I wanted to get people's thoughts/methods for dealing with hero selection at the beginning of a game.

Do you just play the standard rules of each player draws a random hero and go with it, or do you have give the heroes extra chances to form a balanced party, get rid of completely crap characters (like Aurim), etc?

I'm generally the Overlord in my group (with 4 heroes), and to this point I've allowed each player, if they choose, to put the hero card they draw back in the pile, reshuffle, and draw a new card (completely overriding the original selection in every way). This is done in sequence, so the first player does it blind, the second only knowing who the first hero is, etc. Is this too much of a benefit to the heroes? Am I being too nice to them?

Part of me wants to just play the rules as is, but part of me feels that hero composition can make or break a game before it even starts and so I've tried to give them a bit of a better chance to get a balanced party.

I currently think everyone getting a redraw is too powerful, and so I've considered allowing one total for the entire party. How does this sound? Or should I just play the rules as they stand? For those who play the rules as is, do you find that the heroes sometimes get screwed over with a horrible party that really has no chance of winning?

Sorry for all the questions...I've just been really wrestling with this in my head. Thanks for the help.

The rules actually say that you can deal one random hero to each player OR that you can let everyone pick exactly the hero they want. I've seen a ton of different systems posted for picking heroes. The most common one is probably dealing each player three characters and letting them pick one to play, which was popularized by its inclusion as an official rule for campaign play in the Road to Legend expansion, but there are a ton of variations: individual redraws, party redraws, picking from piles separated by primary trait, picking the entire party from a random pool, "buying" heroes based on conquest values, designing custom heroes (there's a system for that from the designer , and a more detailed one I made , and lots of designs that aren't based on any hard rules at all), with or without selecting randomly from the custom designs once they're made.

"One redraw per hero in order" is harsher than most of the house rules I've seen.

I suggest adjusting your rules for party selection to the supposed quest difficulty. You are the OL, so check the quest map and try to figure out how hard it may become for the heroes. Then suggest a party selection rule for this quest to them. If you play without AoD or WoD all base game quests apart from #7 should be playable with quite strict selection rules apllied (the whole party may redraw one hero in total seems fair to me, we did the same). If you add treachery from AoD or WoD or play quests from those expansions it gets more difficult for the heroes, so giving them more options to choose from might become neccessary. If you add ToI heroes get a boost from feats, so you might want to reduce their options again.

Generally I prefer (as a hero as well as an OL) to reduce the party selection options as much as possible. Thus the variety of the game shows best. It is a challenge to deal with a "bad" hero or a weird party, and it is fun to detect rather hidden strenghts or to develope uncommon strategies to compensate for some hero weaknesses. On the other hand I find it boring to have the same few characters in play all the time.

kalev said:

I suggest deciding on a hero selection method that works for your group and sticking with it. Draw 1 replace 1 is harsher than most (as Antistone said) but if his group likes it, more power to them. Besides which, hero selection is only one of many aspects that influence how well the hero party will do. sh*tty heroes with good skills and lucky treasure draws can still hold their own. Awesome heroes with crappy skills can still get trounced.

There's no particularly easy way to tell how "hard" a given quest is without playing it, there certainly isn't any kind of absolute metric for measuring how hard a quest is, so changing the hero selection method based on something as esoteric as this seems difficult and mostly pointless to me. Picking heroes isn't important enough to the overall game play to justify this level of tweaking, IMHO.

If the OP and his crew are unhappy with their current method, Antistone has provided a litany of other ideas already, they can play with those until they find one they like.

Interesting...I thought I was being generous by allowing ANY reselection.

I'll have to think on this some more.

What do you use, Steve-O?

Steve-O said:

That is what we tried but we found ourselves readjusting the rule repeatedly, especially after adding expansions to the game. What we mostly did is starting with harsh rules. Then we softened it for the following shots when the first one was not won by the heroes.

