How do we use the Tomb of Ice heros in tomb of ice? They don't have "standard stats" like the one that start with 5 power dice or the other that start with only 2 cards... Do we have something special to do? (With dice restrictions, ability cards,.....)

We ruled that the yeti started with no skill cards and had a maximum of 4. It's not so much the 5 dice as the fear and immunity to frost that unbalance it.

Not sure about the woman with 4 skill cards we didn't consdier her

She has a slight advantage to start because wouldn't she pull 5 skill cards instead of the 4 that the Heroes normally get to choose from? Might allow you to get a better draw and a better starting skill.

Well, if you are going to rule the Karnon the Yeti not getting any Skill cards, you'd have to rule Arvel Worldwalker starting with 2 to be consistent. Which arguably makes her marginally better than average rather than considerably worse than average.

However playing the RAW...

RtL Pg 8 (my emboldening)

Once these changes are made, each hero player draws the skill cards indicated on his hero sheet, plus one extra skill from the skill deck of his choice . Heroes begin the campaign with only one skill, however, so each hero player then chooses one of these skill cards to keep and discards the others back to their appropriate decks. The traits shown on the hero sheets are unchanged in the Advanced Campaign.

Note that the heroes do not actually draw 3+1 skill cards - they draw the number indicated on their sheet +1. So Karnon should draw 2+1 and Arvel 4+1. Then both should keep one.

There really isn't any 'interpreting' necessary as the RAW are not in any way ambiguous (here). If the RAW said something like 'draws 3 skill cards as indicated on his hero sheet, plus one...' then there could be ambiguity. But there isn't.

Which is not to say you can't have house rules. But be aware, particularly for Karnon, that you are shortchanging one player. Having 5 dice is already a penalty in itself (you will never be able to spend fatigue for 'just 1-3 more damage needed to kill the monster') and a 16/1 for 4CT is a risky proposition anyway. The immunity to Fear/Frost is really no more or less than other Heroes get from their special abilities - better than Reach? Better than a 2H weapon in 1H? Better than Talia's Guard with Movement? Better than Teleporting? Better than 2 surges or 2 damage? Better than Stealth? The list could go on and on... Maybe better than some, maybe not better than many. I'd say that it's independent of the Skills/Traits imbalance though and shouldn't be involved in addressing these if you even think they need addressing.

Arvel might need the boost though... a 1/1/0 trait dice spread is really crap if she is ever going to kill anything.

Corbon said:

I think you're missing the point. Having 5 dice is strictly and significantly better than having 3--yes, it may not be as good as adding 2 damage (or whatever) due to limiting your fatigue expenditures and such, but even if the hero with 3 dice spends the maximum on fatigue, the hero who rolled 5 dice in the first place is still up two fatigue with no drawback. Saying that having 5 dice is a penalty is like saying that starting with 2 skills is a penalty because one of your starting skills won't be your first choice out of the ones you drew and therefore will be worse than typical.

Karnon having 5 dice is only balanced in the first place by the fact that he starts with one less skill. Various game indicators reliably show that 2 trait dice is supposed to be roughly equal in value to 1 skill (compare: price, Karnon's stats, skills like Mighty, etc.). So if he starts with the same number of skills as other heroes in RtL, that leads to a fair chance of him being overpowered, at least compared to non-RtL (I'm somewhat concerned that he may be weak in normal play, but that's a separate issue).

And I think you're wrong about his ability--I'm pretty sure its crap. Fear's pretty rare, and when you encounter it, you have enough dice that it's unlikely to make your attack fail, so immunity is probably just a point or two of bonus damage (unless they did something wacky with it in an expansion I don't yet have..?). Frost and Ice each are from a specific expansion and so don't exist at all in content that doesn't come from that expansion, and I'm under the impression that they're fairly rare even in their respective expansions. Plus, Frost and Ice both have a high probability of not affecting you even if you're not immune to them, so there's no guarantee that Karnon's ability will make any difference at all even when you do encounter them.

Also, the Tomb of Ice preview included a developer commentary on Karnon where they specifically pointed out that his ability is crap in an attempt to convince the reader that the 5 power dice didn't make him broken.

Anyway, while the RAW are not ambiguous, and I haven't played RtL, my cursory examination suggests that starting Arvel with 2 skills and Karnon with 0 is probably quite reasonable.

We have already played an entire campaign with Karnon and Sliver in it (both from ToI) as I got my set at Gencon. I have to say that although Karnon was cool (being a Yeti and all) we did NOT find his 5 power dice to be in any way a deal breaker. His inability to add Power Dice after the fact was a handicap in RtL especially in the Copper campaign level. His lesser skill choices (having only 3 instead of 4) was somewhat of a drawback.

Since we played with Feat cards, his skill limitation were even more of a drawback, and we saw the advantage of Arvun Worldwanderer (the character with 4 skills). She is only useful in an RtL game that does use the Feat cards however.

