I don't know why I am doing this, but those thoughts have been floating around my head for quite awhile, and I think it is a good time that I gave them some release. Please note that I am not doing it out of any kind of malign purpose, I have invested a lot of my time, money, and thoughts into this game across the many years, and despite that I've moved on to Arkhame LCG, and despite all the flaws of the LotR LCG, I still love it and wish it best. That being said, I want to list for discussion some things I think were handled badly with this game's design, starting with...

1. One Active Location

The concept of only having one active location at a time regardless of the number of players is atrocious and leads to one of the game's biggest gameplay problems - location pollution in the staging area. Like a snowball, it keeps growing and there is little to be done about it, unless players have specifically prepared for it. Yes, there are ways to deal with this (Tracker), but when game forces players into a specific play pattern otherwise they're not gonna win - it's not a good design. Game should give options to play it, not eliminate them. Each player should have their own active location, and each location that has on travel or while active effects should affect only the player who has that location as active one.

2. Doomed

This is very similar to the next point, but since it is also printed on player cards, I made it a separate one. Doomed shouldn't threat all the players by default , period. I will go deeper into the problem with this in my next point, but while addressing player doomed effects, I will say that if a card taxes every player in the game with threat, its effect should scale for every player, otherwise the net cost increases with each additional player, while gains from playing it remain static. When every player pays 2 threat for 2 cards because of Deep Knowledge - it makes sense; when each players pays 1 threat for 1 resource discount that Grima gives only to his owner - it doesn't. And there is nothing to be done about it, because Doomed is a badly designed keyword, and only ways to go around it would be to either drop the keyword entirely and increase threat by text/invent a new similar but different keyword, or use very elaborate card effects that prevent other players from paying unnecessary threat. Doom should've been designed to only affect the player who draws the encounter card/plays the player card with it, and in rare cases when Doom should actually affect each player, it could've been resolved by having a text like "Each player triggers Doom 2", or simply having a keyword modifier "Doom All 2".

3. Encounter Card Design

Sharing the main sentiment with the previous point, this point is simple: there are just too many encounter cards that affect the entire party and not just the player who drew them. I even checked recent quests, and this problem haven't gone anywhere, it became worse if anything. For example, there is a treachery that makes each player either discard their hand or assign damage equal to the cards in hand among their characters. And thats just one card. It's a huge hit to everyone's health/hand in a multplayer game, and then each other player has to draw a card as well, which might turn out to be similar or the same card, hitting the entire party again. And they wonder why Test of Will so powerful. Because your treacheries are out of hand. Your cards are out of hand. The encounter deck already scales with each additional player by having each player draw an encounter card during the quest phase, you don't need to scale so many blasted inidivual encounter effects as well, making each encounter card draw grow stronger with the number of players. Arkhame Horror LCG took a very good note of this.

4. Enemy Design

Most enemies are too bulky and too powerful to be fun to play against. Seriously, why even have such things as defense and health for allies and most heroes, if they all are gonna die from just 1 hit from an average enemy in this game? You need a dedicated defender akin to Beregond to even stand a chance of surviving a single attack, most expensive (more than 1 turn worth of resources) allies can easily die from 1 attack, and when they don't from raw stats - shadow effects are there to make sure they do. Don't get me wrong, shadow effects is an awesome game mechanic, I'm not here to knock on it (I have absolutely nothing bad to say about it), but with enemies already so powerful right off the bat and most player entities being so helpless to survive even a single attack... it's just an overkill. And then there is defense. If you somehow managed to keep enough characters ready to the point when you are able to retaliate, most of the enemies have insanely high defense to the point a single attack dedicated character is not going to scratch them, so you can't even go through the long route of gradually killing an enemy across multiple turns most of the time, you must muster enough attack to take their gargantuan defense+health pools in one swing or you're stuck with them. Did I mention you need to dispatch characters to quest (during which enemies also hinder you via their threat) and defend before you get to this point?

5. Bad Starting Conditions

Oh boy, how many games are technically lost due to bad opening encounter draws. And if opening encounter draws weren't bad enough, you only start out wth 3 resources, with which you can't buy jackshit, but with which you are somehow expected to efficianly quest, attack and defend right off the bat. Players should either have more starting resources, or there shouldn't be so much encounter cards ahead of the first quest phase, unless absolutely necessary. Depending on a mild starting encounter draw to have at least the chance to play the game is not a very good design.

6. Insane difficulty on normal

For a game that prints so much bad/mediocre but thematic cards, this game sure does kick you in the balls a lot for trying to play with them. Balancing the quests around the top, most overpowered player cards sure makes it not very fun to play for people who are not trying to minmax. Sure, there are some mildly difficult quests, but they are in minority (at least the ones I am acquainted with, do rememeber that I do not pose as some omnipotent being, this is all my subjective opinion), and you shouldn't be gated out of the larger quest mass just because you're not a min-maxing meta abuser type . And then there is nightmare. It feels like difficulty-wise most of the quest in their current state should've been nightmare.

It's true that having one active location, doomed, and each player treacheries scale against larger number of players. Meanwhile, fixed starting setups, progress needed on locations and quests, and combat scale against smaller number of players. Across the entirety of all quests, I'd guess that specialized fellowships are more effective than solo one-deck play, though I'm not sure that'd be true of pickup or non-coordinated multiplayer. Certainly "fixing" design points that exclusively scale against higher player counts would heavily tilt the difficulty in favor of higher player count.

