I'm not sure if anyone has done something like this, I've seen some discussion about experience houserules on the forums but not this exactly. If this has been discussed before then accept my apologies! ( also hope this is the right forum to post this )

We are using a trophy method which I find very effective! There is a certain bubble that after a player passes around 10 points in either Strength or Craft, it is too easy to beat battles, even stacked ones, and the cashing in of trophies at 7 a cone is all too frequent, and quite the drawback for lower stat characters. The gulf becomes too wide, and it's quite clear who is the winner with still an hour to go, with only the hope of some hopeful random event ( I did roll a 2 on a random spell on CoC as the Dwarf with over 12 Str... gone! )

What we do now is every time you go up a level ( cone ) it costs you your total value +1. This includes objects that directly add to Strenght and Craft, such as Solomon's Crown and the Belt of Strength, but not weapons or Followers that add to your combat totals.

This method has two major benefits, that it's easier for low level characters to catch up and slows down high level character significantly. It really starts to kick in around 9 and 10, you have to hack your way through more and more monsters, even though it's easy for you, there has to be a big pile of bodies! It's nice to have the early game go at a nicer pace as well and you really feel some progress quick, even though it's just evening stuff out.

You have to do more counting for sure, but it's quite easy to keep track of after a bit and the trickiest bit is when you are saving up to do 2 levels at once, you have to account for the 2nd level's +1 as well! We also found that you pay closer attention to cashing in your trophies, so you might want to cash them in before you go up a 'tax bracket' and acquire that certain magic object

It gave the game more of a RPG feel, how it's more difficult to level up the higher you go, and like most RPG's it's easier to level up on the easy levels. For instance, I got the Jester almost right away and then pulled an Ekor, which with my Merchant's Str. 2, the Ekor had the edge on me! I ended up beating him and was well on my way to going up my first level. It's still difficult early on, but not for as long, and we found that games go on for 3 hours easy so I doAn't mind taking a bit of the grinding out.

We played with the Merchant vs. the Gladiator and it was quite funny, the Merchant became super strong and the Gladiator had almost no battles throughout the entire game and became quite learned in Craft. The Merchant eventually won with a showdown with the Ice Queen as well, and was the clear underdog ( Gladiator had never lost in the house up until that point ) I even had to do a second attempt at the Ice Queen as I only had a slight edge and not enough tricks up my sleeve, so the game was pretty evenly paced with lots of opportunity for either side to catch up.

If anyone else has done this, or something similar, I'd be curious to hear your results and thoughts. I think this might be too much for introductory players, but it's just right if you've been around the board a few times!

Maybe Dth will by with a comment. He has a system very similar to this. We have used an "experience" based system, since we find that 2D6 combat handles the "untouchable" problem well enough. The only thing I noted different in your approach was that you counted any bonuses from M.O.s, etc against the cost of leveling up. I can understand why, since someone with the Belt have a +2 strength is going to tag some Enemies faster that someone without.

The problem is that those external bonuses change sometimes throughout the game. So what to do if someone doesn't have enough trophies for a level up while wearing the belt... and then suddenly the belt is gone? Is the cost the level up suddenly reduced, even though those trophies were earned while wearing it? Can he simply take the Belt off, and then the cost is less?

Some serious loopholes in there. And the acounting alone could be troublesome (not to me, but to many players, yes).

That's a very good question about the MO and how we're handling it is if you got the level while you had the MO then you keep it, but if you lost it then that's all, you just loose the MO. It will be a setback, but less of one to level up again, I guess you still have some of the lingering effects of the magic on you Also, yes, if you have enough trophies to level up after you lost the belt then that's your consolation prize and there might be less tears but that's only happened once or twice so far.

You do have to count every time you level up, the major drawback, but it really feels balanced and worth it imo. It's something that everyone has to know what they are getting into and if they are not ok then we just do the 7 point system, but so far everyone who tried it has liked it because of the early speed up and the later slow down.

Sounds fair overall... and what's most important is that everyone playing for the night plays under the same rule. I was just curious about how those holes were handle and still think its a sensible rule overall.

When I used to play a lot with my friends we used similar system. Our sessions lasted whole night or even whole weekend and nobody bothered to go for the Crown - we were just rambling around, killing monsters and gathering treasure - Munchkin style .

Because of this our characters were getting ridiculously strong (base strength around 15-20 wasn't uncommon). Apart from modified fight system to eliminate auto-kills we agreed to rise strength by one for trophies that DOUBLE your current base strength. It slowed very strong characters considerably but at the same time it gave a weaker ones easier start. We used base strength to make it easier to count and follow (no need to add all the junk you were carrying). Double rule might seem overly harsh but there are so many other ways to gain strength that in the span of whole evening or night they stack up pretty quickly.