Antistone said:

:-) We are in total agreement about his ability being crap. I was trying to be nice while arguing against a previous poster's comment about how good it was (it seemed to me that the posters group thought the ability was so good it was a significant factor in their decision to start Karnon without any skill). My point there really was that while there are some better (all of the list I gave and plenty more (most others even) besides) and some worse (Lyssa, Tetherys, Aurim in RtL for example) abilities the ability is really independent of the dice/trait argument and should not be a factor.

As far as 5 dice being better than 3 I agree it is but I do think it is in fact much less than 'strict and significant'. Much less. The ability to add dice of whatever colour needed , when needed , is extremely important. Much of the time those extra two dice will not be necessary at all. When they are necessary, ie you are hitting a monster that is not practially an auto-one-shot-kill, the ability to choose one (or more) extra dice of whichever size is necessary to exactly finish of an almost killed monster is much, much better than not having the ability and saving 1-6 fatigue. The number of monsters that get finished off with the extra dice added by fatigue in my campaigns is beyond merely 'significant' and into 'crucial'. Frankly I would consider 4 Black dice to be stronger than 5 Black dice (unless playing Nanok, and even then...).

To be sure, playing the RAW and giving Karnon the skill he is due (albeit from fewer choices*) makes him stronger. However without that he is a weaker than average character IMO (16/1 for 4CT, a porr special and a tank unable to wear the very heavy armours without disadvantage) and I would very rarely choose him. Frankly, he needs the boost (or more accurately, can't afford the penalty).

* I also think this is a stronger disadvantage than it first looks as with his role firmly entrenched as a slightly vulnerable killing machine he is really only interested in skills that give him more attacks or more damage, with skills that give him increased stats (movement or fatigue, or even wounds) also being 'acceptable' but not as good. That means he is looking for Mighty, Knight, Weapons Mastery, Able Warrior, Cleaving or Unmoveable as first choices with Bear Tattoo (he's not a great grapple option but its also 2 wounds), Tiger Tattoo, Ox Tattoo, Tough and Leadership all being acceptable (though I'd be tempted to put Ox Tattoo in the remainder group). The rest may be ok in circumstances but are poor picks most of the time. So we have 6/19 'good' skills, 5/19 'acceptable' skills and 8/19 'poor' skills. Limiting him to 3 picks instead of 4 increases his odds of getting a 'poor' skill selection from 3% to 7.5% and the chance of not getting a 'good' skill go from 22% to 32%. That is, it is 250% more likely he will get a 'poor' skill and 143% more likely he will fail to get a 'good' skill (for him). The second, in particular, is significant - at least to me.

Bear in mind that all of this is RtL slanted analysis as there is no need for this discussion for non-RtL.

And we can agree to disagree...

BTW, I'd also say the Arvel needs the boost of not playing the RAW and starting with an extra skill if she is to be useable. However since ToI has not yet hit this part of the world and we aren't yet playing with feats, I can't be confident of this judgement yet.

Our house rule:

Heroes draw the number of skills listed on their card, plus one. They then discard three skills.

Learning a first skill costs 500 coins and 10 XP.

Wording it this way is future-proofed for heroes with more than four skills as well.

Ah. I have not played RtL yet and it didn't occur to me that one could roll several black dice and then pay multiple fatigue to add a silver/gold onto the end.

So having more dice isn't strictly better than having less, in that case. I stand corrected.

They certainly choose a very weird way of extending the power dice scale...

Actually, Karnon's ability is good for RtL, because especially in copper campaign level, many silver bosses will have hard-to-penetrate armor, plus the Fear rating of some critters can be rather annoying - a silver demon master has... Fear 3? Combined with his armor, Karnon is one of the few heroes effective against such a target.

the hero with aura 4, anybody played with him yet? comments?

btw, rolling 2 to 3 extra black dice (Karnon's 5 opposed to Sir Validir's 2 or Mordrog's 3) greatly increases your chances for surges or power enhancements.

+3 dice, >= 1 surge: 70.4%
+3 dice, >= 1 power: 87.5%

+3 dice, >= 2 surge: 25.9%
+3 dice, >= 1 surge/1 power: 58.3%
+3 dice, >= 2 power: 50%

+3 dice, 3 surge: 3.7%
+3 dice, 2 surge/1 power: 16.7%
+3 dice, 1 surge/2 power: 25%
+3 dice, 3 power: 12.5%

+2 dice, >= 1 surge: 55.6%
+2 dice, >= 1 power: 83.3%

+2 dice, 2 surge: 11.1%
+2 dice, 1 surge/1 power: 33.3%
+2 dice, 2 power: 25%

EDIT: Added +3 dice, with 2+ surge/enhancements.

I honestly don't see why people feel the need to over analyze the characters and the way they fit into the game. They work as is and how they were intended since they were playtested. I don't understand the need to change heroes because they seem "unbalanced" (gah there is that crap word again that has no business being associated with Descent but again it appears). I find it funny how some have this quick knee jerk reaction to house rule EVERYTHING before even playing through a campaign before making changes. The character swork find how they are and they "balance" (wow the better part of the word without the "un") out in the long run.