Enemies have gotten heftier over the course of the game, but defensive options have also multiplyied over the course of the game. I agree that on most allies points in defense are wasted, even 3/3 defenders need attachments to be reliable defenders. But compared to the core set where chumping was pretty much required in most decks, there's a lot more tools to use. Attack is also cheaper to field than it was when the game started (due to its overpriced allies).

Starting with random encounter draws has, I think, decreased over the course of the game:

core+Mirkwood: 5/9 quests

KD/Dwarrowdelf: 7/9 quests

Hobbit saga: 4/6 quests

HoN/AtS: 2/9 quests

VoI/Ringmaker: 1/9 quests

LR/Angmar: 2/9 quests

GH/Dreamchaser: 1/9 quests

SoH/Haradrim: 1/9 quests

LOTR saga: 5/20 (counting PoD quests)

WoR/EM: 1/9 quests

It's become more of a rarity, though IMO the nastiness of the reveals has also become more even as the game progressed. You could argue giving the chance of an easy reveal in earlier cycles is better than starting you with a known brutal setup. (Note -- the above are straight reveal quests -- some quests have variable add-to-staging of a particular type which can introduce significant randomness, while others have choose-your-own elements.)

The designers *did* address the difficulty of the normal startup by adding "easy mode". In easy mode, or even just using the extra resources while leaving all cards in the deck, I think a "large quest mass" is very beatable by an experienced player with a thematic deck.

The *bad* thematic cards are heavily concentrated in the early cycles. In the current and previous cycle, there've also been a lot of cards which make old bad cards better.

I am inclined to agree about Doomed player cards, though the recent Saruman hero may breathe life into some of them.

As to the general complaint of some game features scaling up better or worse with the number of players, I actually enjoy that aspect of the game. I am quite lucky in that I have two different groups I am currently enjoying the game with, and I also enjoy the game 1-Handed solo. So I get to play the game 1-Decked, 3-Decked, and 4-Decked, and I find that because of the non-linear way in which some elements scale (or fail to scale) with the number of players, it can make quests feel very different and distinctive depending on the number of players. For instance, tackling Conflict at the Carrock solo means that there are 4 unique trolls for the player to deal with (versus in 4-Player where there's only one troll for each player), but at the same time in single-handed you may never even reveal a Sacked! card during staging. When you stage 3 or 4 cards every round, you're very likely to see most of the encounter deck at least once and often twice. This means that aspects of some quests are easier with fewer players while other aspects might be easier with more players.


Personally, I tend to view this not-perfect-scaling as a feature rather than a bug because it only adds to the replayability of quests.

Oh it's a feature, alright. But a feaature doesn't necessarily means it's good.

Good and bad are subjective terms that probably shouldn't be applied to game design. Some players may value consistency of experience as player count scales, others may value change of experience as player count scales -- LOTR definitely changes with player count, but whether that is "good" or "bad" is purely subjective and player-dependent.

The same is true of Reveal N setups. It adds variability to setup, but whether that's a good thing or not is purely a matter of preference.

Of the OP points, location is a matter of game design. The game is designed to have only one location, and that *by design* causes location lock to be more likely as player count increases. Doomed keyword *by design* affects all players and again scales unevenly with player count. However, the remaining points are not *game* design, but scenario design. The game system does not require treacheries to affect all players (many don't), the game system does not require difficult enemies (some aren't), and the game system does not require brutal setup to scenarios (some aren't). A particular player may desire that quests be more difficult on average, or easier on average, or more consistent difficulty, but there's *nothing* about the game design requires any particular difficulty level -- and the existence of both "easy mode" and nightmare quests shows the designers attempting to provide a wide difficulty range for the same quests.

The critcism of bad thematic cards is not related to game design at all, merely card design. Nothing in the game design requires thematic cards to be bad. If anything, narrowing the scope where a card can be played allows it to be more powerful without converting it into a staple.

In terms of game design, I see this as a puzzle game. Certain quests require different strategies with different amounts of players, and in my opinion, that just adds to the fun!

1 hour ago, dalestephenson said:

Good and bad are subjective terms that probably shouldn't be applied to game design. Some players may value consistency of experience as player count scales, others may value change of experience as player count scales -- LOTR definitely changes with player count, but whether that is "good" or "bad" is purely subjective and player-dependent.

The same is true of Reveal N setups. It adds variability to setup, but whether that's a good thing or not is purely a matter of preference.

Of the OP points, location is a matter of game design. The game is designed to have only one location, and that *by design* causes location lock to be more likely as player count increases. Doomed keyword *by design* affects all players and again scales unevenly with player count. However, the remaining points are not *game* design, but scenario design. The game system does not require treacheries to affect all players (many don't), the game system does not require difficult enemies (some aren't), and the game system does not require brutal setup to scenarios (some aren't). A particular player may desire that quests be more difficult on average, or easier on average, or more consistent difficulty, but there's *nothing* about the game design requires any particular difficulty level -- and the existence of both "easy mode" and nightmare quests shows the designers attempting to provide a wide difficulty range for the same quests.

The critcism of bad thematic cards is not related to game design at all, merely card design. Nothing in the game design requires thematic cards to be bad. If anything, narrowing the scope where a card can be played allows it to be more powerful without converting it into a staple.

It is most definitely should, otherwise every game on earth would succeed because there is no bad design. There are bad designs. Some of them are subjective to player preference, some of them are more or less objective. Seeing how Arkham Horor LCG moved away from half of the encounter deck affecting each player, I think they understood that mathematical progression of encounter effects is not a healthy design and should be used very sparingly, if at all.