Of course this would not do at all in the standard game when you have two or three hours to get to the crown and win before it's time to say goodnight to your hosts and leave . Weaker characters would catch up to the stronger much too quickly and they supposed to be weaker to balance their other abilities.

wow, these are great ideas!both "double base point score" and "total score + 1" could balance a lot every game! i'm going to play soon, and i'll try the 2of6 combat and one of these mods!

Hello

As JC has pointed out, we have been using the current, unmodified value + 1 method for purchasing new Strength and Craft.

We don't play Talisman very much these days (we've found the expansions have the game more irritating*) but when we do, there are a number of reasons why we use the house rules we do and they are all due to the players...

1. My girlfriend's brother, Alex, would sit and play Talisman for eternity, if we let him. He's more bothered about walking round the board, gaining strength and craft than actually winning the game. He moans a lot if he isn't doing well too.

2. My girlfriend likes to run round and attack other players. She doesn't game too much and gets irritated when other players are mean to one another... She really doesn't have that killer instinct

3. Our friend Dave who likes to mess with other people as much as possible. He also has a tendency to rip the soul out of most games, reducing them to their bare basic mechanics and then seeks the most effective way of winning.

We get the occasional visitor playing with us.

Now, playing with this group causes a lot of problems for me.

Alex is the most conservative player in the world. He used to be a chess champion at school (board one) and so plays every game in that fashion: working out his next move, the next move of his opponents and taking as little risk as possible. Some types of games, he is absolutely brilliant at, others he sucks (during my heyday, I used to be a champion at Heroclix, having seeded 3rd overall in the second UK tournament and winning a number of tournaments and nearly always beat Alex). At Talisman, he will not head for the Crown until he has maxed out (which is why we put a limit on the highest you could raise a statistic, base +10).

Now, most players would spent much of the game in the Outer Region and wouldn't dream about heading to the middle region until they were ready to go for the Crown.

Because of some expansions I made, we put a lot more higher point enemies in the game. We felt that there should be some reward, so we added the graduated experience system above, rewarding players for taking risks to fight harder monsters and also giving characters with lower stats a chance to quickly rise.

That worked and the game became fun again.

*Now, playing with Reaper, Frostmarch and Dungeon, however, we've found that actually finding enemies to fight is troublesome, making the game drag on once more. Now I'm working on some other mechanic for having enemies in a separate deck.

dth said:

We're getting there but for different reasons. There is too little internal "control" for characters, too much external control of others for "players" combined with too many randoms tilted toward automatic boosts. If anyone wins, it isn't often by measurable effort. Too much of the game playing us.

dth said:

Hmm... you lost me here. Either she does run around attacking or she doesn't like it. I'm not sure which. Barb, my wife, doesn't like it when she's stuck with a spell that she can only use to bother someone else; our group's whole view of spells on average is that they are worse not better than they were in 2E. She doesn't mind (as much) facing another adventurer directly, but only does so when its for something she needs. Which is how most of us handle it except a few.

dth said:

Again, I think I'm missing something. If he's tactical and strategic like you later mention, I would think he would be frustrated by Talisman. Messing with others is usually done by spells now, as in small groups with no way to really control movement you rarely encounter each other direcly. I'm at a loss to see how he messes with others except through spells.

dth said:

Then my Barb is like Alex in that. She won't go near the Middle Region until she has one stat at 9 and the other at least 6, and so on... though she did like throwing herself into the dungeon mutliple times... at first.

I think your graduated trophy system solves some of the ridiculous attribute build ups... discounting freebie boosts. To get that 10th token needs a trophy trade of around 12 to 15.

dth said:

Hmmm... yes, I can sort of see that. Even a cursory glance at inventories of expansions (ignoring some misguided analysis that was reported), when and if they have a proportional rise in Enemies, some seem weak. And overall, they don't raise the count of enemies. We find the Dungeon to be rather overpopulated with non-Enemies. During four games with it so far, there was one where it started looking like a freaking city in there.

Let us know if you discover something new to make the game tough again, but that's not all that my crew is finding dissatisfying. And in part, you've answered your own concern. Pull out the expansions you added that have made it problematic to have real challenges and adventures as often as they used to come up. Or take the long road, do an accurate analysis of their balance against the base deck, and stick in additional cards to re-balance or tilt it as desired.

