This isn't something I'm making... yet. It's just an idea that keeps coming back to me from time to time. So I thought I would throw it out here to see what others thought. It's obviously inspired by Judd's work on Cities of Adventure.

The basic premise is the same as CoA - to have cards that provide minor events outside of the board's settlements. But I want to be mindful of generally acknowledged concerns with play time... turn time. The events in question would be just a little spice for the game, with the possibility of something major once in a while that might lead to accessing Adventure cards outside of landing on a gem.

The biggest problem with most non-gem encounters in the game is triggering them not too often... and avoiding a time consuming trigger like having to roll a "story" dice every turn. CoA has a built in buffer for that, since its events only trigger when you enter a settlement (city/town/etc.) In such a case, rolling one "story" die doesn't impact game time significantly, because most turns happen outside of a settlement. "In the wild" encounters are another issue, since as the game proceeds, the number of turns spent in landing on a non-gem space becomes more significant as gems become more scarce. Rolling a story die for each of those turns and referencing it might be too much for most players wanting speed of play.

Two options came to mind... use the movement roll itself in some way, with its terrain symbols... or use the terrain landed on.

Interpreting the movement roll eliminates an extra roll for a "story" die, but interpretation itself would still be time consuming and possibly confusing. With multiple dice rolled, and sometimes different counts of them or none at all (just move 1 space). The trigger itself produces additional variations and/or probabilities. In the case of not rolling any dice and moving 1 space, the trigger vanishes entirely. That might actually be acceptable, but...

The other option is to have an "in the wild" card drawn each time you land on a non-gem space. That's a lot of draws overall, but the method of trigger (the terrain type landed on) might mitigate it... maybe. The trigger is constant, simply determine if there's a gem in the space you landed on. If not, then draw a card. So ... what to do about the interpretation?

I had thought that unlike Judd's CoA, there might be only 1, 2, or 3 events on each card. Each event would be linked to a terrain type. If the hero is on a space matching one of those terrains, that is the event that is triggered. If the terrain space is not on the card, nothing happens, and the turn ends. Cards could be turned over and quickly seen. Overall, it would average at about a 20% chance of something happening, and that could be further mitigated by the types of terrains on the cards and how often each type is represented.

Generally speaking, I could imagine the rarer terrains (Mountains / Swamps) having a slightly higher occurrence in the deck and some of the slightly tougher events. More common terrains might be less represented and have the easier and more beneficial events. This way, event occurrences would also be less frequent, until you get into remote places where it's reasonable that things might get tough.

I'll leave it at that and see what others think. Again, it's just a notion and nothing is in the works just yet.

JCHendee said:

Personally I'm of the opinion that these sorts of events are basically exactly what the challenge cards are meant to represent, and the fact that there aren't gems on every space is the built in mechanic for preventing gameplay from bogging down (such as it is.) In my experience with the game, there are very few situations where a hero can't reach at least one gem after rolling his dice, so players CAN have an encounter almost every turn if they want. The only reason they wouldn't is if they rolled particularly poorly, if difficult terrain is slowing them down, or if they don't want an encounter because they have some other plan.

If you want to introduce something additional, that's fine, but whatever you do, don't make it happen on EVERY space. Even if the task is as simple as drawing a card and scanning it for your terrain type, that will add up while playing the game. A better way to do it (I think) would be to have one or more approriate terrain images printed on the back of each event card. If you END your turn in one of the terrain types pictured on the top card's back and have no gem in your space, draw that card and resolve it. This might mean several turns go by without people landing in the right terrain, but on the bright side that just means you need less cards to make a deck that will span a whole game. You could also add a rule about auto-cycling the top card to the bottom if it goes an entire turn around the table without it being drawn, that way the effects don't stop completely forever because there's a swamp card on top.

I'd also recommend that you not award XP for any such encounters (and be stingy with the gold) otherwise you begin to remove the incentive of having actual challenge card encounters. I mean, a variant that entirely replaces the challenge decks with something else, non-gem dependent, is fine and all that, but it doesn't sound like that's what you had in mind. It also sounds like frankly a lot of work. =P

Okay... here's hoping my split quotes don't foul up another thread...

Steve-O said:

Frak! Split quotes used to work on this forum system... but I guess not any more. At least it didn't mess up the forum's layout this time.

JCHendee said:

Yeah, it's finnicky that way. Personally I liked the old forum software where the tag was just

Easy to modify on the fly for splitting quotes or pulling stuff from rulebooks, etc.

Agree! But even then I ocassionally mess up real bad. It would be nice if the forum simply recognized the simple quote and unquote ... and then stick in a serverside regular expression filter in the ASP to catch any instances when someone leaves off a trailing "]" on either.