Reveal N setup is OK in vacuum, it's not OK in situations it leaves you within the basic game of LotR LCG. And I wasn't cracking just at random setups, there are plenty of fixed setups that demand immediate answers than you can't give most of the time, and then you get also swamped during questing.

My point was never that it wasn't *by design*, my point was that *this kind of design is bad, and causes bad game situations*. Scenario design is a part of the game design. I probably made it unclear when I was talking about cards that affect all players, but I didn't mean just treacheries. There are plenty of enemies and locations that screw over everyone.

Once again, card design is a department of game design. Nothing requires, but there many unplayably bad nontheless. There is often a problem that they are worthless outside of their narrow scope, which is fine, but they are not even good within their narrow scope, which is not.

1 hour ago, Felswrath said:

In terms of game design, I see this as a puzzle game. Certain quests require different strategies with different amounts of players, and in my opinion, that just adds to the fun!

I'm glad it works out for you (not a sarcasm). The way I see it, though, being shoehorned into a particular deck/player number subtracts from fun, not adds to it.

I agree on some aspect of your thinking but disagree on the vast majority of what cause them. Have you been playing in other LCG cooperative games? Other cooperative games? I do have, and try to think about what difference exist and let to the conclusion that our problem are:

1/ No REAL difficulty levels. I mean easy and normal modes aren't that different, nightmare is on a different package that need to be buy, is half release almost only in english. Such games with many way to be played should have many way to change the difficulty of the game. So very different players (such me who find most nightmare way too easy, and you who find most normal too hard) enjoy most part of the game.

2/ The need of a real clock pressure. Something that push you to go further in the scenario rather than just using your action to get to an ideal situation. It was supposed to be the threat but quite early we realize that we can bring down the threat quite efficiency, at the point that I usually end up a game at a lower threat that I begun...

Time counters, mount doom mechanic, race scenario are some exemples of scenario that make this working way better, but it should be on the core of the game

3/ The game should not be about building a board always better. Allies are just too strong. They stay at every turn, are adaptable about questing or fighting or even sacrificing against enemies attack. Best decks often are the ones who are able to play many allies each turn. Having allies that have a once per game cost and then produce a value each turn is not viable. It will obiously lead to a situation where you need to stand up to the point where you have no difficulty at all to win.
How to solve it? Not being allowed to have more than X allies, have allies that require to be payed each turn (new wilyador, dwarven sellsword), allies that dies from themselves after some turns or use.
Of course for some balance attachment need to be watched too. Especially readying effects, who have to get the same restriction as allies.

With those element fixed we can fix the rest of the game accordingly but they are the key problem to me.

14 minutes ago, John Constantine said:

It is most definitely should, otherwise every game on earth would succeed because there is no bad design. There are bad designs. Some of them are subjective to player preference, some of them are more or less objective. Seeing how Arkham Horor LCG moved away from half of the encounter deck affecting each player, I think they understood that mathematical progression of encounter effects is not a healthy design and should be used very sparingly, if at all.

Reveal N setup is OK in vacuum, it's not OK in situations it leaves you within the basic game of LotR LCG. And I wasn't cracking just at random setups, there are plenty of fixed setups that demand immediate answers than you can't give most of the time, and then you get also swamped during questing.

My point was never that it wasn't *by design*, my point was that *this kind of design is bad, and causes bad game situations*. Scenario design is a part of the game design. I probably made it unclear when I was talking about cards that affect all players, but I didn't mean just treacheries. There are plenty of enemies and locations that screw over everyone.

Once again, card design is a department of game design. Nothing requires, but there many unplayably bad nontheless. There is often a problem that they are worthless outside of their narrow scope, which is fine, but they are not even good within their narrow scope, which is not.

Any game that is loved by a particular set of people is not, objectively speaking, a bad game. Not all games rise to that threshold. It's also the case that a game design could fail to achieve what its designer *hoped* it would do. Candyland is not badly designed if your goal is to let small children have a decision-free, luck-based competition requiring no reading skills. Candyland *is* badly designed if you are trying to attract adult gamers wanting meaningful decisions.

That doesn't mean that "bad" and "good" should necessarily be avoided, just because it's subjective. If I say that Escape from Dol Goldur is a bad one-deck quest or that Sleeping Sentry is a bad card, I'm giving my subjective view -- and I suspect it's the view of a majority of players. But we both know that there's some masochists out there who want to play the Kobayashi Maru and enjoy the challenge of knocking off EfDG solo. They probably played Passage Through Mirkwood with the Tactics starter deck until they won, too. *I* don't enjoy that, but that doesn't mean it was a design failure. I suspect EfDG was specifically designed to encourage two-deck play, and the tactics core cards were explicitly designed not to be an all-around sphere. You can't say the design failed unless you know what the design goals *were*, and if you don't like the results it doesn't mean the design failed its intended purpose -- it's quite possible you just don't like what it was actually designed to do.

We all agree that the possibility of location lock asymetrically affects the game according to player count, but it's only a design failure if it was never intended to do that! I'm not convinced that is the case. The fact that a later LCG (Arkham) has more uniform scaling in player count does not mean that LOTR's approach was a mistake, it only means Arkham is different. Champions is different than Arkham, this doesn't mean that all the changes between Arkham and Champions were design failures by Arkham. I don't see new LCGs as an attempt to attract the existing LCG players with something better. I think they are intended to tempt both the existing audience and the non-LCG players with something *different*. The itch scratched by the three cooperative LCG is not the same and I know of no designer statements that it was *meant* to be the same.