Depending on how often characters (not players) are encountering each other, you might consider the full encounters in some variation. We've found it useful in balancing PvP vs CvC. Players who like to jump on others only when they have the advantage think twice when they have to face space based encounters as well. Other players will take advantage of more opportunity for retribution against when they don't have to skip drawing cards. Those who like to throw ridiculously over potent spells in Talisman's "outside of the environment" approach had better watche their character's back.

Those are great descriptions of your friend's playing styles, you really brought them to life even with some of the disparities that JC mentioned. I'm curious as well A couple of conventions you've employed I really like, such as the max level. I'm going to keep that in mind over the next few sessions and see what might be an appropriate cut off.

When you say 'current, unmodified value +1', could you explain a bit further what all is included in that? Here we use everything that goes towards your entire value except anything that adds to combat only.

@Felis: it's funny how you mention Munchkin, I was playing with a friend the other day who's never played Talisman and about 10 min into the game he exclaimed 'this is just like Munchkin!'

Somewhere on the forum I was reading about how someone had a seperate monster deck. So everytime they pulled a Stranger or Place card, they put a monster on top of it, so it was guarding the area. I'm not sure if this would necessarily increase the amount of encounters you would have though.

What I've done with our deck here is pull a whole bunch of cards out, for better or worse. I took out almost all doubles, except if there was triples of the cards, then I left those in, or if they were special effect monsters. Took out maybe 1/3 of the gold, 80% of the spell doubles, altogether over 70 cards. Now if you run into something you know that it's probably the only one of that card in the deck. We have 2 Adventure decks, plus the Dungeon, and have rarely gone through the first deck and never all the way through the Dungeon. I was wondering how much it would throw the odds balance off but I still manage to run into my fair share of monsters despite everything pulled out. Mostly I wanted to decrease the frequency that I saw the Guide and other usual suspects and see the unusual rare cards a bit more often.

I've used this value +1 method with younger kids as well and they really like it, helps them catch up really quick with the added bonus of practicing their math without really noticing

inkblob said:

...helps them catch up really quick with the added bonus of practicing their math without really noticing

ah, there's a father most definitely! Anything to keep those little brains working... and it works best when they do it for fun!

JCHendee said:

Totally agreed. I am actually at the point where I'm not sure I care about the Highland expansion.

I am seeking to add more decision making to the game. Simple decision making that doesn't add complexity. After all, this is talisman. I've just got bigger fish to fry

JCHendee said:

Ah, I see what I did. "Killer Instinct" insofar as trying to the win the game. Its a phrase my group uses (from our days of the playing the Vampire card game). It was the difference between just being combative for the sake of fighting your opponent's and actively striving to win the game at all costs. So, yes, she likes to fight the other players (especially when she was the pre-errata'd Monk) but seems to only go for the Crown when she remembers that's how you win the game

JCHendee said:

Dave is a weird one. He will play anything to avoid boredom and he does get enjoyment out of Talisman, mostly by (as you point out), playing spell users and casting an endless stream of spells at the other players, for nothing other than amusement. If you play any other game, he will reduce it down to the most basic tactical decisions to win. Nothing wrong with that but it does stomp on the players (like me) who are more interested in a story/entertainment.

Dave's use of the Prophetess/Wizard is the reason we implemented the "Do not replace your spell until the beginning of your next turn" for "Always have a spell" characters. Before that and the "One spell a turn" limit, he would run the Spell deck out until he hit a spell he couldn't cast...which meant everyone else had a frustrating game until the point where he was frustrated and then HE'D start having a frustrating game

JCHendee said:

It works very well for forcing people to move the game onward, seek better challenges and most of all, win the frikkin game!

JCHendee said:

Next time we play (I have no idea when that will be), I will try the alternate Creature Deck idea...

JCHendee said:

Oh, we've played the Player > then Space variant for a while. It does make people think twice but we've found that certain people are more interested in fighting the other player and don't care if they lose the match against the Creature

Best Regards

DTH

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I follow you better now, Dth. The dynamics you mention are pretty common to other groups I've seen. The self-amused spell cycler who gets bored when stuck with an unusable spell. The rumbling basher working the system purely for the win so that others ignore the game itself and have to do the same or be left behind. Etc.

And ya know... there's been very few games I've played or seen that create this atmosphere like Talisman... well, maybe an MTG mutliple battle (more than two combatants in a a game), but that's to be expected there. And of course any form of FPS video game.

You're rulings on Spells seem sound to me. I might suggest them to my own group. Spell cyclers are often more problem than any other personality type in the game: they annoy both the rumbling bashers, the hoarders and guaders, and even those who remember what the game's title implies. One issue I wonder about are characters who draw or fully replentish spells when they land on a certain space. I suppose just rule they grab their spells at the beginning of their next turn.