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Doesn't Opo's Ravager have 4 damage now since he engaged it from GTR?
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Apr 13, 2016 21:37
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Oh right, "react". Ok I think I'm getting the hang of things. Also SilverMike posted:Doesn't Opo's Ravager have 4 damage now since he engaged it from GTR? Yeah, should be at 4, the two he had before and the 2 from engaging me
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Apr 13, 2016 21:45
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My turn: Use my 2-6 from reserve to Knockback Shot the Elder Scion when it engages me, doing 2 damage from KS and 2 damage from Riposte. I'll send it to Opo. I'll release my Riposte, giving me 7 dice to roll this turn. 1st roll: 1-2-2-4-6-6-6, keeping 1-2-6-6-6 2nd roll: 4-6, keeping 6 Final roll: 1-2-5-6-6-6-6 Actions: Exhaust the Chalice to heal 1. 1-6 + 6-6 to Open Fire on Opo's Elder Scion, killing it for 4 XP. Set the 5 to Assist. Set the remaining 2-6 to Reserve. Next turn I should be able to grab Head Shot, which is a 1-2-3-4 skill to outright kill one non-boss enemy. Figure I've got a good chance to do that every turn on 7 dice. SilverMike fucked around with this message at 21:52 on Apr 13, 2016 |
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Apr 13, 2016 21:50
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Opopanax posted:Yeah, should be at 4, the two he had before and the 2 from engaging me Quite right - fixed that now and will resolve SilverMike's turn in about an hour - have to do some actual work!
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Apr 13, 2016 22:23
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Opopanax gets a free Elder Scion from SilverMike, with 4 damage. However it doesn't last long as SilverMike opens fire x2. All players receive 4 xp Then Surge increases. Burning Cage damage increases by 2 MTV draws a card. Endless enters the tunnels. Endless engages MTV  Tunnels Surge: 6/6 Objective 2: 0/10 Assist Dice available: 5 (SilverMike) Action Queue: MTV to decide whether to spend any xp and block, and whether to sustain burning cage. Then roll dice and take actions. Player 4: MTV Crib Death Engaged Enemies  Endless 0/5      Burning Cage Damage 4 Damage: 7/10 Shields: 0 XP: 21 Dice: 6 Player 1: GTR Engaged Enemies      Damage: 8/10 Shields: 0 XP: 21 Dice: 7 Player 2: Opopanax Engaged Enemies   Behemoth 3/10; Ravager 4/8      Sustain: Defensive Stance Damage: 8/12 Shields: 0 XP: 16 Dice: 7 Reserve Dice: 2 Player 3: SilverMike Engaged Enemies     Chalice: 5/5 Damage: 0/8 Shields: 0 XP: 16 Dice: 7 Reserve Dice:2 ,6 Sustain:
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Apr 13, 2016 23:30
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Not going to block. Going to buy Divine Intervention. Release the cage. Rolled a drat fine: http://orokos.com/roll/392038: 6#1d6 1 6 6 6 6 1 Rerolled both 1s: Got a 1, 6 Luck has smiled upon me. Brand the Endless. {1} Divine Intervention on GTR. {6,6,6,6} Pull the Behemoth to me with Drawn to Light {6} Friends, spare me any 4s, 3s, or 2s that you can. The heal train has pulled into the station.
