Ok, first of all allow me to apologise if this has been discussed in the past; I took a brief look through the forum and saw nothing on it, nor have I seen any mention of it in the rules;

What happens when a player decides that they don't want to play any more?

Currently I play it so that their character spontaneously dies and drops all of their equipment/followers (as though they'd been hit by an event, command spell or touch of death), and then place a ban on that player rejoining for 5 turns (to stop people instantly killing themselves if they draw a weak character- but allowing someone who gets bored of the game, but then later wants to rejoin a chance to get involved again), but can find no documentation to support this.

What do you guys do when the situation arrises?

exion said:

If someone quit in a 2 player game, then the character with the highest strength and craft wins the game.

If you play with more players, and someone dies(or give up) then he must ditch all of his followers and objects etc, and he leaves the game.

If someone want to join... then he must draw a new character from the deck.

But i don't like it if people want to join the game, when the game has already begon.( especially if you are in midgame)

This is how i should play it..

Velhart said:

but some characters start with higher strength/craft than others... using that rule someone who rolls a lucky character in a 2 player game could just quit immediately and win

Surely quitting is equivalent to surrendering, thus conceding defeat to the other player, regardless of any stat-gap to the contrary!

Still, horses for courses

exion said:

First off, has never happened for me. Second, they get booted out the door and are never welcome back. You start, you finish. Talisman rarely takes even 2 hours anyways.

exion said:

I don't count it as a game then, because this is not fair.

exion said:

This is also true.

this is how i will play it:

If a player want to quit the game, when both characters can still win the game, then nobody will win.

But if a player is far ahead, and the weaker character can't win anymore, and that player( the strongest) want to quit, then he wins.

____________

This has happen once in our games.

I was the Priest, and my opponent was the Prophetess. The Priest could not win anymore from the Prophetess, because i could never beat her in the endgame. She was too strong, and was already in the Dungeon. she could defeat the Dungeon Lord easily, and beat me in combat with the Battle Royal ending.

So we quit the game and the prophetess wins

My lesson is that i don't want to play the priest again

Velhart said:

That sounds like a fair resolution. No point trudging through a foreclosed game!

exion said:

well I've only recently picked up the game (with all current expansions) so all of us are pretty new to it (though I'm pretty clear on the majority of the rules and play-styles as I played the second edition a few years back with a different crowd). There's almost always someone new playing each time I crack it out, which means I do restrict myself by not playing particularly competitively so as not to intimidate the newcomers and to allow them to get a feel for the rules.

Quite often there'll be an irritating run of "Events" but few battle encounters in the beginning of the game (possibly due to the huge adventure deck being disproportionately filled with gold, strangers and places) which eats up a lot of time with noone making any real progress. In huge games (with 6-7 players) I tend to reduce the trophy trade ins to 5 or 6 points to help speed things along, though this does lead to a snowball effect in stats once the players become moderately capable in combat (again, I'm relatively new to this edition so I'm still getting a feel for the pacing, so I'll likely keep to the 7 point trade-in in the future).

I'm looking forward to playing some games where I'm more focused on achieving goals throughout rather than hand-holding the newbies, so I'm sure that the game's formidable duration will drop the more we play.

In my games it doesn't happen too often that a player quits before the end, but in some cases I experienced the situation or the need of this. Sometimes it also happened that we were forced to stop the game, pack everything and quickly flee (in order not to get trapped by the snow in an isolated mountain hut ,about two years ago). When I proposed this game to a bunch of new players and in a situation where some of them were not able to stay until the end, then I had some early quitters.

When a player quits we usually delete his presence from the game. Objects & Followers are not dropped but are discarded instead, as well as any other card kept by that Character. It's not correct to loot on a Character that is not dead, we assume he abandoned the quest and used his possession to live a honest life as a farmer.

Nobody quits to rejoin the same game later. This is not allowed at all. If you quit, it's not because of your weak Character. If you want to kill your Character there are plenty of options (get in the Middle Region, travel in the Dungeon, etc...). We pick two Characters and choose at the start, if you've chosen two Characters that you don't want you're stuck with one of them.

Regarding the playing time, well, I think Dam and his fellows are still a quite unique group with their 75 minutes average. I experience very different playing times, ranging from 60 minutes (minimum) to 3-4 hours and I've always cashed Trophies at every 5 points (with plenty of snowball-effect). The last game was played from 21 pm to 0.30 am and after the first 2 hours no Character was "Crown-ready" (the best Character was a Magus with Str 5 and Cft 7). It happens that the combination of card draws and PvP is so well balanced that everybody is stopped in his progression. We play with hidden ending, so nobody knows exactly what's waiting on the Crown space. Last time I got there with a 16 Str / 9 Cft Cleric and drew the Judgement Day. I eventually won because it ended up in a standard Crown ending, but all my stats were useless except for the LoD fight.

The_Warlock said:

Some pretty cool stories you have there, and an elegant means of dealing with quitters. In the future I suppose I'll deal with it on a per-play basis, asking how we deal with quitters (beyond tar and feathers) be it drop all loot or disgard all loot. Knowing the greedy thirst for undeserved reward in my friends, they'll probably opt for the former, but if it becomes a game-breaking issue I'll stick with the disgard "rule". Cheers for that!

Also, In my most recent game I came up with, what I consider at least, a pretty decent means of doling out characters, each player draws 3 cards which they can choose between, if they don't want any of them they can opt to make a blind choice and have the card off the top of the character deck, but if they choose this option then they MUST keep this character with no choice from the original 3. In the game one of the players was being extra picky, having drawn a prophetess (he didn't want to be a girl!), a priest and a monk... quite possibly some of the least cool roles (disregarding the abilities). Choosing the wildcard instead he drew the elf (one of the weakest characters IMO) and raged, but having agreed to the rule he stuck with it, and even came quite close to winning! It was quite entertaining watching his frustration against a begrudged character at the beginning, by the midgame he was playing him up as the game's underdog and singing the rocky themetune as he grinded the dungeon, and at the end you could see how attached he'd gotten to his unlucky draw!

Much like the fate counters granting more choice to players (as mentioned in the interview), this character choice method gets everyone into the risk/reward mindset from the get-go and makes everyone feel more involved with their input (in an admittedly random game with much of the choices being left up to chance).

exion said:

Bah, single random FTW !

exion said:

Heh, 2nd best base game character according to my stats from 121 plays . Only the Troll has won more.

exion said:

Too much choice.

Drawing 3 characters is good enough.

Your friend should choose for the Prophetess. she is one of the best characters in the game.

Who cares if she is a woman..