these are a few of the ideas i am playing around with to test, but before i do it, i want a little input.

Lt. Encounters and Normal Encounters.

After the Heroes gain a "Party Victory" during a Lt. or normal encounter they receive a loot roll ( as per pg 18 SoB .) In addition they receive the following based on that dice role:

1CT per Power Enhancement rolled

2CT per Surge rolled

3CT per Blank rolled

This averages to an additional 6.67CT per encounter for the Heroes.

If The Heroes flee a Lt. or Normal encounter, the OL receives an amount of CT equal to HALF (rounded up and a minimum of 1 per hero) the total CT value of any hero that is alive when the party flees.

>>This rule gives both sides an incentive to stay in an encounter and not flee, as they will be giving up CT if they do. It also helps with keeping the campaign progressing along if the heroes are forced to go after Lts and a penalty to an OL who constantly uses the flee tactic.

Lt. Encounters on Ports

For lieutenant encounters on ports, use the island side of the ocean map (except if the Lt. is the ghost ship) setting up the Revenge like an normal island encounter without any glyphs. Kraken and The Void must be placed in water and cannot leave the water. Neither Monsters, nor Lts, may start within 5 spaces of the Revenge.

>>This gives heroes a better ability to fight lieutenants if they are siegeing a port.

Elven Sails Fix

If only one of the two trails the heroes travel have an encounter, the Heroes must choose that encounter.

>>This prevents the heroes from moving around the map in a way as to avoid encounters completely.

Monsters Vs. The Revenge

Any monster (or Lt.) with at least a 4 base may directly attack the Revenge. However the Revenge receives armor (that cannot be pierced) against this attack based on its size.

Sloop: 4 Armor

Galley: 7 Armor

Brigantine: 10 Armor

This Armor only affects non-cannon attacks. Monsters attacking revenge cause damage only to the revenge. Area of Effect non-cannon attacks made by monsters thats target the Revenge suffer innacuracy. Area of Effect non-cannon attacks made by monsters attacking figures do not hit the Revenge.

The Encounter card "Out for a Stroll" should now read "4 less Armor" instead of "4 Armor."

<<Because it just makes sense...

constructive input appreciated

Torin Negatia said:

Your heart's in the right place with this one, but the problem is that fleeing an encounter is sometimes a good tactical choice. As I understand it, the main problem with fleeing encounters in SoB is to do with the LTs only being pushed back one space instead of being sent back to the OL's lair (as they were in RtL.) There's no balance concern with heroes fleeing that I'm aware of.

There are other house rules I've seen that simply change the rules for LTs fleeing which I think are probably better suited to fixing the balance. I agree that you want to discourage the current (broken) LT fleeing rules, but you don't want to discourage fleeing in general. There are times when it is not only appropriate, but strategically wise to cut your losses. It's just that the LT's punishment for doing so is not really commeasurate for the deed.

steve-o, i completely agree with the fact that using flight as a tactic is very important, but a simple fix saying send them to the OLs keep is not viable nor is just sending them back to their starting location. First, all the keeps are landlocked (which none of the lts may move on land) and within 1 or 2 weeks of a city. likewise, all of the Lts. starting locations are within 1 to 2 weeks of at least one city. Darkwind, alone, has access to 4 cities in 1 weeks movement from his starting location. the only quick fix i've read so far that would work, does not discourage the tactic of flee every encounter. and that is the one where you remove the Lt. from the board and roll a power die at the beginning of the OLs turn to see if it comes back. personally, i do not like that fix.

as far as the player side goes, encounters are stacked against them with no incentive to even bother doing them, both lt and normal ones. since they now have a ship, that they have to spend a TRAIN action to repair in a city and pay 100g per 10 wounds or fraction there of (pg 31 of SoB.) this fact, above all things hampers the players, costing them extra time when trying to break multiple sieges. especially since the fastest route from south to north deals damage to the ship (The great maelstrom pg 15 SoB.)

