I'm finally about to start our SoB campaign tomorrow! Very excited.

Anyway, my hero players like to be able to choose their heroes freely. Me, not so much, because I know some of them like overpowered combos. I plan to only introduce the Siren very late in the campaign as well, playing the whole thing more gamemaster-like than overlord-trying-to-win style - I want to give my players a good time, a pleasant experience and a good challenge, no more no less. I plan to draw both the avatar and the plot, to avoid unconsciously choosing anything overpowered there myself.

So what I thought I'd do for hero choice: I'd give them four stacks of heroes, maybe 5-6 heroes per stack, making 20-24 out of the 39 heroes available, counting all heroes from all expansions, but no promo ones except for Nara the Fang. Karnon and Arvel will be house ruled to get 0 and 2 starting skills respectively, to balance them. I'm also thinking about restricting the range of Runemaster Thorn's teleport, for islands.

Out of each stack, a player would be able to choose one hero. If a hero is chosen from a stack, another hero from the same stack can't be used - but the players can decide among themselves who gets which stack, and each hero player can then decide which hero he gets from his stack.

Like this, they'd have a large selection of heroes to choose from, but couldn't just take all of the best heroes and greatest comboes at once.

What do you think, is this a reasonable way to give them a good selection of heroes?

So instead of "draw 3, choose 1" like the rules suggest, it's "draw 5-6, choose one"? With the addition that heroes can trade stacks with each other, which doesn't affect anything balance-wise.

The point of the draw-3-choose-1 is to give the hero players a little bit of "cool, someone I *want* to play", especially over such a long game, without letting the hero players get the best of the best heroes. So you should definitely keep some random element.

Our group does this:

- Hero players may swap *groups* of heroes (i.e. the whole selection of 3) with other players (one of our guys likes playing the magic hero, but if he draws 3 melee and another drew a good mage, the two players can swap their whole set of heroes)

- As a group, all heroes can be discarded, reshuffled back into the hero deck, and everyone draws a new set of 3 heroes to choose from (basically the campaign was "aborted" before it began and a new one immediately started).

I like Antistone's idea too, just add a few more heroes to the group a hero can choose from. This still keeps a random element but gives a little larger of a selection to choose from.

-shnar

Antistone said:

Kinda, yeah. I don't mind the heroes winning, so giving them some advantage over the RAW is OK to me. I do wonder whether it's too big an advantage of course, but they (well, a group of nearly the same players) complained back when they had free hero choice in RtL already, so I guess I just know more about the game than they do.

shnar said:

Hm, that sounds like a good idea as well. I really want to give them quite a bit of choice, but not so much that they can choose whatever they want.

Shnar, can the OL "give up" right after hero selection as well, forcing a re-draw if the hero group seems overpowered? (multiple promos, etc.)

Why would he? The OL's draw isn't random like the Heroes'. If he feels it's an extra tough group, he can go with Sorcerer King and pick a plot that best suits, etc. The OL's game is pretty much the same regardless of the draws, where-as the heroes can feel like they got "stuck" with some crappy character that they really don't want to play, and have to stick with it for 50+ hours? That kind of setup is what makes players not come back to game-night...

-shnar

haslo said:

First, I'd strongly advise you not to houserule Karnon or Arvel.
In Karnon's case he is already a weak hero. 5 dice is actually worse than 4 dice (the amount of times the 5th dice makes any difference is low, you can roll the 5th dice with fatigue anyway if you need it and if you are adding with fatigue then it can be silver or gold if you need it as well whihc is strictly better) his CT value is on the high side (16/1 for 4 is at the weak end of the scale, compare with Steelhorns, Validor and Kirga) and his special ability is fairly weak (compare with Reach, whose hero has identical stats). Just losing one of his optional skill choices can be painful too - not always, but, for example, 1/4 draws he effectively has to discard his best skill choice. He has a significantly higher chance of getting a weak skill. He also starts with one less feat, although that's minor.
In Arvel's case she really loses just 1 dice which she would never use anyway if she was a 1/1/1 - such a minor loss! ...that is easily recovered through the campaign. Getting twice as many feats is massive . Feats used well can be the most significant factor in CT scoring - they kill Dark Charms and other traps, they can give extra attacks at just the wrong times to kill monsters for the OL, they can get your party past tricky situations with extra speed and/or Fly, they can give heroes big armour boosts or big attack boosts, they rock. Finally, the extra skill choice is not as minor as it seems.

Anyway, its still up to you. My experience , as opposed to analysis, is that Karnon played RAW (ie one starting skill) was the weakest hero in my party and very quickly became a 'support' character (Leadership was his skill, in a RtL campaign).

As for taking picks, thats up to you. The rules give them each a pick out of 3, which in not unreasonable (and actually the houserule we came up with for vanilla descent before RtL came out). We do opperate with a mulligan call - if the party choices (12, 4x3) do not include any heroes with at least 2 dice, in each of the trait types, then they can redraw.

Oh, and BTW, you just don't get much in the way of combos in SoB. First, starting with only one skill reduces your combos to almost none anyway and second, there are fewer combo's due to the skill changes.

Best combo's I can think of:
Koll's Mark/Saj's Mark/Prodigy for killer mages, add Keen Sight or Precision for effect
Keen sight/Dead eye/Eagle Eye etc for Shooters, again adding Precision for effect
Weapon Mastery (surges)/Reach weapons (efficient surge use)/Cleaving/Vampiric Blood, add Runner for effect

Hm, good points about Karnon and Arvel, guess the house rules don't need to be introduced for them then. How do you feel about limiting Thorn's teleport to, say, 15 spaces? That's still a lot, and should perfectly cover all the dungeon teleporting, but limit his movement on islands a slight bit.

Do NOT limit me. What are you thinking...?

Runemaster Thorn

I would not limit Runemaster Thorn's ability either, but then again I'm someone who does not like to house-rule things. Plus the heroes need all the help they can get on Islands and when facing the Siren or some other LT, if they are lucky enough to draw Runemaster Thorn, they'd be wise to take him and use him as much as they can. He was in the campaign I OLed, and even though he was annoying and certainly a pretty powerful hero, he wasn't game-breaking in my opinion, and the heroes still lost the campaign pretty handily.