it or it was only 1 encounter per character it wouldn't be that bad.
But Arboreal Blight, with bya and aya damage and affecting everyone rather than just open locations? Yeah that shouldn't have been a B/C card, IMO.
And the Carrion Golem... That's death for spellcasters. I feel like that also shouldn't be a B/C.
But if you pull those 3 cards out and run B2 it doesn't make it easy, but it does make it less of a nightmare. I say this as someone who played through the B scenarios before the 1's and only failed on B5, and then only once. Also had one death in that same run of B5 (Kyra). And the failure and death can BOTH be directly attributed to Arboreal Blight & Demonic Horde causing off-turn hand wipes that led to wasted turns and reckless explorations. (The Carrion Golem has only come up twice for us, and none of our characters are pure casters. The closest is Kyra and she will happily bash its head in with a mace if she has to.)
I have not modified my box at all, but if we had continued to have trouble with those banes I was prepared to sneak one of each out of the box. Thankfully we persevered and got our mythic paths which makes everything less painful.
tl;dr: I don't think it is a scenario design problem. I think it is base set Bane difficulty not scaling down for lower level groups.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I had a different take on the Lancer debate. I don’t know if he should be changed or not, but I am convinced that that Lancer power in question should never have been made.
One of the central tensions of the game, particularly for large and mid-sized groups, is the balance between generating additional explorations and not getting your character killed. The most conventional approach to dealing with this tension is to discard cards for explorations and then you healing power to mitigate the damage from the discards. The interaction between playing cards to explore and using healing powers to recover those cards is a cornerstone of PACG, though not every group or player relies on it.
However, as characters gain more and more abilities, one of the most common and most desired, upgrades is to find ways to explore without having to discard. Different characters gain the ability to explore without discarding through a variety of different mechanics, and those mechanics present a series of mini-games, as players look for ways to maximize how often they can get these cheap explores.
- Cards that you can recharge to explore. In RotR, we had haste, a spell that gave you a free explore. S&S allowed Damiel to use potions in a similar fashion. Characters like Lini, Feyia or Kyra could all get five or six cards of a specific type in their deck and that allowed them to recharge to explore. These cards create a deck cycling minigame, where the player is incentived to trim their deck and draw through it as quickly as possible so that they can hit these ‘recharge to explore’ cards again and again.
- Some abilities allow you to explore based on encountering a certain of card. Ezren, Ranzak and Imrijka are all examples of this type of power. Here the player is encouraged to consider the composition of each location, reward for scouting powers, and incentivized to find ways to succeed at certain kinds of key roles to earn more and more explorations.
- Some of these additional explorations come with downsides. Ranzak can explore a ton, but he fills he deck and discard pile with giant troves of junk, making his deck less and less efficient the more he loots. Kyra can ensure she always has a hand full of blessings, but the cost is that her deck cycling ability grinds to a halt and she sees very few of her cards aside from those blessings.
All of which brings us to Alain and the Lancer roll. This power generates additional explorations, but does it far more efficiently than any previous option. You don’t need any mini-game to maximize the additional explorations, nor is there any down side or tradeoffs to taking them. As soon as you get your hands on winged mounts, every card in your deck becomes a better version of haste if you want it to be. The Lancer provides more reliable, more efficient exploration than we have seen from any previous power, and requires no work or thought on the part of the player.
Lancer isn’t just powerful, it’s mechanically uninteresting. It doesn’t require you to make any choices, or to rethink your approach your deck or the locations, or encourage working with yor team mates in any particular way. It just allows you to throw down four explorations, every turn, with no cost. It breaks one of the central tensions that makes the intriguing, and offers nothing mechanically interesting in return. From my point of view, that’s a design flaw, and I hope that Mike and the rest of the team will work to avoid replicating in future characters
Hi joshua.
Great point! I hadn't thought about it that way until you pointed it out. It makes lots of sense! I agree totally with what you wrote.
-----------------
Re basic scenario difficulty, I totally agree it is the speader banes that make the difficulty nuts. We are playing a 4 player group, played AD1 first then the basic. All tooled up (I am playing Adwyn and first power was discard for another player to evade) and B path should be easy ..... Took three trys to to complete B5. Primary reason was hitting multiple spreader banes in a scenario, chewing resources and then running out of time. Third time we only hit one spreader bane and managed to win.