(sigh)

doing the calculations out, the most viable way to make encounters worth the time it takes is to MAKE them worth the time. i looked at boosting the gold amounts, or even changing it to a dungeon loot roll with treasure possible, neither would have worked well. so i looked at doing something with CT, and this was the viable option i came with. (though after a recalculation, i would change the OL to gaining just 1CT per hero that fled if the party did a flight action. the OL would not get any if the party ended up with a victory and say, 2 ppl fled to keep from dying.)

even with this rule it only discourages either side from flight. it does not make it non-viable for a tactical action. since there is no HARD penalty for anyone fleeing as of now, it actually makes it more of a tactical action. with the CT gain in place, you will actually have to weigh the options of whether or not it would be worth fleeing, instead of fleeing as the best logical choice 99% of the time for either side.

my current campaign i am running is only halfway through copper, and i am going to toss these rules in (minus the elven sails fix, because the break is not as bad as it originally looked to me) to test them out. i would like if others would test them out also, because one group testing them is not realy enough to prove viability.

I've been thinking about the following simply change to fix lieutenant encounters. After some thought, I still can't see anything wrong with it, and it seems like it would virtually all problems––

A lieutenant may only flee an encounter during the first round of combat.

also--

(optional) When a lieutenant flees, the heroes decide what path it flees down.

After all, the problem with the Siren is not that she flees, it's that she flees after wearing down the heroes a bit, meaning that a TPK is going to happen sooner or later. What remains is that heroes need to return to besieged city regularly to quell the assault. But this was always the case with Road to Legend lieutenants anyway, and the home-port mechanic makes this even more attainable.

-pw

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I recently completed a solitaire SOB campaign where I tried a number of house rules.These were:

1 - Playtest a system to create new dungeon and sea encounters similiar to my RtL encounter cards on Board Game Geek.

2 - A new naval system using hexagons instead of squares so that ships can manuever.

3 - Campaign levels continued to be triggered by total CT levels.

4 - The final battle was triggered when the Heroes earned 200 CT.

5 - The heroes could purchase the staff of the wild from RtL which allowed them to move an extra land trail each week.

6 - I also used my RtL encounter cards to create random wilderness island levels since the ones in the SOB rule book have been so problematic to others.

There were two in regards fleeing:

1 - If the Heroes flee the encounter, they return to the location where they started the week.

2 - If a Lieutenant flees, the Lieutenant is removed from the board and misses the next two weeks. The Lieutenant is then placed back on its starting location at the start of third week and may then take a normal action.

I based rule number two on a comparison of the RtL and SOB boards. On average, the Lieutenants in SOB have quicker access to cities from their starting locations compared to their RtL counterparts. The two week penalty made them more equal.

As the campaign played out, even with the two week penalty, the OL was able to maintain alot of pressure on the Heroes. The Heroes were only able to trade in one set of map tokens, and never conducted secret master training. The week the Heroes triggered the final battle, the Ghost ship would have rolled to win the game. Since the OL was using the Fury of the Sun plot, the OL initially went after the three keys and by late copper had darkwind delivering the third key when the Heroes intercepted and forced him to flee. The OL then focused on razing cities. If the OL had focused on razing cities the entire time, the outcome may have resulted in even more pressure on the Heroes.

In the final battle the Heroes faced a Master of the Hunt with 599 wounds plus his ability to regenerate 200 wounds the first time he died. Each Hero had 74 wounds. The Heroes won in 10 turns, averaging 80 points of damage per turn. Afterwords, I realized a number of tactical mistakes I made for the OL. Also, if the OL had been using a different plot and focused on the final battle with his upgrades, I can see the final battle being a much closer event.

One result of the divine favor rule is that the OL will not have an over abundance of XP so each upgrade purchased must be carefully considered.

As a final note, setting the final battle at 200 CT for the Heroes was probably a little too low. This allowed the Heroes to survive only in a sloop during the campain. This forced them to stay on green and yellow trails and avoid the most powerful encounters. Additionally, they were able to force the Final Battle before the Ghost ship could really do any damage. With the naval system I was playtesting, the Heroes would not have been able to defeat the Ghost Ship with a sloop. They would have been forced to spend gold and XP on ship upgrades. This would have impacted the final battle.

