I'm curious what the ranking of the expansions (WoD, AoD, TOI) and JITD in terms of dungeon difficulty. Just looking through the books I'd think it would be JITD, TOI, AoD, and then WoD, but we haven't played all of them yet (or even that many. Mostly RTL), so I'd appreciate some input from more experienced players.

Well, for the difficulty of quests within JitD and WoD, these threads are rather useful. Comparing the expansions as wholes is probably not very informative, because quest difficulty can very greatly within a single book.

The reason I want to know the general difficulty of the quest sets is I'm planning on making a progressive campaign somewhat similar to RTL using the quests. There's about 530-ish guaranteed CT throughout all the quests ignoring the starting CT for each quest, so 600 rounded (for chest CT) multiplied by 2 for overlord gain to give around 1200 CT. That's twice the combined CT needed to kick a RTL campaign into final battle, so doubling XP cost of everything (haven't looked at money totals yet, but I'm guessing it is fairly similar) would allow the game to be played as a hybrid style campaign. However, as the quest sets use a progressive story, I'm loath to break them up to get a totally linear difficulty curve.

I would agree with that order, in a very general way. That's not to say that a ToI quest isn't going to be more difficult than a WoD quest, but generally, I would say that WoD has the largest number of quests that the community deems "difficult", but I get the feeling the last quest will be rather anticlimactic.

SamVimes said:

How will you solve the problems of no overland map to

a) put time pressure on the heroes,

b) restrict their training freedoms,

c) give Lts something (important) to do,

d) allow the OL Plot options.

Further, most of the quests are already balanced with (by?) treachery.

There are other issues to be aware of too, but they are much more minor and solvable.

If you force the heroes to finish quests with nothing higher than copper treasures, or if you let them start quests with gold treasures, you've pretty thoroughly broken the quests no matter what order you do them in. Do you have some master plan for handling that?

Also, while there is some story connectedness between quests in a single box, most of them are unrelated to each other, and even most of the ones that are related are written such that you could insert other quests between them as long as you did them in the right order. So jumping back and forth between boxes a bit probably wouldn't be a problem as long as you're moderately careful about it.

Corbon said:

A couple of initial thoughts on those points

a) Haven't thought about this yet, but as there aren't rumors/legendary areas/secret training a number of the objectives the heroes have, and therefore the need of an overlord to put time pressure on them isn't there as much. This does essentially mean that the campaign is a CT grab, with an inevitable Avatar battle at the end.

b) Thinking of allowing one "week's" action between dungeons, and having skill dealt randomly if they are purchased. This does however screw with character building and can lead to some useless heroes, so admittedly a better option is for there to be some predictable manner for the heroes to gain skills. Perhaps drawing a pool of skills available to purchase/train that "week" similar to how treasure cards are already drawn.

c) This is a tricky point I've been thinking of all day. A possible solution is allowing all LT's to be purchased and allow the Overlord to replace a dungeon leader with an LT he's purchased. Definitely need more time to figure this one out, but the earliest this campaign would start is in about 2 months, 3 more likely.

d) This campaign wouldn't be plot driven, just an inevitable Avatar clash at the end. The 1200 CT threshold should be reached before all the standard quests are finished, and the remainder would be pure avatar power-building to lessen the un-epic final battle. This campaign is definitely more a dungeon crawl than RTL.

It is true that currently the quests are balanced towards treachery, but the treasure chests also give a great deal more loot, powering up the heroes. Also, the basic objective of the quests changes from flat-out defeating the heroes and winning the quest to milk as much CT as possible during the level. This may make some quests easier, and others perhaps harder, but I don't see that as much different than drawing a hard/easy dungeon level in the first place.

Antistone said:

Well, I'm not really convinced that the quests would be "broken" due to treasure levels as the monsters are going to be RTL stats (from copper to Diamond as usual, to keep up with the heroes) and with the spawn marker the heroes should avoid being overly swamped. Yes, this will make some quests easier/harder, but the goal of the quests change from "beat the heroes" to "milk as much CT as possible" on this level.

One note: There are a number of quests that end abruptly (such as the collapsing mine one), and for those I think awarding the overlord 4 CT (the general reward for killing the main baddy in a vanilla game) is appropriate for stopping the heroes.

As for the story connectedness, yes, you are right that I can mesh the expansions together if I do it intelligently without disturbing the "flow" of the fairly loose narrative.

It's not terrible to limit hero treasure in that way. My group had messed around with using regular dungeons in place of the 3 dungeon RtL model, the main issue is armor on bosses, and as long as the heroes are aware of it, it is easy enough to deal with (power potions become extremely important when trying to get around an armor 8 boss with copper weapons). They just need to be thinking ahead and keep hitting up the potion shop every opportunity there is. Note also that there is a large difference in the monetary awards available in JitD compared to RtL dungeons. I believe JitD is the worst offender in terms of this discrepancy, but IIRC there are a few quests in each book that hand out a pretty amount of cash.

Yeah, I definitely need to figure out general expected cashflow over the course of the game, compare that to RTL, and adjust prices accordingly.