Bolt & Campaign - your thoughts?

[gorillacrab]

I've played a handful of FG games and hope to start a campaign soon. With this in mind, here are two questions for you FG gamers:

1. If you've played a couple of games using Elemental Bolt, what do you think it does to game play and balance, given the +8 attack is the most powerful basic spell in the game? (Strike Dead IS stronger but requires 18 to cast)

2. If you are already involved in a campaign, are you using the rules as written or choosing some of the variants from calmdown's thread for balanced campaigns - and what works or doesn't work?

Tell us what you think.
- Vlad

[nozza_uk]

Regarding point 2. Our house rules are:

• Wizards cannot buy Grimoires and Magic Items. The whole point of Frostgrave is to explore and gain treasure, so we removed the option of going to Flourish & Blotts or Slug and Jiggers Apothecary to gain Magic Items.
• Each soldier has an upkeep of 10% of their initial cost per game. Adds very little to my bookkeeping and encourages Wizards to be a bit frugal.

[gorillacrab]

"Regarding point 2. Our house rules are:

    Wizards cannot buy Grimoires and Magic Items. The whole point of Frostgrave is to explore and gain treasure, so we removed the option of going to Flourish & Blotts or Slug and Jiggers Apothecary to gain Magic Items.
    Each soldier has an upkeep of 10% of their initial cost per game. Adds very little to my bookkeeping and encourages Wizards to be a bit frugal."

Thanks for replying. Are these the only changes you've made to the campaign - as written? And how is the campaign going - especially in terms of balance and enjoyment?

[Elbows]

While I own the book, I haven't read it enough to game it yet --- I would imagine if you find something terribly unbalanced, it'd be as simple as bumping the casting number to an agreeable point.

[nozza_uk]

Thanks for replying. Are these the only changes you've made to the campaign - as written? And how is the campaign going - especially in terms of balance and enjoyment?

So far it's early days. We currently have four warbands in play and they've each played once. Three are currently level 2 and the other is level 1. By removing the ability to buy magic items, it's encouraged each warband to go after the treasure on the board.

Introducing upkeep costs has slowed down the rush to expand and buy the more expensive soldier types. If a warband wants to have seven knights on their roster, then they need to have in the bank at least 70 gc to pay them. In fact, a couple of the warbands are saving two games worth of expenses in case they make some poor rolls.

The other house rule we introduced was not allowing a wizard to go into debt if they needed medical treatment. So the safe players are keeping a minimum of 100 gc + plus one games worth of wages in the bank.

All this is managed via a spreadsheet, so it's very easy to keep track of.

Hope that helps.

[Calmdown]

Elemental Bolt is very powerful, but so are lots of other spells.

Bolt is made overpowered by the parameters of the game and scenarios, rather than the spell itself. Killing is a good strategy when the game length is infinite and you get all of the treasure tokens if you kill the enemy warband, and also you get a lot of XP for kills by your Wizard.

http://www.bad-karma.net/some-thoughts-on-frostgrave-mostly-the-campaign-system/


Fixing the campaign system and scenarios also fixed Elemental Bolt, Bone Dart, and other killy spells, whilst making buff spells etc more worth using.

http://www.bad-karma.net/frostgrave-campaign-change-recommendations/


I'd suggest fixing the root cause of the issue in either the ways we suggest or your own version of it. Changing the spell won't fix anything.

[Mr. Peabody]

That's some very good looking work Calmdown, kudos to your group for brewing it all up so elegantly.

Gorilla, I'd be happy to try these mods for our campaign game. They look to be the business. 

[gorillacrab]

"Gorilla, I'd be happy to try these mods for our campaign game. They look to be the business."

Peabody, I'm always curious to try tweaks to modify games, as you know, so we'll definitely be using ideas from calmdown's group.

Calmdown also made a great point on killy spells (like elemental bolt) being less problematic in games which have limited number of turns (and using the campaign rules fix where you get 20 pts per successful spell cast but no points for kills by wizards).

I'm still hoping this threat gets more feedback with people actually campaigning with rules-as-written or modified rules to see how each works.
- gorillacrab (aka vlad)