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Apr 14, 2016 00:24
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Endless deals 6 damage to objective MTV releases Burning Cage. Leng Priestess takes 4 damage. MTV Brands the Endless for 2 damage MTV uses Divine Intervention on GTR. GTR is healed to full and receives 5 shields MTV pulls Opopanax' Behemoth. It takes 2 damage. Then Surge increases. End of Times is added to the tunnels No cards to draw. Elder Scion engages GTR And now you just have to kill the final boss to win!  Tunnels Surge: 6/6 Objective 2: 6/10 Assist Dice available: 5 (SilverMike) Action Queue: GTR to decide whether to spend any xp and block. Then roll dice and take actions. Player 1: GTR Engaged Enemies  Elder Scion 0/11 Damage: 0/10 Shields: 5 XP: 21 Dice: 7 Player 2: Opopanax Engaged Enemies Ravager 4/8 Sustain: Defensive Stance Damage: 8/12 Shields: 0 XP: 16 Dice: 7 Reserve Dice: 2 Player 3: SilverMike Engaged Enemies Chalice: 5/5 Damage: 0/8 Shields: 0 XP: 16 Dice: 7 Reserve Dice:2 ,6 Sustain: Player 4: MTV Crib Death Engaged Enemies Endless 2/5; Leng Priestess 4/9; Behemoth 5/10  Burning Cage Damage Damage: 7/10 Shields: 0 XP: 6 Dice: 6
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Apr 14, 2016 00:37
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If you guys can stack everything that can be damaged onto MTV or Opo I can get 15+ total damage per Chain Shot.
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Apr 14, 2016 00:53
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Question, as worded, it appears as though The End of Time will heal 3 damage any time he is attacked, because his ability damages players when he is attacked, and he heals each time he damages a player. Is this the intended interaction?
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Apr 14, 2016 01:25
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Ah thanks for catching that. No, it's not. It should read 'Any time End of Times deals damage as a result of attacking a player it heals 3'. Or maybe just 'any time it attacks it heals 3' for simplicity.
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Apr 14, 2016 01:27
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Thanks for clarifying! Now it will die Buy Stand Together 15xp, Block the Attack, Release Sustain Initial Roll: 3,5,3,1,1,1,5 Final Roll: 3,3,1,1,1,6,6 6: Healing Draught on Opopanax Tome of Mirrors: Opopanax's Ravager==> My Elder Scion 3: Misdirect My Ravager==> Opopanax's Elder Scion (Ravager dies, Elder Scion 2 Damage) 3: Misdirect My Elder Scion==>End of Time 6: Stand Together With the Best Dog Ever 1: Savage End of Time (3 Damage, Take 3 Damage) 1: Savage End of Time (4 Damage, Take 3 Damage) 1: Savage End of Time (4 Damage, Take 3 Damage) FINISH HIM
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Apr 14, 2016 01:32
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GTR heals Opopanax GTR runs Ravager to death. All players receive 4xp. Elder Scion sent to tunnels to think about what it's done Then Surge increases. No cards to draw. Aberrant engages Opopanax  Tunnels Surge: 6/6 Objective 2: 6/10 Assist Dice available: 5 (SilverMike) Action Queue: Opopanax to decide whether to spend any xp and block. Then roll dice and take actions. Player 2: Opopanax Engaged Enemies  Aberrant 0/11 Sustain: Defensive Stance Damage: 5/12 Shields: 0 XP: 20 Dice: 7 Reserve Dice: 2 Player 3: SilverMike Engaged Enemies Chalice: 5/5 Damage: 0/8 Shields: 0 XP: 20 Dice: 7 Reserve Dice:2 ,6 Sustain: Player 4: MTV Crib Death Engaged Enemies Endless 2/5; Leng Priestess 4/9; Behemoth 5/10 Burning Cage Damage Damage: 7/10 Shields: 0 XP: 10 Dice: 6 Player 1: GTR Engaged Enemies  End of Times 11/20  Damage: 9/10 Shields: 0 XP: 10 Dice: 7 Sustain: Stand Together
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Apr 14, 2016 01:49
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15XP to buy Bloodletting, and 3XP to pick up Essence Draw Block the 6dmg from Aberrent putting me at 9/12 and eating my shield Initial Roll 1,2,3,4,2,5,4 Final Roll 1,2,3,4,3,6,3 2,3 Bring them to me on MTV's group of 3, hitting them all for 2dmg each 1 Strike on Behemoth to do 1 (or 2dmg, not entirely clear but it won't matter soon) 3,4 Drain Life, healing me for 8, and killing the Endless and Behemoth. Rolled for Endless and got a 6 so he comes back with 1dmg  3,6(4) Essence Draw on Leng Priestess, killing her and healing me for another 3 (or technically 1 since I'm back at 0 now)
