Out of blessings in the box

[grudgekeyper]

What happens if you remove enough basic blessings from the game that you don't have enough blessings
A: in the box when the villian escapes?
or
B: to build the locations and the blessings deck?

[Vic Wertz]

See the Limited Resources sidebar (MM p.25): "If you’re required to do something with a certain number of things and there aren’t that many things available, use as many as there are." In case B, that makes the game more difficult, so you probably want to avoid that.

But I think that both circumstances are theoretical. Have you actually had either one happen?

[zeroth_hour2]

Incidentally, I asked this question a long time ago with an Adventure Path that had blessings that were a lot harder to banish.

This is another old thread about this theoretical issue.

It falls under the category of "Doctor, it hurts when I do this."

Also remember that if you temporarily close locations to complete a scenario, the locations that didn't get banished don't get any cards banished.

[grudgekeyper]

Vic Wertz wrote:

See the Limited Resources sidebar (MM p.25): "If you’re required to do something with a certain number of things and there aren’t that many things available, use as many as there are." In case B, that makes the game more difficult, so you probably want to avoid that.

But I think that both circumstances are theoretical. Have you actually had either one happen?

If the villain ran away a second time in a recent scenario we would have had less blessings than required fortunately we didn't encounter the villain a second time so this didn't become relevant.

[Vic Wertz]

Good point—we have always known that if you defeat but fail to corner the villain *a lot*, that could indeed cause the Limited Resources rule to fire in almost any scenario. In this situation, it actually makes things slightly easier, because it reduces the number of places the villain can escape to... but that's just fine, because if you're in this situation, you need all the help you can get! (But we've still never actually heard of it happening.)

[Frencois]

Still, defeating the villain but failing to corner actually closes a location.
So in a game with N characters, usually there is no more than N+2 locations, and worst case scenario (no temp closing anything anytime), you would defeat the villain N+2 times consuming N + (N-1) + ... 1 blessings.

With 4 players that's 10 blessings only.
With 6 players that's 21 blessings only (but you get the character's deck blessings in the box).

So still very unlikely.

[Doppelschwert]

You forgot to count N+1, so you actually end up with 15 blessings for 4 players and 28 blessings for 6 players.

[Frencois]

Nope because the first time you defeat the villain, you close the location he is in. Then you have to shuffle him plus only N blessings in the N+1 remaining locations. That's why you don't even need N+1 blessings and why I was pointing that even in worst case scenario this is not that costly in blessings.

[Keith Richmond]

And if you don't acquire any blessings from any of the decks, you're banishing them when you close the location, which puts them back in the box.

[Doppelschwert]

Sorry, my bad. You're right of course, although I didn't forget the closed location - I just thought of the number of cards needed to shuffle into locations and forgot that the villain itself is part of them.

I think it's possible to have too few blessings in the box by banishing a couple of the basic blessings and playing characters that can keep a lot of blessings around.

[Vic Wertz]

I have a vague recollection that with Runelords, I actually took the time to ensure that if you took the 6 characters that put the largest number of blessings in their deck, banished all the basic blessings, and assembled the scenario that used the most blessings in location decks, that you would still have enough blessings for the villain to be defeated and escape once or twice. But there are way more blessings-heavy characters now than there were back then, so I'm pretty sure you can now build a party to make that happen.

[grudgekeyper]

This session it actually occurred when villain ran away the first time during Lanterns of the Bone Fields (Adventure 5 of Mummy's Mask) with a 6 player party and have been fairly adamant about banishing basics when we encountered them.