My heroes and I are starting a new RtL campaign soon and I need a bit of advice. We usually let the hero players choose their hero rather than the pick 3, choose 1 method, but I have been reading that that may give a large advantage to the heroes. I don't want to seem like the nazi rules lawyer and say they can't pick their own, but I do want to make sure this is as balanced as possible (I would like some chance of winning). Is this that big of a deal, or will it all work out anyway?

"Choose the Best of 3" should be done, imo. If you let them pick, at least say that the combined conquest value can't exceed 12. Alternatively, and this could be funny... let each person pick whoever he wants, but he has to do it without the knowledge of what anyone else is picking.

Veinman said:

I see a party of 4 Nanoks if you go that route.

How we did it:

• I had my Heroes in a circle, each where dealt three Hero cards.
• Without discussion, they kept one, passed one to the right and one to the left.
• This was rpeated again.
• They then, agaoin without discussion, chose one Hero.

The players are all happy, their party is strong, but not perfect (they lack a ranger, two squishy mages), and I have a chance at winning.

I'll second some sort of randomness. It also makes sure some heroes, that you would choose right off, gets used once in a while. In our group, we actually ended up with quite a powerful party, even though I was certain we were too weak when we startet off. What you can do (and we have done in some of the groups I've been playing with) is that you can mulligan the picks. If it's really awful (f.eks. no fighters at all) all the piles of heroes can be shuffled back, and redrawn.

I force my heroes to draw 3 pick 1...in return I choose my avatar random as well.

Thanks guys! This has given me some ideas so that we can compromise between what we're used to and what we're suppose to do. I like Slev's plan I think that gives everyone a near guarantee to play the type of character they want, just not neccisarily the exact one they want.