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Apr 14, 2016 18:16
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Aberrant hits Opopanax for 2 damage (Since you had Defensive Stance sustained) Opopanax grabs a bunch of monsters, and kills Behemoth. All players gain 4xp. Endless regenerates. Opopanax kills Leng Priestess. All players gain 2xp. Then Surge increases. No cards to draw. Behemoth engages SilverMike  Tunnels Surge: 6/6 Objective 2: 6/10 Assist Dice available: Action Queue: SilverMike to decide whether to spend any xp and block. Then roll dice and take actions. Player 3: SilverMike Engaged Enemies Behemoth 0/10 Chalice: 5/5 Damage: 0/8 Shields: 0 XP: 26 Dice: 7 Reserve Dice:2 ,6 Sustain: Player 4: MTV Crib Death Engaged Enemies Burning Cage Damage Damage: 7/10 Shields: 0 XP: 16 Dice: 6 Player 1: GTR Engaged Enemies End of Times 11/20 Damage: 9/10 Shields: 0 XP: 16 Dice: 7 Sustain: Stand Together Player 2: Opopanax Engaged Enemies Endless 1/5; Aberrant 0/11   Sustain: Damage: 0/12 Shields: 0 XP: 11 Dice: 7 Reserve Dice: 2
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Apr 14, 2016 20:37
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Use reserved 2-6 to Knockback Shot the Behemoth to Opo, dealing 2 damage to it. Buy 8th die for 15 XP. 1st roll: 2-2-2-3-3-4-5-6, keeping 3-3-6 2nd roll: 1-1-1-2-6, keeping all but 2. 3rd roll: 3 Total roll 1-1-1-3-3-3-6-6 Open Fire on End of Times 2 times for 8 damage to it, 6 to me. Chug my Chalice for 5 HP. Open Fire on End of Times 2 more times doing a total 16 damage to it, 12-5 for 7 damage to me. Celebrate! Edit: First quick thought I have is that the Witch Hunter is an incredibly selfish character and I felt bad about using Hide in Shadows that one turn after I saw it would dump 2 tunnel monsters onto MTV in a single turn. SilverMike fucked around with this message at 21:37 on Apr 14, 2016 |
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Apr 14, 2016 21:33
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SilverMike shoots End of Times excessively. Players win the game!
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Apr 14, 2016 21:40
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Hooray! Praise the Sun!
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Apr 14, 2016 21:43
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First of all thanks very much to all of you for playing - I know it can be a bit of a crapshoot taking part in a playtest where there's a risk that things can fall completely flat, so I really appreciate you all taking that risk and for your patience with the rules clarifications and mistakes. It's definitely been helpful for me to tune a few things, some of which I've already changed based on my own observations of this play through (some of which I'll share) but first of all I'd be really interested in hearing any feedback you have. Certainly no obligation to do so but if you had the time and inclination I'd really value any thoughts you can offer, on some or all of the following: - The overall experience of playing the game, whether you found it fun, how engaging you found it etc. - Thoughts on the overall game mechanics, pacing, the way it plays out etc. - Thoughts on character balance, enemy balance etc. - Thoughts on any specific skills, items or enemies that seem underpowered/overpowered etc. As you've commented on SilverMike, the intention with our design was to make each character play (and feel) quite different, with the Witch Hunter definitely being the most 'selfish' of characters due to multiple ways to avoid enemies and the ability to do high damage to enemies grouped on other players. We've tried playing the game 2 player with any combination of the four current characters and it seems to work whichever combo we use, but we've definitely found from playing with different groups that some players prefer certain characters' playstyles over others. We also intended that characters could be built differently from one game to the next based on which other characters were in play, what items became available etc. so we've also had games where the Witch Hunter ended up becoming a ridiculous tank through using Culling Shot to buy all the armour items.