Sorry for the lengthy post, I just wanted to contribute to the discussion of this great game. Thanks!

Dan Howell

phelanward said:

i thought about something similar (only i was going to try two or three rounds) but this ultimately removes the tactical choice of fleeing that steve-o and i both noted above. as an ol, i would rather have the choice 10 rounds into combat to say "oh ...., they got to strong for this Lt. i need to run." and give them some conquest for forcing me to flee (good job award!) rather than removing the option to flee if things get bad. granted as a player, i would love this if the ol was figured he could take us and was wrong, forcing him to loose the Lt.

rdh174 said:

1) i looked at your dungeon level deck on bbg about a month ago, one of the things i didn't like was that i would be hard to incorporate Level Specials and decent Named monsters into it (more the specials.) otherwise it was great, imo.

2) i only wish decent was hex based. i love hex based games. i ran all my old PnP games with hex base if i needed to do miniatures.

5) the players already have the advantage of ignoring encounters on land, i don't agree with letting them use the Staff. by sea, it only takes two weeks to travel from Garnott to wherever on the north side of the map.

6) i wish they would have made the islands a random deck draw rather than specific for each island. i've even thought of making some cheap cards to make them random.

in regards to fleeing

1) i agree and disagree with this. but mostly agree. while i'm using my ct rewards, i wont force them to go back though, that would be too much of a penalty.

2) this is about the only other option i've considered, but it still does not, imo, fix the system. it actually breaks it in favor of the players. it basicly gives them the option of moving to where the Lt. will spawn, doing dungeons on the way or nearby, and attack the Lt the turn the OL spawned it (after the OL moves it of course.) this basicly flips the game the other way entirely. in RtL (which i don't play very often, its the only set i don't own, but a friend has had for a few years,) the OL has the ability to do an LT rush getting enough out and across the map that he has the chance to raze cities once the Heroes begin striking at his Lts. giving a spawn delay takes that ability away since at most (and only two of the four avatars can) you may have 2 Lts at copper and with Elven Sails and the Compass, you can reach any city in two weeks from any other city. i don't have the map in front of me, so it may be 3 for some.

phelanward said:

hence the reason for using an Island map for Port battles (and only port Lt. encounters except ghost ship.) i believe that if the Lt. is going to stay and siege when the OL knows the heroes are coming, then they should be at a slight disadvantage. this in fact CRIPPLES the sirens special ability because the hero wont take the extra damage for running through the water. since the OL knows the heroes are coming anyway, he can choose to lift the siege and move before the heroes get there. while a LT like Darkwind, playing on the island only makes a slight difference in the tactics needed to play it.

i also play where an lt encounter is considered an ambush if the LT attacks the heroes and not one if the heroes attack the LT. basically giving first turn to the attacker.i don't think it is in the rules anywhere, idr.

i've just noticed that not a single person has commented on the Monsters Vs Revenge part of my original post. thats either a good thing or a bad thing, and i rly don't know how to take that ;P

I think that allowing all monsters to attack the ship is a mad idea. I would constrain it to melee monsters, since skeletons should not be able to snipe the ship.

I understand what you're saying about about lieutenant battles, I just think that it would vastly simplify things to give the choice of fleeing only in the first round. The dynamics you're otherwise introducing are so foreign to the game that there's no precedent to compare them to, and I think it could possibly mess things up more than you think.

I also don't think it's a hard choice to make to commit yourself to fleeing or trying to kill the heroes. It's just not a difficult calculation to make.

-pw

not all monsters, only monsters of a size of 4 or more.

phelanward said:

well, there is nothing to base the encounters in SoB, since they are vastly different. but im going to try it out to see if it breaks or makes a difference at all. my group only gets together about once a week for about 5 hours, so it'll take some time to see.

Never played SOB, just RTL, but I wonder if the lieutenants didn't heal between encounters if that would help balance things? Perhaps they could do a "train" type action at the OL's keep to heal fully. Maybe even killed minions shouldn't come back without the "train"...but that would get cumbersome to track.

this would be a decent idea if it wasn't for the fact that lts can't reach the OL keeps. the keeps are land locked and LTs may only travel over water.