I think Willow should be next. She's hot. Of course, I have a thing for red heads...

Ok, showed Buffy to mu usual group of players, gona playtest it in a week or so (was going to playtest her wednesday, but it was my friend's birthday and she got Kingsport, so we tried that instead. Eihort is an awesome AO)

In the meantime, I worked on another investigator. And the next one is.....

So yep, it's Willow. Cause she's hot (I got a thing for red-head too ). But unfortunately she and I plays on the same team.

So, a little thematic explanation of her:

Stam/San: Willow's a spellcaster, so she need Sanity. However, because of her magic, she's quite resistant. So 6/4, boosted by Tara to 7/4

Skills: Willow is not quick nor agile, but she knows how to hide. In combat she's weak, but she's a spellcaster, thus high Will and Lore. As for luck, she's moderately lucky (I don't think much people have high luck in the Buffyverse. Except maybe Jonathan, Spike and Ethan Rayne).

Ability: The name isn't that great, but Willow often refers to her magic as "dark arts" in a tongue-and-cheek tone. For example: "That's a little darker than I like my arts!" As for +2 to combat checks, Willow is near undefeatable when she uses her spells in combat. She can frigging skin someone alive with a gesture! Yes, I'm aware she would cast Dread Curse of Azatoth at -1 spell check for +11 to combat, but only for one turn. Against an AO, she would sooner or later lack the Sanity to cast it.

Possession: The skill is very fitting, I wanted her to have it. It kinda made sense to me. As for 3 spells, yep it's unusual to have 3 of one things, but she IS a witch after all.

Tara: yeah I know I said I'd not use photo. But trust me, I tried to find a good drawing of her. Not that easy. So I photoshopped a photo, and if I find something else, I'll change it. Her ability are simple: Tara is Willow anchor. She was the one who initiated Willow to wicca and that helped her overcome her addiction (before she got killed, of course). So she help Willow stay in control (Sanity) and she is able to help her cast powerful spells (bonus to spell checks). And as a sneak preview, the fail condition of Willow's personnal story will be to lose Tara.

So, waddaya think? I love feedback, they helped a lot on Buffy.

Up next: Update of Buffy's Scythe, Willow personal Story, Xander ( the main three will then be complete)

It seems mostly reasonable... Still, I'm a little worried that the +2 bonus is a bit much... This means a potential +16 shriveling attack :' And even if it's not shrivelling, two withers would allow for a +10 attack with no sanity loss. Perhaps if you gave that ability a sanity cost per round of activation or something. After all, it's not like Willow's spell casting was entirely healthy, was it?

Avi_dreader said:

And maybe give her her own set of madness cards.

Avi_dreader said:

I'd go the exact opposite way. AH spellcasting has never been powerful enough to justify the costs. Giving a +2 bonus to each spell is the absolute least you need to do.

Having a high maximum sanity is simply not enough to make a character a viable spellcaster; nor is just having a lot of spells, nor is having Expert Occultist. Between all these things and the special ability and ally, she might just about work... but to be honest I'm a bit disappointed that she doesn't have a more peculiar and unique special ability!

Avi_dreader said:

Avi_dreader said:

Yeah, I tought about that too. Spends 1 sanity to gains +2 when using a Spell in combat. Would be thematically a better fit, but I was worried it would render the ability too underpowered. But now that I think of it, it would give the player an incentive to NOT lose Tara, even without the personal story.

As for the madness card, I want them to be usable without any expansion, personnal story aside (as you don't need to buy Innsmouth to play them if you just print the one I've given you and use only Buffy charactrs) Maybe I will break my rule as I have access to Dunwhich. Heck, I even tought of having her personnal story fail result being that she gets "Addicted". Because that what she is Addicted to magic.

Collex said:

Wasn't that a Robert Palmer song?

I quite like Willow (and her ability is *not* overpowered; the reverse, if anything).

She's actually quite weak, I'd say. Her ability is useless if she doesn't draw a combat spell, and all it does is compensate for her low fight score if she does. Also, she doesn't start with any money? This seems a little odd- I think the only character in the game who starts with no money is the Nun, and Willow is scarcely destitute.

Also, no money is a big drawback for a spellcaster (bigger than for someone who isn't). With 7 Sanity, she can afford to cast a spell or two, which is nice, but lacking any money, she can't easily get the sanity back, which is a big downer. I actually do think high max. Sanity is an important prereq. for a good spellcaster, but it does need to be combined with some money.