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Apr 14, 2016 21:46
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That was cool. It seemed really complicated at first but it was pretty quick to pick up, and my badass was pretty fun to play. Standout for me would be The Ravager, having to juggle him around like that was a pretty neat twist. It seemed pretty quick, but sometimes that's what you want. Maybe an option to set it up for long or short games if you want. The store mechanic seemed kind of superfluous, other than what I grabbed early on I really didn't look at it, it might be better to retool some of the actions to use 5s and base the shop off of XP.
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Apr 14, 2016 22:02
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I agree with Opo's comments about the store. I generally had enough to worry about looking at my skills, enemy skills, who was engaged with what, etc. Every time I rolled a five I felt like it was a wasted die. That might change on further plays though. For the sun-touched, I felt like a support class that wasn't great at supporting. My biggest mistake was taking Flay. I can't imagine I'd ever take that card again because of all the times I wish I had mass healing. Cauterize was quickly made useless when enemies beganthrowing around damage of 5 and 7. It's two dice cost was steep too. I'd like either the cost brought down or its power increased. Maybe Cauterize can scale depending on how many bosses have been defeated?
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Apr 14, 2016 22:59
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Kerro posted:- The overall experience of playing the game, whether you found it fun, how engaging you found it etc. Thanks for running this Kerro, I had a lot of fun. My initial impressions are very positive. That said, I do have a few observations, although given that they come from a single game may not necessarily be right. -The mechanics are very easy to grasp. I'm not a huge fan of dice games, but the combination of re-rolls and every die face having some useful application made it so no turn felt useless. -The flip side of this is that I felt it was almost too easy to get exactly what I was looking for with 2 rerolls. Only getting a single reroll might skew the game towards being more difficult, but I'd be curious to see how it goes. The Scion with its ability interfering with re-rolls was annoying but a serious threat and a good effect. -I agree with Opopanax and MTV that the store felt largely superfluous, and it might be better to go back and rethink the use of 5s. -On the topic of dice and character skills, you'll notice that all the skills I purchased only required a single die to activate. With a limited number of dice at our disposal, the effects of skills that require 2+,3+,or even 4 different dice aren't powerful enough to outweigh the fact it is probably going to be one of the only things you can do that turn. Many of the Houndmaster's skills seem very corner-case or not worth the cost. The single die skills on the other hand, were incredibly useful not only for their efficiency, but had powerful effects. -Shuffling monsters around was so much fun. In a lot of ways, I'm reminded of the Lord of the Rings LCG, which had monsters slowly pile up and make checks to engage specific players, and where shuffling them around to dodge attacks was a good strategy. Looking through some of the interactions in that game might give you ideas for monster abilities/player skills that interact with your combat system here. -The early and mid-game seemed extremely easy, while the late game felt much more tense. It might be worth very slightly increasing the danger of early enemies. -Hesitant to post this because I feel the game is very mechanically sound and I really like it, but the one element that stuck out to me was the artwork and theme. Looking at the credits, I'm not sure if these are being used for placeholders or if this was the chosen art. There didn't really seem to be any sort of consistent theme among the enemies, and the artwork was generally pretty underwhelming. On the same note, the abilities on each tier of enemy also lacked any overarching theme. The way you've set up three different tiers of enemy cards with bosses, makes it very easy to expand the game later on with new early/mid/late enemy groups. Having a stronger flavor and mechanical theme for the tiers would help give more a face for the enemies, and open up possibilities later. -I liked all of the hero design, but again, the artwork was very underwhelming but I assume you won't be using the epic generator for the final product.
