Quick question about the interaction between Feiya's ability to reduce the check on a monster by X and the abilities of the two villains in Plugg's Uglies (S&S Deck 1).
Each of the two villains have an ability that says something to the effect of, "before you act succeed a <something> check or <villain name> is evaded".
Officially, can we use Feiya's ability on the first check to not auto-evade the villain?
We went with yes, mostly because this was our 5th attempt at Plugg's Uglies and frankly we were getting tired of running out of the blessings deck all the time.
I was just curious about what the "right" answer was.
Before You Act checks aren't Checks To Defeat, so (S&S) Feiya's ability doesn't apply. ("When any character at your location attempts a check to ... defeat a monster....")
If they'd meant any check, it'd likely use the wording "attempts a check against a monster" or whatever type of card. See (S&S) Merisiel's Finesse weapons power for an example.
Sorry you had trouble with that scenario.
I'm assuming you're talking about the version of Feiya included with S&S.
Officially the answer is no. Feiya's power only works on checks to defeat monsters/barriers or checks to acquire spells (aka the number in the circle next to the art). It does not work on any other checks (any check that is in the powers box as opposed to the circle next to the art would not count).
Ok good to know.
We may still play it "any check against a monster" though, as it is my 7 year old's character and he likes being able to help other checks a lot.
Plugg's Uglies was really tough on us. As I mentioned we were on our 5th try (which is way too discouraging for a 10 and 7 year old) and on this attempt we just so happened to luckily draw the 2nd villain with the 2nd ally used to explore and no blessings left.
On our previous tries we never had even sniffed the 2nd villain before running out of blessings deck, and so I played the encounter as liberally as possible so we could move on and still feel accomplishment. We wouldn't have even got this close except that I took the chance and threw in Alahazra to do nothing but burn through her divine cards and reveal the top cards of the locations.
I think in the future if this happens to us with a scenario I will just take away a location deck or add another 5 or so blessings.
Yeah, do what works best for your group. I'm surprised you kept running out of blessings though, were you exploring again enough times?
Or, perhaps it's a bit of a misunderstanding of the scenario. When you evade a villain, it gets shuffled back into the same location deck. Evaded villains do not escape, and as such don't pull blessings out of the box or blessings deck. Once you find the villains you should know where they are, relatively speaking, and can work on closing the other locations. When you defeat a villain, it automatically closes the location it came from unless another villain is there (in which case it banishes every card except for the 2nd villain from that location deck; the location deck remains open but only has a single card in it -- the other villain).
Our issue always boiled down to not performing enough repeat explorations per character turn. Tarlan, with 4 cards, is one of the main culprits.
Specifically,
- Unlucky shuffles of location decks which ended up putting the henchmen and villains at the middle to bottom in the majority of the locations for all 5 tries at the scenario. Most of the time, we would narrow down the location of the 2nd villain, but run of blessings before encountering it.
- Playing Seelah, Tarlan, and Seltyiel primarily, and occasionally either Damiel or Feiya, we had little way to burn through / reshuffle location decks. That is even with using Seelah's power to examine the top card and put it at the bottom if a boon.
- Many of the barriers were brutal for this set of characters. We seemingly drew 'Man Overboard' every time and no one ever made the Dex check. Many cards were buried...
- The kids inevitably get a good starting hand and don't like to burn through their own deck (especially with discarding that 2nd weapon or spell) even though we have plenty of healing. The blessings typically were getting used to bypass barriers and our team (except Feiya) doesn't really have a lot of allies (and includes some allies that don't give extra exploration).
- Tarlan sorely needs to increase his hand size but his player is more drawn to the other powers. haha. Nearly all of his turns are 'one and done'.
- Finally, we have way too many cards in the box and have been rarely getting upgrades. I already fixed that with adding the AD2 cards by removing a lot of the repeat B/C cards and any class deck card that someone wouldn't keep if acquired.
Tarlin has low Dex. So does Seelah. There's a lot of Dexterity barriers in S&S (and not a lot of heavy armor either), so it'll be rough.
In addition, the base Tarlin card only has the power +2 to his heal power, and every other power feat is a hand size increase. Is the player using the role card before they get it?
no, we aren't using the role cards, but I just looked and we have only checked off one power to this point in the AP. So at least next time he has to go with the hand size bump.
I think you have a point in that having both Seelah and Tarlin will make things more difficult ; perhaps she will retire after leading the mutiny against Captain Plugg. Hah.