Hey there.

My gaming group and I are new to FoD and after a couple of playthroughs we´ve been wondering how other people play the item deck.

As we´ve been playing it the hunters can just keep on pressing through the item deck as they go through cities, picking up new items and then discarding old items if they prefer the new ones. However we all (at least partially) agree that this seems like too much freedom with no consequenses for the hunters to be able to do this. With the event deck there is at least the risk of drawing dracula cards and thus a certain equillibrium is maintained but the item deck does not seem to be restricted in this manner.

Any of you have house rule for this? We´ve been talking about stuff like: 1) discard item before drawing a new one 2) for each item you discard in this manner draw 1 event card, discard if hunter give to dracula if not 3) ban people from drawing items if they are full

Any thoughts?

I've never had a chance to play the Hunters but from what I've seen it depends on what they're gearing for. Some people keep a stake in case they run into Dracula and have some armaments to deal w/ minions that are mildly affective against Dracula. Others get dogs, crucifix, etc and work on clearing my trail if they think I've put a vamp down. Others change depending on the situation, sometimes discarding a weapon for fast horse or newspaper if they think it'll help. And keep in mind they have to find Dracula to use their goodies and he has encounters that can deprieve them of their items.

In short, it's balanced.

I've played both sides for a while, and I guess that the mechanism is rather balanced. You get only three items at a time (well four for one of the hunters) and you can't pack all you want. Card effective against count are ineffective against minions, and for example Rifle will not give you much help against Count. And with all that ways how Dracula can destroy hunters items like minions attacking with knife, they can hunter can never feel safe about his inventory =)