Some people need to really just play the game and stop getting so overly anal about the mechanics. My group plays it as is and have never had a problem. I guess part of that is that we don't read into the rules. We take them for face value and if there is an issue then we deal with it as needed for the time being but we don't cry unbalanced for the sake of it. The whole balanced and unbalanced thing amuses me greatly and kinda reminds me of the Holy Grail moment about how to find a witch. Ah...gotta love the masses.

To be honesy when we looks at Karnon the reason we thought his abilities were so good was probably influenced by the fact that we had just come out of a campaign where the OL was a demon and so Fear had played a big part.

As far as the dice went i think we just looked at it as his two extra dice was very similar but not quite as good as having the weapon master skill card or mighty. When it comes down to it we thought Karnon does on average more damage throughout and therefore negates the need to roll extra dice using fatigue, and if the situation comes up when you really need to kill a monster and you cant get an aim in i suppose we just thought that spending the three fatgue at the beginning of the turn as averse to waiting and then working it out and rolling extra dice was worth the risk.

Slev said for 4 skill characters:

"Learning a first skill costs 500 coins and 10 XP."

I like this house rule from Slev as well and i think we'll be using it, cheers Slev.

In response to the canadianpittbull i think the reason this debate appeared was because the characters don't seem to fit clearly into the rules of RTL like the others. I'm happy ot stick to the Games Rules 95% of the time, If FFG's had put clear rules as to how to incorporate the new characters into the established set of rules we would have tried that first.

I think that before the no card for Karnon rule the only house rules that i can think of are:

1) The overlord doesn't put everything on in an area until we've seen it much like one of the optional german rules i found out today

2) The fact that we created a diagonal breath template which negated the problem with grapple on a diagonal opponent before they came out with the answer now in the FAQ.

and

3) You can only use Rapid fire up to the maximum value of your fatigue (at full) per turn

So with Karnon and the buy a first skill we'll have a total of five house rules.

CanadianPittbull said:

Hahahahahaha....hehehehe.....ohohohoh....lol

Of course! We bought a game from a professional publisher, so obviously everything is absolutely perfect and works as intended. How silly of us.

hehehehe....

The problem is not, of course, that Karnon is overpowered or that Arvel is underpowered. Rather, their differing skill totals compensate for their extra/fewer trait dice. Giving them each one skill in RtL removes this balancing factor.

Used with the rules as written, Karnon starts with two more trait dice than everone else, Arvel with one fewer.

If we look at the upgrade costs, the Skill Karnon looses is of equivocable cost to his two bonus trait dice. Arvel's bonus skill more than makes up for her loss of trait die.

Some people have suggested only the hero activating a glyph in RtL recieves a bonus Feat. In this case, I'd re-write Arvel's ability to:

"When a glyph has been activated, Arvel Worldwalker may draw one more feat card than she would normally be allowed to. Arvel Worldwaker’s hand size for Feats is increased to six."

This means Arvel is no longer forced to activate every Glyph to have any benefit from her ability.

Slev said:

Arguably, losing/gaining the extra skill options in RtL retains the balancing factor. If you start an RtL campaign with a 'bad' skill you will pay for it...

I agree that losing or gaining the extra skill options is apparently not quite as deep a balancing factor as losing or gaining an actual skill, but given skills are effectively chosen in RtL and random in non-RtL it is quite a lot closer than it looks. Very often one or more non-RtL skills are more-or-less useless to the character being played, in which case gaining or losing them is extremely minor compared to the trait dice bonuses. Also consider that trait dice can (and should) be upgraded in RtL anyway, so trait dice differentials are a lot more of a minor differential later in a campaign.

The only person to chime in on this debate with actual RtL playing experience has indicated that the 5 dice of Karnon was not particularly powerful and indeed, often a disadvantage.

I remain completely unconvinced that any house-rule deviating from the RAW is necessary for Karnon. Even playing RAW he remains a questionable option IMO, with many better heroes available. For Arvel, much depends on how Feats interact for her 'competitiveness' in RtL (its a much bigger deal that her traits are split than that she has only two). At worst she adds to the list of not-worth-taking-if-you-can-possible-avoid characters.

Still, its all about having fun, so house-rule away if it makes you happier...

The skill balance is issue is resolved when you use feats. Thats is the great equalizer on Karnon and Arvel

I let my players pick four characters from the deck each (2 players) and pick two they want to play (total 4 between players) and leave it at that. If they get a great draw then they get a great draw. Karnon might be cool but he does not tend to get picked as there are still guys better than him. I find the randomness sort of balances it out in that they don't tend to get perfectly complimentary party members. This prevents me having to agonize about each guy in the deck.

Still if statistical analysis is your bag then go hard. I love reading it just not doing it

You can create Karnon easily using the hero editor, with 3 melee dice and the master 2 ability. The only thing on top of that he has is immunity to frost(which comes up maybe once a campaign level) and fear(which will only make a significant difference vs upgraded tier 4 monsters, which you should be running from anyways). So I say let him keep his one skill in RtL.