Tweaking town equipment -house rules

By player1465698, in Descent: Journeys in the Dark

I'm thinking of taking a pen to some of the town items to tweak some of the less used ones (in a 4 hero game, anyway). Also, I like the way that some of effects are available to heroes from the start, but only on a good roll. Any thoughts?

Dagger: 2 surges = Bleed

Morning star: 2 surges=+1 damage Even if it's mainly for the off-hand bonus, it should still be useable in its own right.

Throwing Knife: Cost=25 Because it's never worth a fatigue potion

Bow: 2 surges=+1 damage

Sling: 2 surges=Daze

Mage Staff: Can also be used to make a melee attack with Reach, R&Y dice, surge=+1 damage For when Mok draws Weapons Master or Valadir draws Water Pact.

Immolation: 2 surges=Burn Since Sunburst appeared, Immolation rarely gets picked, even with the reduced surge cost.

As a general philosophy, making effects "only available on a good roll" is kind of problematic, because skills, hero abilities, and trait dice can dramatically change the probability of having a lot of surges. For example, I think the Sunburst rune is fairly balanced in "normal" use, but in the hands of Landrec or any hero with Prodigy, it becomes massively more powerful. That said, your effects look rather more reasonable.

  • It's not clear whether you want the Dagger to inflict 2 Bleed tokens if you roll 4 surges (the Bleed ability doesn't have ranks, and thus by default does not stack, even though it probably should ).
  • Morning Star looks like it probably still does less damage than your altered Dagger. Is that intentional?
  • I thought the Sling was already the default ranged weapon (the Crossbow costs you a potion, even before buying something for your off-hand, and the damage difference is slight), so making it strictly better seems like a questionable move unless you're going to buff the Crossbow as well.
  • I don't personally like the idea of making melee attacks with a magic weapon, and especially not the idea of making the magic weapon strictly better than the melee weapon except for cost, but it could probably work if you want to go that direction.
  • The idea of Immolation setting people on fire is natural and reasonable, but that's only an improvement against monsters that are going to survive long enough to activate at least two times after you attack them (which is virtually never) or when you don't even penetrate the monster's armor (which is also very rare), and even then the advantage is marginal. I'd still take the Sunburst every time.

You might find the spreadsheet linked in my signature useful for balancing--you can input weapon stats and it will calculate the average number of attacks needed to kill each monster in the game, so you can compare its effectiveness to other options.

I could also show you the modified shop arsenal I'm using in my mod The Enduring Evil, but monsters in EE actually take multiple hits to kill, so the balance assumptions are rather different.

I think rolling a green die is more important than the weapons effects.

Not sure how to balance this without making the effects the primary way of getting damage once you have crossed that line you run into many issues as antistone commented.

You can give effects automatically rather than charging surges for them. That prevents someone from stacking a ton of them with lots of surges.

Of course, you have to balance them appropriately, but a yellow die and Bleed does approximately the same damage as a green die. So you can do things like this:

Bow (100 coins) - 2H Ranged Weapon
Blue + Yellow
Bleed
SS: Pierce 1
SS: +1 range