| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Got to scenario 6D in a two player adventure. I’m playing Kess, and my co-player is Fumbus. Neither of us has any particular need for a melee weapon, so we both let the loot weapon Serithtial pass. I mean, that’s the way that loot works, right? You might get a bonus for having it, but never before this point has it been required for advancement, and it was not explicitly stated when we got it that we needed to keep it.
So yeah. 6D. We’re now stuck with having to play the scenario until the correct weapon is included (a slightly less than 1/6 chance). That feels bad. Is that how it’s supposed to work?
Warning! The above post is a pretty big spoiler for scenario 6D, the finale for Crimson Throne. You might mark it as such in the thread title and use spoiler formatting.
I believe that the loot weapon can be treated as an ally when rebuilding your deck, so that's how weaponless characters can take it. Which was intentional, I imagine.
There is a line in the 5D development (and maybe elsewhere?) that suggests that the weapon might be important, but I dismissed it as flavor text and - like you - would not have included it in a 2-character Fumbus/Kess party.
In 6D, I got extremely lucky and a character happened to be holding the weapon when we faced the villain. But it was sheer luck - completely unplanned.
In organized play, you can take loot at any time. In regular games, I *think* that passed-over loot is added to the vault. That would mean Kess/Fumbus would technically have to replay random scenarios until they happened to encounter and acquire the weapon. Which would be pretty silly, and I doubt anyone would be seriously interested in doing that. If I were you, I'd take the weapon retroactively and show Ileosa Ascendant who's boss. :)
I really enjoyed CotCT overall, but from a design perspective I had three problems with it:
- scenario 4D, which I hated
- the wildcard assault in Adventure 5
- the loot weapon issue in 6D (described above)
Oh, gee, if only *someone* had pointed out that issue during playtest...
Warning! The above post is a pretty big spoiler for scenario 6D, the finale for Crimson Throne.
To be honest, I don't think that spoiling a BUG should count as spoiler. OP doesn't mention any particulars about the story development, and only mentions the name of the card involved in said bug.
EDIT: And, to actually add a constructive suggestion for what a "tight", non-spoilery design might've been, that players in OP's situation could use as a "homemade FAQ":
"When a Story Bane is evaded, a character may banish a weapon in their hand or discards and replace it with a weapon of their choice from the Vault."
There are several possible wordings to the same effect, which spread on a scale between "exploitable" and "spoilery". The above is possibly the most exploitable, but also the least spoilery. I think.
| 4 people marked this as a favorite. |
Because we like fun, and because a loot should always be something you battle to get, and because we come from the RPG where if you do not keep a special item because you don't know yet if you need it later (and you have to get back to get it), we feel that if you discover later you need a loot that you did not keep you must somehow get back to it.
Easy way is to replay the scenario that awards it... but not that fun.
So our house rule (forgive me if my English wording isn't fully precise, but you'll get the "idée") is that:
Whenever a scenario refer by name (not type) to specific cards that at some point a character could have in his hand or deck, any of those cards is not in any of the character decks before the "Decide On the Challenge Mode" step, add the following to the scenario rules: "When building the locations, shuffle together one copy of the missing specific cards and enough monsters to deal one per location."
That way you know the needed loot is somewhere in a location (good luck hunting). The scenario is a bit harder (more monster, but hey, you have to pay for not keeping that loot when you could).
Note that it also apply (and that's fun theme-wise) for scenarios where - to take a totally random example - it would be cool to have a Pig Ally showing up.| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
That’s probably a good way to do it, especially since you can’t replay the scenario to get the loot again because it’s an Adventure reward.
As for spoilers, sorry about that. It was past the edit time when I saw the suggestion. That said, this is definitely one thing I would have liked to have spoiled.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Played again. Was going to use Frencois suggestion, but the weapon miraculously ended up in one of the location decks. Found the weapon, got a really bad roll, were reduced once again to trying to survive through the dragon attacks until we’d run down the clock. There’s not a lot less fun than managing Wounded and Poisoned to just try to stay alive through a doomed scenario. Also, realized that Fumbus with a double blessing and ally maxes out at a 22, so he probably wouldn’t be able to get the sword if he found it, so there’s another piece of luck.
