Its really come to my attention as of late, lots of games are "longer than reguarly". For this reason they should do something about adding higher strength and craft creatures. If you are like us, we remove talismans from the adventure and dungeon deck so that one must earn them via warlock quest or treasure deck. Granted this is totally optional but many players I have encountered preffer it this way. Sure with the dungeon expansion which is amazing, you no longer need a talisman to win. But other than player made expansions they should do something "offical" to suppliment this style of play. as sometimes 8-10 power in an encouter is an automatic win. Lots of times even if you dont remove the talismans from the decks you got a 25ish points character (strenght + craft) is hunting for a talisman and automatically wins most encounters with out a roll. Any thoughts?

I'm not sure of what you're getting at. You claim games are longer the regular, but with removing Talisman's from random draw is part of why (though I would prefer it that way).

As to automatic wins, that's the way the game is built. The higher one builds a character's two qualitative attributes (Strength and Craft), the more quickly the game proceeds when a roll for Battle, Pyschic Combat, or skill test is automatic and pointless. But without a Talisman available for free draw, characters have to linger and wander until they can hit the Warlock space on a purely random roll. Two suggestions:

1. For the Warlock space, allow any character to stop short there automatically if a roll is enough or more than needed to reach it. But if they do so, they must take a quest and cannot change their mind after the fact.
2. If you don't care about long games, switch to using 2D6 for Battle and Pyschic Combat to make it harder for characters to become untouchable with high Strength or Craft.

• A natural 2 always loses; a natural 12 always wins.
• On a tie of 2s, both side lose; between adventurers they both lose a life and can't choose to take Gold or Objects. In the case of an Enemy, it dies without being taken as a trophy.
• On a tie of 12s, both sides win; between adventurers they both choose a Life, Gold, or Object from the other (makes for some interesting exchanges and the one who attacked always chooses first.) In the case of an Enemy, the adventurer loses a Life and takes the trophy).

The only thing higher numbered Enemies does is create an even greater build up of Strength and Craft to the point of a more exaggerated untouchable state is created.

Sorry but I don't really agree with JCHendee's last comment on more higher numbered enemies creating more exaggerated characters.

Based on the amount of games I played with custom more powerful ememies cards, I can tell you that a character can die quite fast even in the middle of a game if he gets too confident. The result that was visible is that players don't wait too long before going for the crown of command.

The "untouchable state" take much longer to get to with the fact that you may still have to roll a dice even if you have 12 strengh or craft.

But this is my point of vue, experience and it is, in the end, only a question of how you like to play

Cheers

Hi,

I play in a group of 4 to 6 and our games are about 2 to 3 hours long. This is how we play.

1. We do not use the Strengh/Craft/Health/Fate markers to track. We use colored 12d's. Red(Strength), Blue(Craft), Green(Health) and Black(Fate). Rule we use is once character has 12 he cannot gain any more of that atribute. He can only increase it above 12 via objects and followers.

2. We use experience points instead of trophies. Rule we use is 7 experience points to gain attribute and all battles gain experience, so fighting a farmer str 3 in the tavren and winning gains us 3 experience points. We track experience using a 12d(Yellow or White) on character card.

3. We deal 1 character at random at the begining of game, if character dies you are only aloud 1 new character draw.

4. We call this rule "Tough Bar and Grill or Don't Play if you can't pay the Piper", any time a character is instructed to lose one gold and they do not have it they must lose a life instead.

5. When rolling a one for movement instead of moving the reaper by rolling a d6 we telaport him to any space on any board, including the crown of command, he is not allowed to teleport to the same space he is on.

6. Last rule we use is you must encounter the spaces you end your movement on. This means you must take a quest at warlocks gave and you must encounter the city, village, graveyard or chaple.

I hope i have givven you some ideas how you can make your games go quicker and maybe more fun.

I find the idea of using 2D6 for combat to be good for a couple reasons. Even strong characters still have a chace at losing. There comes a point where a character is so strong that rolls aren't needed, and he progresses much faster than people that are still rolling. By having the two dice, you have more variance in what can be rolled.

I also like the auto-fail with natural 1 and auto-success on natural 12 because it introduces a little bit of randomness to the rolls that keeps them from being pointless.