Steve-O said:

You are right in general, but still there are some things you actually can tell about the difficulty level of a quest. You can assume whether spawning will be easy or difficult. You can check whether treasures come in early or rather late. The distance between glyphs plays a role as well as special quest rules. Monster types and monster locations can also be taken into account ... also there were some attempts made by players to rate quests which can be found at BGG if I am not mistaken.

We play the basic "everybody gets a random guy" way. It seems like we have a decent heroes-to-OL win ration (especially if you discount the quests we did with only two heroes).

Antistone said:

Out of curiosity, when picking from piles with primary trait, where do you put heroes like Lyssa or Arvel Worldwalker, who are not clearly best in any one role?

The main concern my friends have is drawing a party that is lacking in one key area (tanking, running, ranged damage, etc)

I believe the poster who used this method said that heroes with no unique highest trait were distributed more or less randomly among the piles. I think that may have been before ToI came out, but presumably Arvel Worldwalker (the only 2-way tie) would NOT go into the magic pile.

One could also argue that they should go in the melee pile, since melee is probably the most viable weapon choice for heroes that don't have any good traits.

Of course, Zyla is commonly regarded as signifcantly overpowered, while Red Scorpion, Lyssa, and Aurim are all regarded as being very weak, so simply leaving them out would also be a defensible choice. I think Arvel Worldwalker is the only "tied trait" hero that's generally considered balanaced.

MR Suplex said:

I used to arrange decks in stacks of three based on primary trait, and there are two things my group would agree to do with the likes of Lyssa, Aurim, Red Scorpion, and whatever other train wreck of a character has been built with one die in each trait.

First, we would just throw them out. The idea of sticking booby-prize characters into the deck is annoying. There were hopes that expansions would eventually make these characters more viable, but there hasn't been much progress in this direction.

Later, we'd distribute them amongst the three stacks as evenly as possible. We did this because it seemed necessary to balance the broken characters with some sucky ones.

It's worth noting that for whatever reason (perhaps no reason at all), the number of "pure" (i.e. three-dice) ranged characters is significantly smaller than you'll find for melee and magic. Even Laurel, archer extraordinaire that she is, has only two dice in ranged. So, any leftover from the "suck pile" probably go here.

Since we have two players that will always insist on playings "tanks" no matter what they draw, in the future we will likely use the draw three method, but instead of dealing them out so a person is stuck with the three they get, they can instead select from one of the four sets of three that are laid out. This does nothing to unbalance the game in the party's favor, but it does give players a better chance of playing what they want to play.

steveg700 said:

I don't follow your reasoning here. Are you suggesting that someone hoping for a 3-die ranged hero would be happier with a 1/1/1 than with a 2-die ranged hero?

If anything, doesn't this suggest the split heroes should go in the other piles, to "dilute" them and bring their average down closer to that of the ranged pile?

steveg700 said:

One could also hypothetically divide heroes into categories of "tank", "runner" and um..."other". Or something. But the amount of overlap between "tank" and "melee" his huge; maybe 80-90% (depending on your definition of "tank"). For some reason, FFG chooses to make almost all of their melee heroes conquest 4, almost all of their ranged heroes conquest 3, and almost all of their magic heroes conquest 2. (Of course, some 3-conquest heroes are better tanks than some 4-conquest heroes, but the good 3-conquest tanks also tend to be melee.)

Also, while there are obvious advantages to a party for being able to use different weapon types (due to random draws), it's not obvious there's an advantage to having a mixture of tough and fast; some players argue it's best to have all of one or all of the other.

If everyone likes tanks but you want a mixed-weapon party, you could also try my hero editor .

Antistone said:

Yeah, I removed Zyla before our first game. Between my own instincts at reading her stats and the consensus I saw online, I saw no reason to keep her. I may do the same for the weak characters as well.

Thank you for the input everyone. This has been a great discussion and I hope I'm not the only one who got new ideas from this thread.