Options now are probably to go back and play 1A (it has the maximum number of possible weapons and won’t destroy us like some of the 6 scenarios), or just give up trying to make our win at all legitimate and take the sword.
Speaking of which, how would replaying scenario 1A work at this point? Would we need to rebuild the vault for it, in which case getting the sword is impossible, or are we allowed to run it using the current vault? Reading through the rules I only found something that said that we’re allowed to replay old scenarios, not how to do it.
Speaking of which, how would replaying scenario 1A work at this point? Would we need to rebuild the vault for it, in which case getting the sword is impossible, or are we allowed to run it using the current vault? Reading through the rules I only found something that said that we’re allowed to replay old scenarios, not how to do it.
Just like any other scenario. You don't have to rebuild the vault. However, if you've already gotten the reward for that scenario, you can't get it again.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Options now are probably to go back and play 1A (it has the maximum number of possible weapons and won’t destroy us like some of the 6 scenarios), or just give up trying to make our win at all legitimate and take the sword.
Like Longshot, above, I consider the loot sword issue in CotCT to be a pretty serious bug. So it's not your fault if you have to semi-cheat to complete the campaign.
The bug won't affect most parties, but those affected are affected dramatically.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
There’s not a lot less fun than managing Wounded and Poisoned to just try to stay alive through a doomed scenario. Also, realized that Fumbus with a double blessing and ally maxes out at a 22, so he probably wouldn’t be able to get the sword if he found it, so there’s another piece of luck.
I know very well the detrimental effect of OCD about "playing by the rules" can have, but really it's not you who would be breaking rules here, it's the game that's broken, so if you can overcome your "anti-cheat" urges - just take the sword and actually have fun with the product you paid to have fun with.
PACG pretty much advertises itself about being able to be played with all sorts of characters and giving you the opportunity to build all sorts of decks; at no point the game teaches you (not only in Curse, but in the whole history of its 5 -or maybe a dozen, I'm not so familiar with all the Seasons- Adventure Paths!) that you need a *specific* card to be able to win a scenario, and to do so at the final stretch is absurd.
Look at it this way: if I was making a computer game, and the first -and ONLY the first!- time you beat the penultimate Boss he drops a weapon you need to beat the game, AND if someone fails to pick it up then you're reduced to grinding the game hoping for a *chance* to get said weapon from a random loot drop AND then most of the characters in the game don't even have the stats to realistically equip that weapon (or beat the CtA in PACG) - you better believe that A) no one would actually let me ship the game with this condition, and B) every player that has a readily available cheat to spawn this weapon in their inventory would just do so. I'm pretty much obsessed with PACG, but despite -or possibly because of- this, I don't see why it should get a free pass for breaking basic game design principles.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
This does remind me of those darned Sihedron rings back in RotR. I even remember peaking ahead at the adventure and scenario cards to see if we needed to hang on to them for some reason, didn't find anything, and then had the Oh, crap moment when we hit the deck 6 barrier that was basically a perpetual party wipe without them.
To be honest, even if you don't have Sihedron Medallion (or one of the two AD6 items Sihedron Ring, which is far more unlikely), you can A) beat the barrier to not take damage (much easier with RotR blessings and rules), 2) shuffle the barrier in a location that you can then plan on temp-closing , 3) banish the barrier if its in your last location.
RotR is actually much more likely to kill you with its last scenario if you haven't stocked on "examine and rearrange location" cards, but the difference with the OP issue is that you have *the entire Adventure Path* to learn the importance of these cards and to actively pursue them (the most powerful such card being given as a Loot in AD5 - by which time you *should* know better than to throw it away). But even without those you could still win with sufficient damage mitigation and luck (though I often wonder how many people got to that scenario ill-prepared, died and then decided to stick with perma-death... :)