Has anyone tried a variant that allows 5 players in a Sea of Blood game? My play group is considering starting this up, but there is 6 of us. I glanced through the PDF rules and it doesn't seem like it would support it.

I suggest you just go ahead and do it, despite all the balance arguments. There is not too much balance anyway, so just have some fun with five heroes. I allowed a fifth heroe to my campaign as a guest for one or two adventures and it worked quite nicely. It was not Sea of blood though but selfmade stuff (Siege of Helms Klamm, I set up a campaign in middle earth). Only you have to improvise on material as there are only 4 sets of order markers.

My group decided to go ahead and give Sea of Blood a try with 5 adventureres. We start this Saturday.

I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions on how to balance out the extra character. Maybe an increase in threat generation or a decrease in the cost for the Overlord to upgrade things?

Thanks for any input.

The biggest difference with 5 characters is going to involve spawning. The dungeon levels are so tiny that 4 characters can usually cover most spawn points. 5 would be able to cover them all quite frequently. The SoB maps differ from the RtL maps in that they seem designed to force the heroes to allow the overlord to spawn more often because there are a lot more twists and turns in them. If your change doesn't touch upon spawning, I don't see how it could work.

A few random ideas off the top of my head:

• Increase the number of critters a spawn generates
• Enact some method whereby the overlord can limit or ignore line of sight for spawning (maybe each spawn card comes with a pit that the OL can place which represents a trap door, and the spawned monsters come out of it). It'd need limits to stop the things from appearing next to heroes.
• Drastically decrease or remove the cost to flip the eyes. That won't change spawn points availability, but could help the OL take advatage of mistakes by the heroes.
• Ban Boggs the Rat.

I would actually disagree with the spawns being the biggest change. The extra hero represents an additional set of actions. This translates to extra attacks and fewer monsters getting a chance to attack in their turn. It also means that the hero's will be getting about 20% more xp in effect (1CT now equals 5xp instead of 4xp)

I would suggest a few things.

1.) Have spawn cards give 1 extra monster if there are at least 3 monsters already on the card. Monster availability does still require that there be enough monsters to get this. Ie a lone Medusa will still only be 1 Medusa while a beastman spawn will be 3 regular and 1 master.

2.) Have the cost to flip the eyes go down by 5 points, and give the OL the choice of paying an additional 5 threat to reduce line of sight from the hero's to 5 squares (ie the gust of wind card). But only for spawning purposes and only on the turn that the eyes are flipped.

3.) Eliminate Boggs the Rat.

4.) Do not let there be any extra tokens for fatigue/health upgrades or orders. This will help with the number of actions and how far the hero's can be upgraded. It will also require a little more stratagy for the players.

5.)Do not give out extra treasure/coins from chests and

6.)Allow the OL an extra 5 points to buy upgrades at the start of the game and give him an extra point to spend for every 5 points that he makes. Do not have this raise the CT count on the game however. This is to balance the extra xp that the hero's will be getting from having a 5th hero in the party and the extra skill that the party starts with.

7.) Do not give the hero's any more choices in picking the hero's than they normally would. 4 sets of 3 cards choose one from each set and then pick one other hero from the remainder. Also to reduce to chances of having an overpowered party. Also do not allow any of the make a hero specail abilities that mimic a skill. (this can cause a lot of problems as the game deliberately restricts access to skills so there are no duplicates.)

Items 1-3 are to help with the spawning problem. This should make it easier to spawn and have the spawns do something usefull. 4-7 are more from play balance and you can change them around if you find they are to much, or need more help. Mostly they restrict to cash income to keep the hero's from having more money to buy equipment/skills faster. As buying better skills/dice/equipment earlier will have a major effect on how effective the party is, you will want to prevent this.

Brian

bneumann said:

When CT is converted into XP, each hero gets XP equal to the amount of CT earned. Yes, that means 1 CT will become 5XP instead of 4, but each of those XP is being given to one hero, and each hero can only spend his own XP. Buying mutual upgrades such as Town Upgrades already requires each hero to pay the list amount, so this doesn't actually change the balance at all. It just gives the 5th hero the same progression options the other four have.

