Hello

this friday we will start a new rtl campaign to test a 5th player and a couple house rules including invulnerability potion rule(armor +2/+4/+6 on a single attack based on the campaign level) and SoB rule for conquest(+1/-1 rule)

any idea on how to play this 5th hero?

Adding a 5th is *really* tricky and will require some odd playtesting to find the proper balance, because balance in RtL swings a lot (early campaign stages, it favors the Overlord, later campaign stages, it favors the Heroes).

We added a 5th hero ad hoc to our campaign, which was half-way through Copper (we had an extra player show up from out of town, so we just added him in with a random hero draw). We decided to make the following changes:

- Treasure Piles yield 500gps
- Treasure Chests roll 5 dice
- Encounter Loot roll 5 dice

Didn't scale very well. The heroes were tanking everything, and they had really good LOS. However, gold becomes the biggest resource lack in a 4 hero game, so we felt it was important to include that. If you want to keep those rules, I'm thinking you should modify the Overlord, reduce the threat to flip the "eyes" or maybe remove the eyes all together. Maybe the OL can draw an extra card per turn too.

-shnar

shnar said:

what do you think about 13 conquest to flip eyes and 1 card more each turn?

I would lower it to 5 or at the most 10. Even with the ability to spawn though, the OL won't spawn that often due to LOS. Rather, what this does is allow the OL to have more Threat for other cards to give the heroes a challenge.

-shnar

I wonder what would happen in a 5 hero game if changed Gust of Wind into a Power Card? You'd play it, and for the rest of the dungeon the heroes LOS is cut to 5 spaces.

That would be really interesting the more I think about it.

I'd probably increase the distance to 8 or even 10, but it's not a bad idea. At least for spawning. Would the Gust of Wind Power Card affect attacks as well? Might be a bit powerful if that was the case...

-shnar

Big Remy said:

That does sound interesting, though my suspicion is that you'd occasionally discover a dungeon design where it somehow completely screws the heroes due to the conflict of expectations. The Well of Darkness (WoD quest #9) immediately comes to mind, but less contrived issues might exist.

It also nerfs high-range weapons even more compared to high-damage weapons, which doesn't seem desirable.

Which is why if Gust of Wind Power Card only affected LOS for Spawning purposes, I think that'd be an interesting power card...

-shnar

I personally would go with its LOS period - spawning and attacking. I mean 5 heroes in the relatively small RtL dungeons can cover just about everywhere. So it will help spawning, but I'm not sure as much as people think. As for attacks, I have it affect that as well. That's still not an unreasonable distance, again with 5 heroes. Doing 8 or 10 for the range I think would make it very weak as a Power Card (also, you would need to at least double the threat cost for Gust of Wind). I mean Spiritwalker got nerfed in RtL for having 10 range because the mage could basically sit at the start and never move and still be within range of someone on a good number of levels.

If I have time I'll have to just grab a set of five random heroes and try it out.

and how about the fleeing the dungeon option

heroes cannot start a around a glyph or adjiacent to it so how to manage a 5th hero like for fleeing rules?

anyone have some ideas?

Hrm? You can still start on or around a glyph. Just because there's 5 of you doesn't mean you can't use a glyph. You don't have to use it all at the same time. Just so long as everyone is in town, then the players announce they are fleeing.

The setup is a little trickier. The startup glyph is usually in a corner, so there's only 4 spaces to put heroes. We just put the 5th one as close as we can (i.e. 2 spaces away from the glyph).

-shnar

Thanks a lot shnar

we had the same ideas on the starting place