I understand the Afganistan principle saying core cards have to be in base sets, but spreader banes in the base set should either have "only hit characters at OPEN locations" so you can at least play around them or "are defeated based on the encountered person, NOT needing ALL to succed to pass.
In general I like the concept of spreader banes for later difficulty levels, however dont think they should be in B or AD1
I also agree with Josh here. Maximizing explorations over time without sacrificing too much power is what tends to maximize success in general. The Man's Promise allowed you to stack turn buffs (creating efficiency in exploration) but didn't increase the number of explores you actually got, to give an example of something that was powerful but not broken.
In general I like the concept of spreader banes for later difficulty levels, however dont think they should be in B or AD1
Agreed. I don't feel that any of these are bad banes. I just think they are too much for characters with low attack rolls, minimal damage mitigation (mostly basic one-use armor), and few cards in their deck (low hp). Once you get a bit further into the game and have more cards in your deck, larger hand sizes and more skill boxes checked, they become a nice challenge rather than a card that, when one came up around 15-20 turns in, made one of my friends said "Crap. Want to just burn the blessing deck out and try again?"
Of course, some of that was probably due to it causing the death of Kyra the previous week.
Thematically, I do like that these cards cause genuine dread in the people I play with. But it is a razor thin line between dreading them and not wanting to play when you get hit a few too many times in the early scenarios by them. It's the kind of thing that in a PnP game of PF would involve a fair bit of GM control to make sure that it is genuinely threatening to the players without just stomping them into the ground. That is the one area of the PnP game that the card game can't really simulate, since the GM is an inanimate set of cards.
I do think there are a few options for house rules that could help with these types of punishing cards though:
#1: Remove all but one copy (or even all copies) of these from the box. This way you won't get nailed with them over and over in a given scenario.
#2: Don't remove any, but once you've encountered one, display it next to the scenario deck. If you encounter another one you can swap it out for a random bane of the same type (Monster or Barrier) from the box.
#3: Add "At open locations" to the summon.
#4: If a character encounters multiple demons from Demonic Horde, give a bonus for each demon defeated so far. Kind of like he's on a roll. Maybe a simple +2 per demon defeated for any checks against the next demon? That would require a bit of playtesting to figure out what is worthwhile but not OP bonus.
but the time has come for everyone to accept that the experiment was a failure.
Respectfully disagree.
I personally feel the designers nailed it it with a really large heavy +3 heavy pick. The basic was a real shocker but that added to the adrenaline and challenge. My whole group enjoyed it and became really good maximizing their char and teamwork as a result. We stopped being reckless, kept eye on each other, shared the boons, kept blessings avail to assist.. etc. There are wonderful subtle choices and decisions for the whole team.
The only real challenge now is how to keep the endgame AD interesting! Fingers crossed!
My whole group enjoyed...There's always an outlier.
Indeed
I'd really appreciate it if people had the time to read and share their thoughts - as I say in the article, not just a thought on whether X is too easy/powerful or not, but how this sort of thing cna best be dealt with?
I too find your thoughts closer to my version of the 'truth', but that should've been evident by my posts on the matter (thanks for the citation, btw). In particular, your analysis of Alain seems to show pretty well that he's only 'imbalanced' in parties that want to enable him being 'imbalanced' (throwing blessings and what not), while at the same time assuming a particular play-style and/or turn of events (i.e. you take hand size upgrades, you don't send him to monster-heavy, but instead to boon heavy locations, he doesn't have to spend cards out of turn, he doesn't have random BYA/AYA damage knocking cards out of his hand, etc..)
At any rate, as to the general difficulty, I want to say something, brought on by a poster recently mentioning that even though he removed all Basics and Elites as of the start of AD5, Worm Demons and similar still appearing made his game underwhelming.
Some years back, the Elder Scrolls: Oblivion CRPG came out and caused some fuss among gamers and critics with one of its controversial decisions. That game had implemented enemy scaling in the manner, that (for example) when the player is Level 20, he still gets to fight Rats, however they're now also Level 20 and still present a challenge (or at least a chore) but also now drop Elven Armor, or Enchanted Swords, or what have you.
Setting aside the immersion breaking aspect of such approach (and it's no small matter), it achieves one other thing: it annihilates sense of progression. It seems a lot of people's understanding of a 'challenge' in PACG is that all the banes scale appropriately with the heroes throughout the adventure deck. This perfect scenario (impossible as it may be to really achieve) may be indeed more challenging, but for me and other people I know it also means we never get to feel are character's are getting 'stronger'.