I don't think it's useful to lump scenario design and card design under game design. The game design itself is what allows the possibilities, if something is disliked with that it will affect *all* scenarios and *all* cards. That's not true with scenario design. I don't like the one-key-card-that-wrecks-everything structure of Road to Rivendell, but Sleeping Sentry affects *only* Road to Rivendell. It's even less true of player cards. The End Comes may be a waste of cardstock, but that affects that card only. And even weak cards can be rehabilitated -- my favorite new cards are cards that make old cards worth playing.

Scenario design, IMO, has steadily improved over the years, as has card design. The underlying ruleset has remained essentially unchanged over that period of time, and continues to constrain the possibilities of scenario and card design. I think the core would be "better" if a number of the player cards in it were better, and if Escape From Dol Goldur scaled more evenly with player count, but in the context of the full card/scenario pool I don't think it makes much difference.

I also think that even with location lock, doomed, and "each player" effects, it's not been shown the game actually is more difficult on average for more players. "Fixing" only the effects that work against more players, while leaving intact the things that favor more players, would not provide evenly scaled difficulty according to number of players.

It's true that some scenarios with fixed setups can leave you with a demanding first round situation. And some don't. This has nothing to do with the rule system, it's just variety in quests themselves. What sort of quest you prefer varies a lot according to player, but I think it's a lot easier practically speaking to make the quest easier with additional resources (or cards; I frankly prefer Seastan's Grace of the Valar variant to easy or semi-easy mode) than it is to make a quest more difficult, which argues for a default bias towards more difficult quests for the widest appeal.

1 hour ago, Rouxxor said:

I agree on some aspect of your thinking but disagree on the vast majority of what cause them. Have you been playing in other LCG cooperative games? Other cooperative games? I do have, and try to think about what difference exist and let to the conclusion that our problem are:

1/ No REAL difficulty levels. I mean easy and normal modes aren't that different, nightmare is on a different package that need to be buy, is half release almost only in english. Such games with many way to be played should have many way to change the difficulty of the game. So very different players (such me who find most nightmare way too easy, and you who find most normal too hard) enjoy most part of the game.

2/ The need of a real clock pressure. Something that push you to go further in the scenario rather than just using your action to get to an ideal situation. It was supposed to be the threat but quite early we realize that we can bring down the threat quite efficiency, at the point that I usually end up a game at a lower threat that I begun...

Time counters, mount doom mechanic, race scenario are some exemples of scenario that make this working way better, but it should be on the core of the game

3/ The game should not be about building a board always better. Allies are just too strong. They stay at every turn, are adaptable about questing or fighting or even sacrificing against enemies attack. Best decks often are the ones who are able to play many allies each turn. Having allies that have a once per game cost and then produce a value each turn is not viable. It will obiously lead to a situation where you need to stand up to the point where you have no difficulty at all to win.
How to solve it? Not being allowed to have more than X allies, have allies that require to be payed each turn (new wilyador, dwarven sellsword), allies that dies from themselves after some turns or use.
Of course for some balance attachment need to be watched too. Especially readying effects, who have to get the same restriction as allies.

With those element fixed we can fix the rest of the game accordingly but they are the key problem to me.

As I've mentioned multiple times, I've been playing a lot of Arkham Horror LCG. In general, I've been playing many different co-operative boardgames over many years.

1. It's not just that I find the game too difficult in vacuum, it's more that I find that game expects me to play only the top tier stuff if I want a shot at winning, which is an aspect I don't enjoy.

2. Arkham Horror LCG introduced separate quests deck for bad guys and good guys, which is a very good way to handle this.

3. My point is that the game shouldn't be about something in particular. It should let the player approach and beat it with many different combinations of tools it gives them, not giving them many different tools but only letting them win with one or two.

22 minutes ago, dalestephenson said:

Any game that is loved by a particular set of people is not, objectively speaking, a bad game. Not all games rise to that threshold. It's also the case that a game design could fail to achieve what its designer *hoped* it would do. Candyland is not badly designed if your goal is to let small children have a decision-free, luck-based competition requiring no reading skills. Candyland *is* badly designed if you are trying to attract adult gamers wanting meaningful decisions.

That doesn't mean that "bad" and "good" should necessarily be avoided, just because it's subjective. If I say that Escape from Dol Goldur is a bad one-deck quest or that Sleeping Sentry is a bad card, I'm giving my subjective view -- and I suspect it's the view of a majority of players. But we both know that there's some masochists out there who want to play the Kobayashi Maru and enjoy the challenge of knocking off EfDG solo. They probably played Passage Through Mirkwood with the Tactics starter deck until they won, too. *I* don't enjoy that, but that doesn't mean it was a design failure. I suspect EfDG was specifically designed to encourage two-deck play, and the tactics core cards were explicitly designed not to be an all-around sphere. You can't say the design failed unless you know what the design goals *were*, and if you don't like the results it doesn't mean the design failed its intended purpose -- it's quite possible you just don't like what it was actually designed to do.

We all agree that the possibility of location lock asymetrically affects the game according to player count, but it's only a design failure if it was never intended to do that! I'm not convinced that is the case. The fact that a later LCG (Arkham) has more uniform scaling in player count does not mean that LOTR's approach was a mistake, it only means Arkham is different. Champions is different than Arkham, this doesn't mean that all the changes between Arkham and Champions were design failures by Arkham. I don't see new LCGs as an attempt to attract the existing LCG players with something better. I think they are intended to tempt both the existing audience and the non-LCG players with something *different*. The itch scratched by the three cooperative LCG is not the same and I know of no designer statements that it was *meant* to be the same.