Money, on the other hand, IS pooled, and a 5th hero will mean 500gp for each gold pile instead of 400gp. I still don't think that's an imbalance though, becuase they'll also need to spend more money gearing and training the 5th hero. It all comes out in the wash.

You do have a point regarding an extra Action each hero turn that will clear more monsters. This will really only be an advantage in Copper though. Once the campaign level rises, the heroes will begin to reach the point where they clear dungeon levels faster anyway. The monsters on the map don't usually get more than one action anyway (if they're lucky.) The primary source of damage is spawned monsters, and if the heroes can cover spawn points more easily, there won't be as many of those to go around. By the time they hit Gold, the 5th hero will be lucky if there's even anything left for him to attack, I'd imagine.

bneumann said:

Not a bad idea. Of course, if the OL can't spawn because the heroes have all lines covered, then this rule won't help much. But it does do something to make sure the spawns that DO get off will count. I'd allow the extra (always white) monster on all spawn cards though - the spawn cards with fewer monsters are the ones more likely to benefit from it, since the ones with more monsters may well not have enough unseen spaces to get everything out anyway, thus the extra monster is pointless because it can't be spawned anyway.

bneumann said:

Giving the OL a permanent Gust of Wind is a good idea. I don't think reducing the spawn flip cost is necessary. I never had trouble putting together enough threat to flip it at least once per level when there were 4 heroes in the dungeon. 5 heroes means I'll have more threat to play with anyway.

bneumann said:

Definitely. The last thing the heroes need is more LOS.

bneumann said:

I'd go one step further and say since they get 5 heroes, it's a blind draw. Each player gets one hero and that's their hero.

Thanks to everyone who replied to this post.

As an update to anyone who is interested, we played our first 5 player Sea of Blood game last weekend using all the suggested rules bneumann suggested and it seemed to work out pretty well.

We drew 12 characters and just pooled them all together to choose from. I don't remember the names to all of the characters we ended up picking but, one player picked Shiver, I took the ranger with the falcon, our tank picked the dwarf who gets two free moves every turn, another guy picked the barbarian that can weild a two handed weapon in one hand, and the last guy picked the wizard who can teleport 5 spaces. We didn't get a really focused archer-type, but other than that everyone seemed happy with the choices.

As the characters, we really weren't sure what to do on our first turn so we just went into the dungeon thats adjacent to the starting city. By the end of the dungeon the score was 9 conquest for the Overlord and 19 conquest for the players. We were able to handle most of the monsters pretty easily, but the Overlord was able to spawn reinforcements without a problem as well. Having the extra 5th player didn't seem to have too much of an impact with LoS and with the reducded cost to flip the eyes and the optional gust of wind added for the Overlord we saw a lot of extra monsters spawned.

By the end of the adventure we had about 3000 gold (some spent for copper treasures and potions along the way). The two mages ended up with Bane and Crystalize (the rune that pierces) and I ended up with Ripper. The dwarf ended up getting the +1 movement rind and the barbarian guy didn't get a copper treasure.

I'll keep you guys updated as we play, for anyone else considering adding an extra player.

One thing to remember with the ideas I had above. I have not played SOB, just RTL. You might find them to restrictive, or you might find that they are two easy on the hero's. Evaluate after the first couple of dungeons and see where your ct is at that point. If you are actually getting to finish an entire dungeon (3 levels) and are still ahead of the OL then the rules mod's are probably not enough. If instead you are pretty close or the OL is slightly ahead then they are probably about right. Also take another look when the campaign level reaches silver and gold. A lot changes with this and you do want to pay attention. There is an excellent after action report at this site that you might want to read.( http://www.compoundeye.net/descent/copper1.html ) They had 5 custom made characters for this campaign.

Brian