Bounties

The introduction of Threat / Fortune tokens that came with the lieutenant packs offered some nice new ways to spice the game up.

I wonder if we can somehow add something extra to it.

I'd like to make it more interesting to defeat some of the tougher heroes of a party instead of constantly having to prey on the weaker ones. Right now you gain 1 threat token for each defeated hero (once per quest).

How about a Bounty system that cumulatively adds more threat tokens with each passing quest. Heroes that almost never go down (tanks, etc) would become more and more interesting to defeat.

Perhaps the amount of threat tokens added by each passing quest on an undefeated hero would be the following:

Count the amount of missions that a hero was undefeated starting at 1. Take half of that number, round it down and finally add +1 to it, giving you the following:

1 = 1

2 = 2

3 = 2

4 = 3

5 = 3

6 = 4

...

Heroic Resolve / Vengeance

Another idea I have is to make the loss of a quest less bitter. A lot of quests dangle with a certain Relic the winner gets, so sucks to be the loser right?

How about the loser gets fortune/threat tokens to play around with. Having options is always nice and you want people to play until the end of the campaign, not quit halfway through because they kept losing, ultimately ending in some snowball effect.

How about if the heroes lose, they gain 2 fortune tokens (just enough to get a shop item or to get an edge in a future quest) and if the overlord loses he gains 2 threat tokens (or just 1 if you think 2 would be too powerful).

Conclusion

Some things might still need some tweaking, so just look at the essence of my ideas.

Thoughts?

First off thanks for your work, it's nice to see some people out there are throwing time at finding out ways to make the game more enjoyable.

There is nothing wrong with the bounty system you suggested as such, but that's another thing to check on in parallel and I´m not too keen on introducing more and more mechanisms to a game where a lot is already going on. Another downside in my opinion is that it gives the overlord more incentive for killing heroes, which is obviously a core part of the game, but I vastly prefer encouraging strategies that are not entirely tied to combat. Then another thing is that if the 18 Health hero goes down then it's probably because the others are dead too, because it can't possibly be your first choice of a target, so giving even more reward to the OL for wiping out an entire party where the heroes have no chance to come back from, feels quite over the line. So no, I wouldn't play with your rule, but I can see that it may be more appealing to other gaming groups who would want some more emphasis on what you would get if you killed a hero.

The second point you presented looks appealing to me as a concept, but it seems invalidated by the fact both sides gain their XP at the end of the quest regardless of winner. Then the winner gets another reward on top of that, which seems fair to me. The quality of that reward may vary depending on the quest, but in general I would think it's quite okay to come out of a quest and still have resource to spend on a skill/card to come back stronger in the next quest. Giving fortune to the heroes seems very strong, even stronger than giving threat to the overlord, so I would be careful with that. I don't think losing heroes should get more gold than what they already looted for balancing reasons, so there's not much left you can give them apart from that rather precious XP they already get, so not sure what you think is wrong there.

I like the bounty system, though it would take some testing to find the right scale- you want the undefeated heroes to be enough of a valuable target to persuade the OL to "share the love," but not such a trophy as to outweigh the quest objectives- that is, since the OL gets 1 threat per quest anyway and another for winning, unless attacking the tougher hero nets a bonus of more than 1 threat or threat equal to the number of squishy heroes in the party,) there's really no reason for him to not just knock out the weaker ones (costing fewer actions) and focus on the win. However, if the bonus gets too large, he may decide he wants to scrap a win for the price of say, 10 threat. Additionally, you risk an OL who forgoes knocking down the 8 health mage for all of Act 1, only to easily do so at the beginning of act 2 for a giant bonus.

I am not such a fan of the consolation prize for losing quests. Unfortunately, since the heroes can't keep fortune tokens between quests, you can't very well just give them one fortune for losing, as that is useless unless the OL spent another during that quest, but a free shop item draw is a huge consolation prize. It is less so in Act 1, since you end up seeing all of those items eventually. However, for Act 2, the lack of shopping steps (and the luck of what the heroes manage to draw) can drastically impact the second act of the campaign. I've used the example before of a campaign I was playing with a party including a knight and a skirmisher- and until the shop step right before the finally, the heroes didn't draw a single act 2 melee weapon . Though we won the campaign, we lost most of Act 2, and an extra shop card during each of those steps would have helped a whole bunch.

Additionally, the consolation prize being related to shopping only further encourages the the heroes to ignore objectives and just to search for gold, which is already too lucrative (no pun intended) of a strategy.

Bounties sound like an interesting idea for a class of overlord cards to me. I could see them working similarly to the infector class in that they have their own set of bounty tokens and the 1xp cards are bounty generators that stay out for the quest. Some quick examples off the top of my head:

Card #1

Place this card in the Overlord's play area. For the remainder of the quest, whenever a hero ends it's turn in the same space it began it in, place 1 bounty token on it's hero sheet. When a hero is knocked down, you may discard any number of bounty tokens from its hero sheet. For every 2 tokens discarded, you may take one search card (face up or face down) in the same hero's play area and shuffle it back into the search deck.

Card #2

Place this card in the overlord's play area. For the remainder of the quest, whenever a hero performs a search or open/close door action, place a bounty token on its hero sheet. When a hero is knocked down, you may discard any number of bounty tokens from its hero sheet. Choose a monster adjacent to the knocked down hero. That monster gains MP equal to the number of tokens discarded.

I haven't put any thought into how balanced those cards would be but those are just a few quick ideas. The theme would be that bounty tokens are only used when a hero gets knocked down. I think it could be neat. Thoughts? Too similar to infector?