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Apr 15, 2016 02:02
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Thanks very much for the feedback so far, that's incredibly helpful. I had a few thoughts from running it, a lot of which I think parallel stuff you've already mentioned I did think the pacing felt off - too easy to begin with and only picking up any kind of challenge towards the end. It's one of the main things we've been working to try and smooth out and which is proving remarkably difficult. Although the pacing right now feels well tuned for 2-player games, it does get easier in 3 player and substantially so in 4 player. While some things are more powerful in two-player games (like AoE abilities since it's easier to group enemies) others become stronger with larger player counts (like things which affect multiple players) but the biggest issue seems to be the fact that you simply have more bodies to soak hits, and that if you draw an enemy away from someone you get 3 more turns before you have to worry about it again (compared to only one in a 2 player game). Our next thought for balancing that we'll need to try out was to have the surge dice start at a higher number and increase faster with higher player counts so that monsters pop up faster with more players. Our goal with balancing was to avoid as much as possible having any kind of different stats etc. on enemies or players based on the player count so hopefully that might work! I was curious throughout the game as well that the items/store seemed to be largely ignored since in many games I've played players have ended up with 2-3 items each (or more) by the end of the game, some of which have made a big difference to how the game has played out. I'd be interested to know what would have made you more inclined to buy items - if they just seemed underpowered or a waste of dice, or something else. I wondered too whether the fact that it didn't seem like you guys were really challenged at any point meant that the items were indeed superfluous since you really didn't need them to succeed in this game. One possible thought I had to perhaps make them more appealing would be to let players trade 5s on dices for gold coins which could then be spent during the upgrade step to buy items, allowing you to save them from turn to turn rather than necessarily spend them at once. The item costs would probably need to be somewhat modified if I went that route. I think you're right about two rerolls making it fairly easy to get what you want, particularly if you do pickup mostly single die abilities. I wonder what could make the multiple die abilities seem more attractive without making them overpowered (though obviously MTV did pickup and use Divine Intervention and SilverMike was planning on getting Headshot). Thanks for mentioning Flay as well - I like the idea of the skill but feel like it doesn't quite come together in practice. The same with Cauterise - the intention for the Sun-Touched was that she could be built either as a healer or a damage dealer. I'm wondering if a simple fix that might make Flay more appealing (as well as Cauterise) would be to change Cauterise to a single die skill, and have it simply heal the Sun-Touched for 3 but not other players. That would make it easier to use Flay as you could self-heal more effectively, but could still pick up extra skills if you wanted to go towards healing other players more. Regarding the art - when my wife and I decided to create this we had no real thought about it beyond 'hey I wonder if we can design a boardgame that doesn't suck' so the art is placeholder in the sense that we'd much rather replace it with something else, but didn't have particular ambitions to try and publish the game or anything like that since neither of us have the slightest experience in that space and so have no budget whatsoever to hire an artist. In the event that we got sufficient interest as a result of our entry in the current BGG print and play competition to justify trying to run a kickstarter we would definitely consider trying that out and hiring an artist as part of that process but I haven't the faintest clue how to run a successful kickstarter so that might be a bit of a pipe dream. If we did, I'd love to get this guy to design the creatures as I really like his stuff. The suggestion to look at the Lord of the Rings LCG is a good one - it was part of our inspiration as we enjoy the kind of 'puzzle solving' aspect in that game so I'll definitely go back and look at different enemy interactions (and player abilities) for more ideas. I definitely think working towards a stronger 'theme' for each set of monsters would work well. Any ideas for new monster abilities would be appreciated too  At the moment the monster abilities come out pretty much in the order in which we thought of them rather than with any coherent interactions in mind! I'm definitely keen to think up more abilities like the Ravager and Elder Scion's dice-stealing ability that interact with other mechanics of the game, rather than just 'this enemy is a bit tougher' or 'this enemy does random damage under certain circumstances'.
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Apr 15, 2016 05:02
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Being able to stockpile 5s into gold sounds great. I would pay much more attention to items in that case.