I don't think it's useful to lump scenario design and card design under game design. The game design itself is what allows the possibilities, if something is disliked with that it will affect *all* scenarios and *all* cards. That's not true with scenario design. I don't like the one-key-card-that-wrecks-everything structure of Road to Rivendell, but Sleeping Sentry affects *only* Road to Rivendell. It's even less true of player cards. The End Comes may be a waste of cardstock, but that affects that card only. And even weak cards can be rehabilitated -- my favorite new cards are cards that make old cards worth playing.

Scenario design, IMO, has steadily improved over the years, as has card design. The underlying ruleset has remained essentially unchanged over that period of time, and continues to constrain the possibilities of scenario and card design. I think the core would be "better" if a number of the player cards in it were better, and if Escape From Dol Goldur scaled more evenly with player count, but in the context of the full card/scenario pool I don't think it makes much difference.

I also think that even with location lock, doomed, and "each player" effects, it's not been shown the game actually is more difficult on average for more players. "Fixing" only the effects that work against more players, while leaving intact the things that favor more players, would not provide evenly scaled difficulty according to number of players.

It's true that some scenarios with fixed setups can leave you with a demanding first round situation. And some don't. This has nothing to do with the rule system, it's just variety in quests themselves. What sort of quest you prefer varies a lot according to player, but I think it's a lot easier practically speaking to make the quest easier with additional resources (or cards; I frankly prefer Seastan's Grace of the Valar variant to easy or semi-easy mode) than it is to make a quest more difficult, which argues for a default bias towards more difficult quests for the widest appeal.

I don't agree. An objectively bad game can be loved. Have you ever heard of a movie called "The Room"? It's an objectively bad movie, yet it is loved by many including yours truly. That being said, I never said LotR LCG is a bad game, I merely said that I think listed design choices are bad and are hurting the game.

I'm not discussing design goals and if they failed or not. I'm discussing results purely, and they are not great and could've been better.

I'm not saying new coop LCGs are attempts to lure in old players with new and improved mechanics. I'm saying that new LCGs are made with old experience in mind, and old experience shows that these design choices were not very good. Just like Arkham learned a lot of lessons from LotR LCG, especially which one not to repeat, Marvel Champions learned from Arkham that having doom not scale with the player count is not a very good design choice, which was translated into the new game.

Game design is a very broad term, which includes card design and scenario design. Basically everything that is gameplay related.

I don't think the game should be "fixed" at this point, or if it even can be fixed. The reprocussions are running too deep. One of the reasons I think the game should be given a second edition, like GoT.

Late to the discussion (as usual), but sphere balance has long been a bee in my bonnet.

In terms of "fixing" the game I would agree that it can't be fixed exactly, but I don't believe it needs to be. Is it perfect? No. Do I want to return to a limited format in order to make it better? Also no. I vastly prefer the imperfect, deep card pool we have now to that. Can it be made better? Probably. Should it be made better? Not worth it imo.

34 minutes ago, John Constantine said:

[in response to my claiming that any game that attracts a player population that loves it is not objectively bad.]

I don't agree. An objectively bad game can be loved. Have you ever heard of a movie called "The Room"? It's an objectively bad movie, yet it is loved by many including yours truly. That being said, I never said LotR LCG is a bad game, I merely said that I think listed design choices are bad and are hurting the game.

I'm not discussing design goals and if they failed or not. I'm discussing results purely, and they are not great and could've been better.

I had never heard of "The Room", so I looked it up. It objectively was unsuccessful on release and objectively has attracted a cult following by this point of time. Whether it met the design goals of its self-financing creator is (I gather) unknown and unknowable. Labelling it an "objectively bad movie" requires objective standards, constructed and agreed-upon without this particular movie in mind -- this may be possible among a wide swathe of the viewing public.

But "bad movies" are loved *because* they are bad, and this is independent of whether they were intended to be bad or not. Plan 9 From Outer Space perhaps never meant to hit that target, Lost Skeleton of Kadaver certainly did. As the popularity of MST3K showed, it can not only be fun to mock "bad" movies, it can be fun to watch people mock bad movies. Some of my kids seek out "bad" fan-fiction just to mock it--I draw the line there, my life is too short to waste my time with that. Even video games can attract cult love from percieved badness -- Somebody Set Us Up The Bomb!

But in all my time on BGG I've never run across a cluster of gamers seeking out games because they consider them objectively bad, and play them for that reason. I *have* seen BGGers dismiss games for being "objectively bad" that turned out to be smash hits among 12-14 year old boy scouts at scout camp. But the scouts loved these games not because they were "bad", but because the "objective" flaws seen by BGGers -- for instance, extreme randomness and player elimination -- were positive virtues to the scouts. The objective standards shared by the labelling BGGers were not shared by fans of the actual game. There are *very few* "objective standards" in boardgames that can be applied, perhaps none. Any game that finds an audience has done *something* right.

But as you point out, you're not labelling the game itself bad, just certain things that you find bad. That's fine, but it's not *objectively* bad without objective standards for it to violate. Those are lacking here. That certain game effects scale against player count *is* objective -- that effects scaling against player count is "bad" is subjective. To my mind, even if you accept that overall difficulty should scale evenly against player count, it does not follow that all *effects* in the game must scale evenly. If positive and negative scaling effects roughly balance, you have even scaling while introducing asymetric play with player count, which some (myself included) would see as a good thing. And if some *quests* scale in different directions, some (myself included) could also see that as a good thing. Further, in a game with positive and negative scaling effects, if you "fix" only one side of the equation you end up *unbalancing* with player count in a uniform fashion, which some (including myself) would see as a bad thing.

