I'm definitely not feeling the rule regarding 2+ creatures of a type (say orc) sharing an action card. Although I'm loving the system I'm seeing a few rough edges where ease and flexibility of play interfere with logic. Does anyone have a house rule they're implementing to alleviate this?

I was thinking that for ease of tracking once there are recharge tokens on the action any of that group can still use the action during the same round but add in their own set of recharge tokens, and the action requires all to be removed before it can be used again. That way you're still using one card, tracking it the same, but everyone gets a shot at using it before it goes dormant.

Another option would be to allow the creatures associated with the action to spend a maneuver to remove a counter from a card recharging only when it has more than the printed maximum. (so if it was a 2 recharge and 2 creatures used it there would be 4 counters, after the first round there would be 3 remaining. One of those two creatures could remove a counter as a maneuver, leaving 2). I haven't completely thought this through yet, but it seems like it could help balance things.

(alternately, you could simply assign each creature its own action cards and track individually).

keltheos said:

I have my custom NPC sheets where I have action cards (created in eon). I simply use different coloured d6 for each NPC. If it's henchmen, then I use the official rules and they share the action. But I very rarely use henchmen as I find the system and idea behind it a bit too weird and abstract for my taste.

Ditto.

Gallows, will you be compiling your house rules at some point? So far from what I've read they seem to parallel what I'd probably wind up doing with some of the rules when we finally get to playing.

Also, do you have your custom sheet online anywhere?

I'd toyed with putting together half sheets that cover the full page of information for the NPCs/creatures in the ADventure tome as they're easier to manage tableside.

I think I'll divide the opponents into as many groups as there are PCs, and track A/C/E for each group. (I don't use henchmen rules, but this is inspired from them.) So 10 Gobboes attacking 4 PCs would have groups of 3, 3, 2 and 2 Gobboes each with their own A/C/E pool.

Then for actions, I'll just use the rules as is, except I'll remove one recharge token on each initiative slot of the Gobboes. Since there are as many groups (thus as many initiative slots) as PCs, the recharging speed of actions will be "scaled" to the PC's group size. Then I'll try to not have the same individual use the same action twice in a row. For that, I'll just use my good old memory. And if I screw up, it won't be that bad.

I think this way, I'm keeping the tracking of things to a mangeable level, and I'm making the critters a little tougher than as per RAW, but no so much as to overwhelm the PCS.

Thoughts ?

keltheos said:

Yeah I'll put my rules online at some point, but they are very much a work in progress still. Because of the dice pool and the somewhat complex way the dice interact it's not as simple to just change minor details. I have stolen two two of my rules on here as well (ranged combat and starting stance pieces.).

My rules for critical damage , assisting in combat , character creation points limit and item breakage are the only rules that are final.

I am still working on my success rate balance rule. I started out by adding challenge dice at higher ranks, but that really turned out to create big dice pools that didn't have the relative effect as players rank up and it rendered active defence cards relatively weaker. Currently I am looking at increasing the potency of the challenge die, so that banes and chaos star cancel sucesses as well as having their regular effect (only on challenge dice... black dice remain the same). This seems to be much more efficient, balanced and keeps the dice pool normalized.

As for my NPC sheet, it's a two part sheed with room for two NPCs. It has a box with room for stats, using the same system as the rule book. It also has a place to track A/C/E. It has no wound tracking as I always use wound cards next to the npc standup to show the wound level of each npc to players (they don't know their wound threshold though). Then there is room to four action cards for each NPC. I create custom NPC cards (or copy the actions from the bestiary for those monsters detailed there). So far for the Thousand Thrones campaign I have created all NPC and 22 NPC action cards I need for the next couple of sessions (we're starting chapter 2 at some point durring next session). But since the EON plugin I use is the old controversial one I don't think it would be fair to upload my TT NPC sheets with the cards on. I don't mind uploading my basic NPC template without the cards though, but it's just a publisher file because I haven't got a way to make a pdf that lets you write and insert images. But I just made it for private use, because I wanted to get the things done quickly and the EON plugin was nice. I have also scanned progress tracker pieces and other stuff that I use for my 3rd ed. notes for the TT campaign. It's just much nicer having visual notes instead of describing every detail and as I get more cards and other things done, it's really convinient to be able to just insert actions on the sheet when I need them for new NPCs