@Comsquare: The Cleric did Mend Wounds…over and over again.
Okay, what did we think of the game?
Things we liked:
1) In general it was fun! It had the oldskool feel and the mechanics were easy to follow and players could start fast.
2) We REALLY liked the equipment and ability cards. They really help making a personal character and no 2 rangers have to be the same. Just pick different equipment and abilities and you have different characters. Really nice.
3) The items are nice and work well (well, the healing potion is a tricky one, needing a focus action).
4) Critical hits and failures are cool and don’t happen too often.
5) The story in the scenario is great. It has good atmosphere, is moody and spooky and helps to get that RPG feeling. Really nice.
Things we disliked:
1) Combats involve a lot of dice rolling. Because characters can defend/evade around 50% of the attacks miss. And most creatures require 2-3 hits to go down. So that takes quite some time. In the end we weren’t the biggest fan of Defend/Evade as it mainly slowed down the pace. Sometimes we had a full combat round without anything happening due to good Defend/Evade rolls. That felt a bit boring now and then.
It also removed the fun of critical hits. A player would roll a 6 and then another successful roll and was stoked he got a critical hit! I then rolled a 5 and defended the critical hit. And the elation died.
2) Armour Penetration is too high. Armour often is pointless as most creatures had an Armour Penetration of 3-4+. So they would simply stab right through it. Or as a player said about armour: go high or go home. It’s only interesting once you get to Armour 6 or so.
3) The creatures are extremely strong! Especially the Orc was insane: Melee3+ with a Battle Axe and SB+4 meant he hacked into the heroes for so much damage they just couldn’t withstand them. Even the goblins are painful with their relatively good stats and high damage spear.
4) It felt a bit off you could strip the creatures of all of their equipment and move around like a pack mule. The Ranger took the Goblin’s leather armour and then donned it. That was a bit weird. And it felt like buying Armour from the start was pointless. Just kill a creature and take its armour. Cheaper and more effective.
5) Camping is a bit tricky. The heroes really needed to heal (but with Mend Wounds that went very slowly due to the 50% chance of getting the spell off). So first they needed 8 actions to get them patched up enough to get going. The camping brought along another Orc and Goblin and they again got hit hard. We then ruled that Camping wouldn’t trigger again and they needed *14 actions* to get going again.
6) Having the ability to destroy all locks with bashing is a bit too easy. Now they simply evaded the Troll by bashing in the door.
Suggestions:
1) Make Defend/Evade a passive modifier to attack. This way it’s not another roll to be made. So for instance, an Orc has Defend/Evade -0 and a Goblin Defend/Evade -1. The Goblin would inflict a -1 modifier to the attack roll and the Orc doesn’t. The Orc is big and lumbering and can’t really defend…but has many hp to soak up the damage. The Goblin on the other hand is harder to hit, but has low hp.
It will speed up the game and this way you cannot defend/evade a critical hit (which is more epic I’d say).
2) Armour Penetration really needs to be lowered to make Armour more interesting. Now most weapons stab right through them, making them a bit pointless. Which is a shame as it should help stop the damage.
3) The creatures need to be worked on. I’d give them weaker stats and weaker weapons. After all, these are the creatures you’re starting out against. So I think they need to inflict a maximum of 6 damage per attack. Otherwise the heroes have no chance at all. You could make stronger versions of the creatures as challenges for later levels (Orc Veterans or such).
4) After killing creatures, heroes can rob their gold and maybe make a roll on a table to see what else they will find. But I’d stay away from taking their equipment, it felt wrong and weird. Also speeds things up. And we think heroes need a maximum carrying capacity to limit them a bit. Now they could be carrying around everything they found. Maybe SB+2? So the Barbarian could carry 5 extra items and the Ranger could carry 2 extra items (so stuff not being equipped).
5) As the game is now camping is scary. The monsters hit so hard that you don’t have time to camp because you will get hit again. But you will need to camp to heal. Argh. But if the monsters get tweaked then camping will be fine. But I’d say that you roll once per room for camping. Not more, because it slows everything down.
6) Introduce magical locks which cannot be broken. This can help lead the game more to certain encounters and not make it too easy with high damage dealers.
7) Some of the ability cards need some work and tweaking. No big things, but they need some change in text and effects. For instance Battle Cry lasts until the character takes another action. That felt wrong as it now always needs to be your last action to work well.
8 ) I’d remove the Focus roll on some abilities or items. We weren’t a fan of Focus on the healing potion as the barbarian apparently has a hard time drinking from a potion
. Same goes for an Orc going Frenzy. It only goes off on a 6+. Never happened and cost him an action each time.
The players didn’t pick up any torches, so we didn’t get to test them
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So the game sure is in the right direction…but we think it needs work to get it to the next level. Most important thing is we had a good game, which is what it’s all about. If you have questions about what I typed, let me know!