I think we can all agree that the game "could be better", but your ideas, and my ideas, and Rouxxor's ideas about what would make it better are not going to be the same, and in some cases the perceived remedy is directly opposed. And even if we could all agree amongst ourselves that (for example) Sleeping Sentry was a terrible design, that doesn't mean the designers didn't want it to work exactly in the annoying way that it actually operates. I'm also inclined to cut some slack to things that "could be better" when I consider that the game as a whole is subjectively Fantastic, a lifestyle game I expect to keep me amused for decades to came.

1 hour ago, John Constantine said:

I'm not saying new coop LCGs are attempts to lure in old players with new and improved mechanics. I'm saying that new LCGs are made with old experience in mind, and old experience shows that these design choices were not very good. Just like Arkham learned a lot of lessons from LotR LCG, especially which one not to repeat, Marvel Champions learned from Arkham that having doom not scale with the player count is not a very good design choice, which was translated into the new game.

Yes, I agree that new LCGs are made with "old experience" in mind. But I totally disagree that the "old experience" was that the past design choices "were not very good". I think it's more the case that the "old experience" that appeals to the old audience already *has* the old game and recreating that game from scratch with a tiny card pool wouldn't be interesting. So the designers look for something they think will appeal to a *new* audience.

I can't speak to Arkham/Champions differences, but I can speak to LOTR/Champions differences. I have all the published content for Champions, and I like the game. Certainly some of the changes (IP aside) address some of the things that have put off potential LOTR players over the years. You're playing as a single hero, not as a set of heroes. You always can use the cards in your hands, even if only as fuel. You don't have to worry about complexities like many action windows, or sentinel/ranged. Playing Champions is definitely a more streamlined experience than playing LOTR. It is also (so far) a much easier to win experience.

But most of all, it is a *different* experience, and though it's barely begun its life and no doubt has a huge amount of player cards and scenarios ahead of it, it's clear the streamlined game system will *never* deliver the subtleties of hero and deck interaction that LOTR is capable of. It may well wind up finding a larger audience than LOTR, but it's also not the same audience, and the design choices made to simplify the game are not rectifying design mistakes, they are simply making the new game system something different than the old game system. And for me, the old game system is subjectively better. If they had made the same design decisions when originally designing LOTR, it would be a different game and IMO an inferior one.

1 hour ago, John Constantine said:

Game design is a very broad term, which includes card design and scenario design. Basically everything that is gameplay related.

I don't think the game should be "fixed" at this point, or if it even can be fixed. The reprocussions are running too deep. One of the reasons I think the game should be given a second edition, like GoT.

"Game design" used in such a broad fashion to describe the entire corpus of a modular game makes the term not useful for discussion. In the interest of using common terms, I will use "rule system" to describe the structure of the game. The rule system affects 100% of the game. A scenario design affects about 1% of the game, since there are about 100 scenarios. A card design affects far less, since there are many hundreds of player cards (less heroes, so maybe 1% for them).

Cards and scenarios can be "fixed" with errata, though the designers have largely restricted errata to player card nerfs. More than that, they can also be ignored by releasing *more* scenarios and *more* player cards not having the same issues as the original. Does Escape from Dol Goldur scale badly against solo one-deck? Virtually every quest ever release after that one doesn't scale as badly. Is having one game-ending treachery/shadow in an otherwise unthreatening quest a design failure? If so, what later scenario ever repeated it? Are first cycle allies hideously overpriced? Allies released *since* then usually aren't.

With the exception of locations, which are part of the rule system, every one of your objections about quests could be addressed in a *new* quest simply by not doing the things you object to--if they agreed with your assessment that the quest would be better without those things. As for bad/mediocre thematic cards, they've published a vast number of good/great thematic cards lately.

So what's to fix? Short of *positive* errata to go with their stealth nerfs, or new nightmare quests for the ones without those, there's not much that can be done for released content. But new content can continue to be of ever-higher quality. At least in card design, I think the current and previous cycles is showing the designers at the top of their game. The one thing I would expect from new content, should it ever resume after the current cycle, is a change in how new content is packaged, making it more free-standing and in fewer new SKUs. Logistically keeping the product available is a nightmare that gets continually worse.

An incompatible second edition strikes directly at the game's strongest point, its deep and varied pool of quests and cards. Reboots might be practical in a competitive game where older content ages out of rotation and the real game is playing against each other. But in a cooperative game like this I can't see it happening. This game is at its best as the options explode, attempting to return to ground zero when the existing game is so compelling would be very very poorly received, I think.

22 minutes ago, dalestephenson said:

But most of all, it is a *different* experience, and though it's barely begun its life and no doubt has a huge amount of player cards and scenarios ahead of it, it's clear the streamlined game system will *never* deliver the subtleties of hero and deck interaction that LOTR is capable of. It may well wind up finding a larger audience than LOTR, but it's also not the same audience, and the design choices made to simplify the game are not rectifying design mistakes, they are simply making the new game system something different than the old game system. And for me, the old game system is subjectively better. If they had made the same design decisions when originally designing LOTR, it would be a different game and IMO an inferior one.