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Apr 15, 2016 05:15
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With 5s, there is a real tradeoff between being effective this turn, and improving your effectiveness in the future. During some turns, there was either no real need for the items for sale, and wasting 1/5 of the actions you get for a turn to maybe see something else never seemed worth it. Either that, or the situation was tight enough that you couldn't spare resources. It should be important to note that its not just the cost of the item in terms of needed dice or gold, but the opportunity cost of losing your actions for the turn. Under the current system, its simply not worth going after any of the 3 or 4 gold items. When the item requires dice and is functionally the same as a skill, I have to wonder why not fold that into the existing skill system as some sort of pool of "general upgrades" instead. The best items were the ones that didn't require any investment past the initial outlay. The chalice helped keep SilverMIke alive, I made excellent use of the Tome of Mirrors because it synergized well with the Houndmaster's abilities, and the Blade of Bone as a passive effect was also useful. It would have been more useful had I gone after Opopanax, as usually anything engaged with him died before I could begin the great monster shuffle. Kerro posted:Regarding the art - when my wife and I decided to create this we had no real thought about it beyond 'hey I wonder if we can design a boardgame that doesn't suck' so the art is placeholder in the sense that we'd much rather replace it with something else, but didn't have particular ambitions to try and publish the game or anything like that since neither of us have the slightest experience in that space and so have no budget whatsoever to hire an artist. In the event that we got sufficient interest as a result of our entry in the current BGG print and play competition to justify trying to run a kickstarter we would definitely consider trying that out and hiring an artist as part of that process but I haven't the faintest clue how to run a successful kickstarter so that might be a bit of a pipe dream. If we did, I'd love to get this guy to design the creatures as I really like his stuff. I think you have a really great system here, and with some refinement you might have a really attractive game.
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Apr 15, 2016 05:25
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I am going to respond, just been having trouble finding spare time the past few days.
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Apr 17, 2016 03:22
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Thanks SilverMike, just when you get around to it would be great. I've found the feedback on the items very useful, and have tested a few things on subsequent playthroughs. As a result, I've changed all the items that required a dice to no longer do so, so the tradeoff is (I believe) a more reasonable one in most cases. You still lose the potential for actions on your turn (or a weaker action, if the item is one that can be used immediately) but with the benefit of gaining more actions or passive effects that last the rest of the game and don't take away from your normal actions. I've also tweaked a couple of the level one monsters to be a little (but not much) harder, but have altered the pacing by making the surge die starting value and increases to be based on the number of players, which creates a lot more enemies coming out in a four-player game. So far this seems to smooth out the difference in pacing between different player numbers substantially. I've also reviewed a number of the class skills, particularly those requiring multiple dice, for balance against the lower dice-cost abilities to ensure that you would always do more damage (or equivalent) by using a multi-dice ability over just using a single die ability multiple times. As part of this I also changed some abilities that were too close to being duplicates of each other (e.g. the Penitent's 'Bring Them to Me' and 'I'll Take You All' and altered the Sun-Touched's Cauterise ability to just be a self-heal, making it easier to use Flay and her other self-damaging abilities more effectively. I started looking into what kickstarting would involve as well and it all seems a bit daunting. I think one of the biggest challenges that I'm not sure how I could overcome if I did want to try publishing would be the fact that I live in NZ, meaning that it would be highly inefficient to have the games manufactured (presumably in China) and shipped here only to ship them at great expense back to the US/Europe/wherever most kickstarter backers come from. Presumably there are companies that manage that kind of distribution so I think a lot more research would be needed on my part before being able to go down that route.
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Apr 17, 2016 22:06
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Alright, things I liked in general about the game: - The ability and basically requirement to juggle enemies between characters so nobody gets overwhelmed. - Interesting choices with XP vis-a-vis skills, even though I think buying dice might be the stronger option in a choice between same-value XP expenditures. - Feeling like I can do something useful most turns. If it wasn't possible to directly control and/or damage monsters, I was able to save dice to prevent damage with Reacts, and if I couldn't do that, I was usually able to invest for the long-term with buying items. Might be nice to have 2 assist spots but I think it'd be an odd turn where you couldn't find a way to use all your dice but 1. - Monster special abilities had a nice ramp in complexity/difficulty, and I especially liked the Ravager with forced re-engagement as its only vulnerability. - All characters had a unique feel to them and really hammered home the need to work together using each other's specialities to survive. Things I didn't like: - Once we got past the opening turns, it felt like taking most of a turn to grab an item would unacceptably slow us down is stemming the tide of monsters trying to beat us down. - Single 5s were mostly useless and I'm not sure I saw anyone use one even when they were set as Assists. - The Witch Hunter was incredibly selfish, which was weird for a coop game. - It was hard for the Witch Hunter to do damage without rolling 1s. Only 4 of his 10 bought skills didn't require a 1, and of those 4 Hide in Shadows doesn't do damage and Mysterious Ways does some but you're liable to use it more for healing and shielding. I think that's about it, my skills all felt relatively useful, though I got a LOT of mileage out of Chain Shotting groups that were set up in front of someone else.