Incidentally, I don't know if you've considered this, but Willow's ability does penetrate magic resistance and immunity, allowing her to usefully weild spells against magic immune monsters.

I think, in addition to giving her some money, I'd:

* make her skill draw random (no real need to give her Exp Occ, what with Tara and her Black Arts ability, and high Lore anyway)

* give her a fixed spell draw (instead of one of her random spells) of Wither, to ensure her ability is actually useful.

Ok, so I reworked her based on all the feedback here. There doesn't seem to be a consensus as to know if the Dark Arts ability is overpowered or underpowered, so I'll playtest it. First, I must say her third spell is in excess to her starting money, thus a kind of special ability.

Second, I took thecorinthian remark to heart and tried to find another, more unique ability, for her. I came up with a defensive ability, as Willow use her magic both to attack and to defend, whatever that mean (i.e: gestalt to help Buffy fight Adam, the spell to give his soul to Angel (twice), shield when she goes dark and fight with Giles).

So, what about this version?

Next on the list: update the Scythe (it's done, I just haven't updated the file yet), a Caleb Herald (Should not have worked on that yet, but the idea just occured to me, so I tried anyway), Xander Harris, using photoshop to add personnal extansion symbol (or can I replace the little red star of SE instead?)

I usually don't like custom special abilities. But I actually like counterspell. It's like Flesh Ward, except it's useful.

Nod. I like her very much now. She's interesting in that she's clearly a monster-basher (both her abilities pertain to combat, and make her pretty effective at it), and yet has a low Fight score.

I thought the ability was rather overpowered before, now that you are essentially making her immune to two or three rounds of combat damage, I think it's kindof insane, especially since you're even starting her off with a one handed +5 to combat zero sanity use attack spell. Consider making counterspell only usable once per turn.

She is now an amazingly good monster-basher, but I certainly wouldn't call her overpowered, mostly because attacking monsters isn't that useful a strategy anyway most of the time. But I wouldn't disagree with a "once-per-turn" on the counterspell; it seems a little unfair to make her virtually immune to combat damage.

Consider two balancing factors:

* She has a low Speed, which is always a big drawback, and makes it harder for her to get where she's needed.

* Despite being geared towards fighting monsters, she has a low Fight score- like I say, her first ability mostly just compensates for that.

Collex said:

Awww, I'm touched. It is a good ability idea, btw. You could even make the 'offensive' ability directly equivalent; she can exhaust "spare" spells to gain +1 to a combat check, or something like that. Not a bad concept for a character: extra spells are always useful even if they;re useless.

thecorinthian said:

No no no no no. That can lead to spell spamming abuses. Lets say she has 5 extra spells. Noooooo. Necronomicon? NOOOOOOOOOO.

Avi_dreader said:

That makes sense

5 extra spell? Never saw that in my game. 2 or 3 spell yes, but 5? My god no.

I could make them both once per turn, sure. Will think about that.

However, Avi_dreader, you're the only one out of four who think this is overpowered. It's not that I doubt your judgment, but I'm wondering: what kind of situations happens often in your game that would make Willow overpowered? Just so I can get an idea of her strenght and weakness better.

My gaming group hasn't seen her yet (they are all away this week), but I hope they'll have other good feedback!

Now working on adding an expansion symbol. Xander Harris is next...

Collex said:

A)You get a hold of a necronomicon, B)you deliberately go spell hunting (dump all your cash into the spell shop (easily done considering that your team of Xander, Buffy, and Willow, start off with good combat items, so there's no reason for them not to spend their money at the spell shop). If I were playing willow as part of a random team, I'd just have all other players toss their spells to her, since it's better having one superfighter than two decent fighters. Then she could kill anything on the board (and trade their corpses for additional resources).

I've had 20-30 surplus spells on characters before. Five is easily gotten.

I'm with avi on this one. Compare Willow with Agnes, who happens to be an very well balanced character. Agnes gets a maximum of +2 to combat checks involving spells. It makes sense to cap Willow's bonus so it is also no more than +1 or +2. Also, investigators usually don't have lots of spells because there is little incentive to acquire them. Willow has a huge incentive to acquire 5+ spells.