Believe it or not, I'm actually fine with design philosophy for the start of WotR having Carrion Golem and maybe even Demon Horde, sans the random distribution (Arboreal Blight is not OK in any universe) – those may be punishing banes, but once you get a a feat or two, they become manageable and later even – obsolete. So yeah, you have a hard time at the start, but then you see your characters grow through adversity and learn to brush aside something that was deadly a couple of adventures ago. That's progression.
What I would not be fine with is if two adventures in I still have to spend at least a single blessing or other resource (as was the case with WotR's base set, but as I said – I'm fine with this) on each bane I ever come across. The much maligned Bandit henchmen in RotR that you beat automatically from some point on may have not been the best approach (as in my mind the Henchmen should always present SOME degree of challenge), but non-banishable Worm Demons or what have you should always have a place in the deck, as well at the occasional monster that makes go “Damn, I bit off more than I can chew right now!”.
As you initially made an absolute claim for everyone to accept the experiment was a failure; It really only takes one person to disagree. I may not be the only one.
That being said Im sure a lot more goes into game design than just a difficulty curve experiment, particularly the B scenarios. was it a bad experience? Not to us. Was it a difficult run? Yes. Was it fun? Hell yeah!
So anyway back to thinking about difficulty and what to do - in this case the broad difficulty curve fit the scenario. I think maybe the scaling blight/horde/army banes could have been introduced differently - maybe only 1 or 2 for 6p games and the whole bunch for 4p games. It seems the biggest revelation was how hard 6p got. Make them special area effect banes (maybe even a different type of bane apart from villian/henchmen - like how the servitor demons change per AD. Servitor barriers?)
|
Zenarius, you're not the only one.
I disagree that the difficulty curve changes are a failure. And here's why …
The people I play with jumped into Season of the Righteous in the same fashion as Shackles. They got their nose bloodied with a couple of Demonic Hordes. Yeah, it's tougher. But actually it's only tougher if you don't play smarter. Failure? Hardly. I've never been a fan of the base adventures since Runelords. But that's mainly because of the rewards.
And yeah, I like the fact that a larger party is definitely harder. Used to be that a larger party had more resources to throw at the scenarios. Wrath has now made it much more difficult by using more banes hitting everyone. So, if anything, I'm still not liking the base adventure. (I do like the idea of a more introductory adventure for new people and maybe a way to make them more difficult for experienced players.)
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
The mention of Servitor demons reminded me of my two favorite changes in WotR that I hope to see more of in future sets:
1. Cohorts. This will obviously continue to some degree, as characters like Balazaar require a cohort to be functional. I'd love seeing more 'important NPC' style cohorts as well.
2. Servitor Demons. The ability to create a Skeletal Horde-type barrier that is not just harder Veteran-style but actually has different powers in future scenarios is brilliant.
Yeah. Cohorts are awesome. I hope to see that return again soon too.
So, having now received WotR deck 6 and peaked at the ending and the real true final reward, I think I've added an idea to my perspective on WotR: I'm not going to get too attached to my characters, and maybe I'm not supposed to.
SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER!!!!
Don't read this if you don't want to know things about WotR deck 6.
Ok. So, if you choose to run the final possible scenario, the reward and that all your deceased characters are brought back to life. WotR can be hard, I think we'll all agree. And I know we can get attached to our characters. But I think I'm going to embrace the plethora of possible characters available. So, if I can convince Calthaer that our group should play WotR (he's hesitant, since we'll have the option to run Mummy's Mask by the time we finish S&S with them), I'm going to tell everyone this:
"Choose a character you like, but don't get too attached to them. Plan on the possibility that your character will die and you'll start a new one."
See, given the end of the story, I think characters dying is part of this story, not unlike Sean Bean in any move or TV show, we should expect it in this kind of story. So, I'm going to suggest that when a character dies, we finish the scenario, they choose a new character (we'll probably give them feats and roles up to ours) and then we press on. Maybe it will time out nicely with picking up Arueshalae (and after that one anyway, I'd say she is far game to start as a new character). But one way or another we'll press on, with the memory of our fallen comrades. That way, when we get that final reward, it will have all the more meaning to us.
Anyway, just some thoughts that were in my head.
Death is heroic.
We are heroic.
We don't care.
Especially as we are way smarter than a lousy bunch of demons and deities.
... OK we are a little over confident too, but we don't care.