Sure. But the system, how you play a card, what a card does, how the opponent react is not bounded in any way to the way to build a deck. So we can compare them. I do prefer the building system of LoTR, and that is why I haven't buy anything from those two other LCG. But I think they have done a better job in making their rules.

As someone who thinks allies are too strong, Rouxxor, I think you would really appreciate the consequential damage nearly all the Champions allies are cursed with. It also has a per-player ally limit.

But so far, building your board state before getting down to destroying the villain is very much the game-winning strategy.

Is this a joke or? Every single thing you mentioned on your list is what makes the game a great game. You have to be joking..? Otherwise I guess the game isn't for you..

I would also toss in "improper scaling". You mentioned the locations being a frustrating one, especially if you flip multiple copies of "cannot place progress on locations in staging" effects. I also saw, tonight, how a "x players" card affected an enemy's attack. I thought that was pretty bologna... "so in one player, an ally could take him, in 4 player, not even Beregond could survive?" Things find themselves compounding in linear fashion and there are times I wish it was just a set median number -- "flip 2 into staging" instead of "flip x". Does that objectively make it harder for solo? Sure! But the x appears so often it would be nice to have a median that 4 players can help overcome.

I think in general that the different ways that encounter card/encounter deck mechanics scale in LotR and AH are appropriate to the overall design. In AH, there is less synergy and co-operation between decks, and it's more difficult for player decks to build up board states that oppress the encounter deck, so it is appropriate for most effects and mechanics to scale more or less linearly with the player count. In LotR, however, two decks will tend to be more powerful combined than two apart, even if you haven't put a huge amount of thought into co-operation, and very much more powerful if you have. It is also much easier to create large board states that can easily absorb a single encounter card. Therefore the encounter deck needs some combos and needs some help with scaling to fight back.

Consider locations in a four-player game. Sure, you are likely to end up with an increasing number of locations in the staging area every turn, unless you are clearing them out with location control. However, it's not likely to be more than one or two additional locations a turn if you're clearing out the active location. If you're managing monsters efficiently, then it hardly seems too much to ask for a four-player team to increase their available willpower by 5 every turn.

Interesting, most of this has never bothered me aside from doomed cards being nearly unplayable- An issue which I must say they did an incredible job fixing with Saruman and his staff, a deck which I have absolutely loved playing and has effectively made those once ignored cards viable.

While I fully agree that some of the quests on normal mode are so difficult that only seasoned players looking for a challenge will enjoy them, I think the balance of easy quests, quests that are fairly easy but can usually beat in an attempt or two but aren't a cake walk, and serious challenges is incredibly impressive. Also they do have an easy mode so this is a bit silly to take serious issue with since its really easy to get your sought after experience out of it.

There is a lot of posts to answer, and even reading them takes a lot of time, and I got a whole day of work ahead of me, so excuse me for being compact in my response.

dalestephenson , I'm not sure what this whole thing about, I never said LotR LCG was objectively bad, I just said I didn't like some segments of it, and while making enemies insanely strong can be argued as a subjective thing, I am willing to stand until my last breath for things like not scaling number of active locations or doomed being an objectively bad design.

They didn't try to replicate LotR LCG, but game elements unavoidably overlap, and when they do, they didn't make the same mistakes again. I think if they made those descicions when designing the LotR LCG originally, the game would be a much more balanced and enjoyable by wider margin.

Even if they agreed with my opinion, there is nothing they can do at this point in time with the game we have on our hands. If they suddenly turn around and change their entire design philosophy, many things just break down and stop working. And thats why I think 2nd edition would be a good thing thats never gonna happen

Khamul , so far you sound like the only jokester in this thread.

player3351457 , yeah thats funny how they created an inveronment when multiplayer games get flooded with locations in the staging area because they can't efficiently explore them via the in-game means, so players are forced to use stuff like trackers to get out of such pickles, so then designers create cards that counter even those venues of resistance

NathanH , I don't agree. I've played a lot of uncoordinated LotR LCG multiplayer back in the day, and when the decks are just solo decks that players have brought to play together - it rarely ended well. Those games were mostly an uphill struggle until the bitter hopeless end. I'm not sure if intentional or not, but it seems like LotR is trying to compensate lack of time pressure (agenda deck in AH LCG), pushing away casual players that try to have a fun and balanced game in the process.

programdude , that's just as I said - Doomed in its current state can only work with a so called cruth, Saruman's Staff in this case. As for the difficulty, easy mode, and stuff... for a very long time that I played this game, no such thing as an easy mode existed. Even then when it was introduced, I don't want to rely on going online and looking stuff up every time I want to play a quest, setting up a regular quest is a cumbersome task by itself, it doesn't need any extra steps. As an additional note, such thing as appropriate balance for the content should be a thing. Looking back at core set days, there is one semi-balanced quest, and two nearly ubeatable unless giant encounter draw luck + an extremely finely tuned deck. And problems like these went through a lot of products. It's OK to have quests on a more of a diffuclt side, but not when they are the most of the quests that the game has, with saner ones being very few and far inbetwixt.

I am sorry for the scarcityy of my replies, but it took me more than a hour to read through everything and form my thoughts and reply even in this compact manner, and as I mentioned, there is a very busy day ahead of me. Thank you for your replies.

I just really don't think most of the quests are insane in terms of difficulty. I think in an average block of content there will be 2-3 rather challenging quests, with the rest ranging from easy to average. I think they did an excellent job with the range of challenge considering they need to appeal to casual and serious gamers alike.