Hmm, ok. But going spellhunting isn't really fun, especially when you get more important thing to do (like closing gate). Well, I'm not against caping both to once per turn.

So she once per turn, she can spend a spell to get +2 combat bonus,and another to counter combat damage. So, for example, Wither at +5, it go wrong, you ignore the combat damage, and you can flee.

Alternatively, I could make both ability cost one sanity but you can use them at will.

Which would be better?

PS: AVi, 20-30 surplus spell? On one investigator? I would never have tought that possible. My god. I suppose you can NEVER think of everything.

Collex said:

Heh... You should've seen the scores I was getting during the first Arkham Horror league. I was solo playing an eight player team, I quit after the third round though (because I found it easy and boring as hell). I was just a few points away from perfect scores (i.e. all gates and monsters collected, while terror was at zero). Ah, Daisy... War God of Arkham... ::Laughter:: I also bought up the entire common item deck and the entire unique deck and was recycling certain items (like Old Journal and King in Yellow).

In a normal game (i.e. where I have 3-4 characters that are randomly selected), I can't think of a game where I'd have more than 5-10 surplus spells... Still, I have on multiple occasions had 5-10 surplus spells, and that is *without* trying to dominate the board through flaws in the game design.

The main problem with making them have a sanity cost is that even if Willow had a sanity of seven, it would be too taxing, considering that she doesn't have normal spell casting sanity loss immunity (and whether or not you took that away, that would allow her to add +10 bonuses to rolls, giving incentive to deliberately allow The Dunwich Horror to wake up for an easy way of searching the decks— among other problems, I can think of a few others, although that's one of the worst).

Actually, I think the solution avec and you came up with is fairly elegant: allow her to exhaust a spell once per turn to get +2 to a combat check, and to exhaust a spell once per turn to prevent a round of combat damage. That way her ability wouldn't just be a repeat of Agnes', and she wouldn't be overpowered (she'd still be powerful, but she wouldn't have a built in way of breaking the game).

avec said:

My idea about using spare spells for bonuses was only a quick suggestion... I still don't reckon it would necessarily be too powerful, but there's another reason not to use it: it basically "homogenizes" all the spells... instead of the players caring what spells do, and trying to find ways to use them, they can just hand them all over to Willow and no-one cares what they do any more. So it would probably make the game a bit less flavourful.

HOWEVER I don't like the idea of just adding a line saying "you may only use this ability once per turn" to Willow's text box - that seems a bit clumsy. The idea of her having alternative uses for spare spells is pretty sound, it just needs to be something which you can't usefully do more than once a turn anyway.

I made an 'engineer' character a while ago who had a very simply and fun ability: "Any phase: exhaust a common item in your possession to refresh another common item in your possession." Rather surprisingly, it was playtested in half a dozen games and never seemed overpowered.... you could just give willow an equivalent ability for spells, letting her exhaust the spare spells so that she can try to cast the useful spells a second time. The advantage of that sort of ability is that it doesn't scale up indefinitely because you can't get into enough situations each turn to be able to use it too much. Then again it might still turn out to break the game in some way; you'd have to look through the spell deck quite carefully to make sure there weren't any game-winning combos.

thecorinthian said:

That sounds like a fun ability. Though combat spells usually last for one combat. So if the "recharge" ability was applied to spells, it would mainly be useful in cases where the investigator has more than one difficult combat in a turn. That would usually be cases where there is more than one tough monster on a location. So it's kind of a specialized ability. Of course, it would also make Cloud Memory more powerful.

thecorinthian said:

Heh... Apparently no one thought about how they could use that and the motorcycle... ;'D As for the spells, you'd be allowing multiple uses of Alchemy. No.

avec said:

LOL, it was Addicted to Love. "Might as well face it you're a-dic-tid-to love." He said it weird in the song.

I like Willow a lot. Counterspell is a great idea, and one that hasn't been done before.

As an aside, I playtested my Druid a couple weekends ago, and I can honestly say that spellcasters can be kick @$$ with the right abilities. In fact, I'm thinking of toning her down. I had dread curse of Azathoth, Caedmon (+2 combat), and would pitch a spell. I was rolling around 20 dice in the final battle, which was outrageous. So just a heads up that you don't want to make your characters too powerful, or it's not really as fun. Pounding the AO into the ground in 2 rounds is kind of blah.