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Apr 21, 2016 15:42
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Thanks very much for the feedback Mike, that's super helpful and consistent with other feedback we've been getting. I think we'll try changing the item mechanic to one where 5s give gold that can be spent to buy items during the upgrade phase of the turn rather than needing to be spent all at once, which should make single 5s more useful even later into the game since far less has to be sacrificed in order to get items. That may require a bit of other rebalancing but I suspect it won't throw things too far off. The comment about requiring specific dice (in your case 1s) to do much damage is something we've also been looking at - to try and ensure that players can at least potentially use all of the different dice depending on the skills they buy. The use of lots of 1s reflects an early idea we had to use custom die which would have sides corresponding to different types of 'effects' e.g. swords being used for simple attacks, lightning bolts for more complex attacks etc. and we ended up carrying this through to some degree when we switched to normal dice (e.g. 4s still largely being associated with healing and defensive abilities). We have gone back and changed some of the dice requirements for quite a number of skills however to balance this better and will have another look at the Witch Hunter specifically. As for the Witch Hunter being a 'selfish' character, I wonder if this is amplified through a pbp format where there's less opportunity for discussion between players. In the tabletop games we've played it's tended to be that players are quite happy to let the Witch Hunter push enemies away and avoid engagements since he can then typically do more damage with chain shot, explosive shot etc which benefits everyone in the long run - but I can see that feeling a bit different when it seems that you're making a unilateral decision of 'here, have my monster' Anyway, thanks everyone again for playing and for your feedback - it's really helping us to create a better game!
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Apr 21, 2016 22:42
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Why not have Cauterize use just a 4 to heal yourself for 3 OR another player for 1? That way you still have two characters able to heal their friends out of the gate and two who are self-only until they get an item.
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May 4, 2016 19:18
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Thanks for the suggestion - we played around with a few options (including that one) which ended up being pretty close to what we settled with, which is a single die to heal self for 2 and another player for 1. We also played a few games trying the 5s giving money as an option but found that even with adjusting some of the prices, it took a lot of the tension and decision making out of the game. Simply removing the dice cost from items seems to have largely addressed the issue - it's still expensive and a risk in a sense to buy items as it costs you most of your actions for the turn, but in exchange for gaining powerful abilities that can be activated without dice on subsequent turns - essentially having to make the trade-off between immediate effects vs building power for the later game. It does tend to mean that players only buy items in the first half of the game and then largely ignore them in the second, but I am okay with that as it seems appropriate to focus initially on gearing up and reaching a point of 'stability' followed by a period of using what you've accrued to focus on destroying the enemies. We've done a few more blind playtests as well and opinions from players seem quite divided. People who want to just tank monsters and use the attack abilities to kill them have tended to hate it and see it as very imbalanced against the players, whereas players who enjoy 'gaming' the system by finding different ways to avoid the monsters attacking altogether or shuffling the monsters around in order to pull off big combos seem to have enjoyed it a lot. If nothing else it's been an interesting learning experience and has certainly clarified many of the challenges of game design, and the reality is that just because we can design a game that we enjoy playing doesn't mean that anybody else will! If anyone was interested in trying another round I'd be very happy to run it again with some of the new changes - the main one being that the surge die now starts on a higher number and increases faster in higher player-count games, meaning that particularly the early game ramps up much more quickly.
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May 4, 2016 23:11
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