And yes we agree about doomed cards, but I immensely respect them giving us a way to actually viably play them with Saruman as opposed to just leaving them as dead cards in the binder.

On 3/20/2020 at 6:26 PM, Felswrath said:

In terms of game design, I see this as a puzzle game. Certain quests require different strategies with different amounts of players, and in my opinion, that just adds to the fun!

Agreed.

Its difficult to put into words, but I think the short answer is that Lord of the Rings is a unique deck building game in that unlike almost all deck building games in that you don't build a deck to beat the game or beat your opponent, you instead build a deck to solve the current puzzle (quest).

Now grant it there are ways with sufficient card pool to create niche decks that can become the sort of "ultimate deck" that is powerful enough to beat most quests in the game but those are so very specific and there really are very few of them, most of which leverage min/maxing and poorly designed cards with a few assumptions (like owning 2 core sets for example).

Generally this is a game of solving a puzzle via deck building and most of the problems described by the OP are not "all quests" problems, but very specific quests. For example most quests do now have Location heavy encounter decks, some do, but most don't. Most encounter decks don't rely on the Doom mechanic, same goes with enemy design.

Each quest is unique and requires a unique deck(s) to beat it and the challenge of the game is building that deck for that quest. For the next quest you will likely again have to alter your deck.

I think the mindset of "build one deck to beat them all" is a kind of carry over from most deck building games and a attribute/attitude players bring over in this game which ultimately leads to disappointment. If however you recognize how Lord of the Rings is different and that the challenge is to build decks to beat specific quests, if you embrace that concept, then the game opens up to you and a lot of the design starts to make a lot more sense.

A good example is Conflict at The Carrock. Most new players really struggle with this quest because up until you hit it, most of the quests leading up to it in that series don't really require anything particularly specific as far as design or strategy goes. Most halfway decent decks will do. Conflict At The Carrock is the first time when you must adjust your deck for a very specific challenge and most players that figure out can eventually beat the quest 100% of the time even on nightmare because there is a puzzle to solve here and once solved a quest that seemed impossible to beat becomes fairly easy to defeat consistently.

From Carrock on, this is how the game challenges you. Now of course there are some quests that really are super tough and you might not be able to find a solution to the puzzle with your current card pool. I dont think that is intentional but it does happen (depending on how you collect). As an owner of almost the entire collecting I have many quests I have never beaten but I know there is a solution to those puzzles, I just havent found it and I have always intentionally avoided seeking out the answer online. The game stays fresh and interesting for me knowing that there are still challenges waiting for me in my collection.

I totally agree with the location issue you comment. The whole location mechanics is not very well thought off. Arkham definitely does a better job in that sense.

The other thing I agree with is the difficulty and the bad/mediocre but thematic cards. I don’t think the game is difficult, but I do think that it does not leave too much room for those who, like my wife, likes making decks with thematic cards.

2 hours ago, John Constantine said:

dalestephenson , I'm not sure what this whole thing about, I never said LotR LCG was objectively bad, I just said I didn't like some segments of it, and while making enemies insanely strong can be argued as a subjective thing, I am willing to stand until my last breath for things like not scaling number of active locations or doomed being an objectively bad design.

They didn't try to replicate LotR LCG, but game elements unavoidably overlap, and when they do, they didn't make the same mistakes again. I think if they made those descicions when designing the LotR LCG originally, the game would be a much more balanced and enjoyable by wider margin.

Even if they agreed with my opinion, there is nothing they can do at this point in time with the game we have on our hands. If they suddenly turn around and change their entire design philosophy, many things just break down and stop working. And thats why I think 2nd edition would be a good thing thats never gonna happen

Yes, you never said LOTR was objectively bad, but you're still saying that not scaling number of active locations and doomed being "objectively bad design". No matter how much you don't like them, neither is "objectively bad". It is *not* an objective principal of game design that co-op scenarios must have the same difficulty at all player counts -- and more to the point, it's not the case that LOTR has been *shown* to bias difficulty against multplayer. *Many* quests are easier in multiplayer and this is especially true in the earliest cycles. Having elements of the game that scale against multiple players is IMO *good* design when there are also elements of the game that scale against fewer players.

New iterations of similar systems may lack things you don't like -- this does *not* prove that it was a design mistake that the designers rectified. It could just as easily be the case that it's an element the designers recognize that some do not like, and they are trying to design a game more to your taste. In the case of Marvel Champions, it lacks both threat and any equivalent to locations, so it did NOT fix any alleged problem with scaling, it just removed the element entirely. "Each player" effects from the encounter deck exist, but are rare -- and the consensus so far is that the game is easier as player count increases.

Except for the design of location which is baked into the rules system, *every one* of your complaints could be addressed by the designers in *every* new quest released, simply by not doing the things you complain about. Not one of them are required to be done in any quest. They also *did* do something about quest difficulty by introducing easy mode, and all reprints of older quests pre-easy mode have the gold circles, making it easy to set up (I've also altered my pre-easy prints by coloring in the white circles on the "easy mode" removal cards. Semi-easy is *extremely* simple and makes a large difference in difficulty level.

I don't know why you think a reboot would fix your complaints. A 2.0 rules system with a different location system could invalidate all the current content, but it would do *nothing* to prevent the designers from using "each player" encounter effects (including raising threat, which is what Doomed does), tough enemies, tough setups, and tough normal difficulty. As the current cycle shows, the designers are still making full use of all the things you complain about -- they obviously *don't* think these things are design mistakes, they are Working As Intended.