I don't have Sea of Blood but have read the rulebook, and I am wondering if it should be thought of as a new "standard" rule that the stamina upgrade token's from Secret Training should be considered only +1s and not +2s in RtL. Was this change made in SoB because it was determined to be too powerful?

Fang

My guess is yes, since +6 Fatigue can be rather powerful in the right hands. However, it really depends on how your group plays. If people are min/maxing like this, then +1 instead of +2 is probably good for your group. If your group is doing general, well-rounded upgrades (and our group, we throw in Feats to the secret trainer upgrade pool) then +2 is probably okay.

Either way you look at it, changing +2 to +1 will be a house-rule, so make it fit your group appropriately

-shnar

My group has started a Road to Legend campaign before I got Sea of Blood. i'm considering a split... such as the first fatique upgrade is +2, and subsequent is +1. I don't want 11 fatigue heroes running around my dungeon with movement 5. (31 movement points???)

The Fatigue upgrade tokens in SoB are +1 and not the +2 as in RtL

CaptainFrisk said:

Keep in mind that the fatigue tokens are limited to 24 max. 11 fatigue heroes mean either the other heroes only have 4 each or the heroes are 'wasting' upgrades.

It still isn't good to have an 11 fatigue hero running around mind you (although you will possibly find that gold and diamond monsters can often one-shot that hero).

Corbon said:

Is that defined in the rules somewhere? I would assume that things like conquest / health / threat, stamina wouldn't be bound by the number of teardrops tokens that exist.

It's an unwritten rule in most games that things are limited by the components within the game. And there is precedence in Descent, there is this rule from the base game, pg 6:

"Important: The store’s stock is limited: there may not be
enough of each item for all players to purchase one. If
the hero players cannot come to an agreement on who
gets to purchase a particular item from the shop, then
the first player to the left of the overlord who wants the
item may purchase it."

Training Tokens in the base game are considered purchasable stock items, and you are thus limited to those items. IMHO, that can and should be extended to Secret Training upgrades.

-shnar

CaptainFrisk said:

Actually, the only thing in the Advanced Campaign that you listed that is not limited by tokens is Conquest, because when you earn a CP you don't really need a token, you simply record the increase on the campaign sheet. But you are limited by Health, Stamina, Threat, Training upgrades, etc. Even gold, if you somehow amass that much coin and don't spend it, you don't get anymore...

-shnar

Another example of the limits of components, from the core rule book, page 12:

"• The overlord player may not place more monsters on
the board than there are available figures. For instance,
if all of the Beastmen are on the board, the overlord
player cannot spawn an additional Beastman (although
he could spawn a Master Beastman if any of the red
Beastman figures are still available).

• If the overlord player wishes to place a monster on the
board but is already using all of his available figures, he
may choose to remove a monster figure from the board
to make that figure available for immediate placement..."

So yeah, I'd say that limit would apply to fatigue and wounds as well.

Has anyone noticed that the +2 Fatigue upgrades in RtL and the +1 Fatigue upgrades in SoB are exactly the opposite of what they should be in terms of game balance?

In RtL, too much Fatigue throws the game off balance because there are so many skills that use Fatigue to add attacks: Rapid Fire being the worst of them, but also Knight, Quick Casting, Able Warrior, Leadership, Cleaving, Alertness, Unmovable (doesn't use Fatigue directly but you need lots to be able to battle more often)... Except for 8-health heroes, Fatigue upgrades were almost always better than Life upgrades. There, we would really have needed upgrades of only +1 Fatigue.

In SoB however, the most unbalanced of these Fatigue-for-additional-attacks skills are gone, replaced by skills that use Life as a resource to provide additional or better attacks (or other things like lifegain): the Marks. So in SoB, even if the Fatigue upgrades were still +2, many heroes (all those who have a Mark as a skill or who want to have a Mark as a skill) would take the +4 Life upgrades anyway because Life has become so much more useful! Additionally, the maps have become so wide in SoB that a little more Fatigue provided by a +2 upgrade wouldn't hurt at all anymore, and would even be direly needed for the fights against Lieutenants especially!

So if you want to make both games, RtL and SoB, more balanced... Invert their respective Fatigue upgrades: put the +1 Fatigue upgrades in the RtL box and the +2 Fatigue upgrades in the SoB box!