My group’s solution for fairly adding Feat cards to RtL.


My game group has found and tested a way of fairly adding feat cards to Road to Legends that works very well, and is fast and simple.

I call it the Overlord reverse offer.

Will not repeat the many discussions here and on board game geek regarding the balance and house rules around this subject. In summary.

With a few exceptions most players found that adding feat cards, as they are written in tomb of ice, are fair and fun in the stand-alone dungeons, but in the (reasonably) tightly balanced system of RtL, are a little too much of an edge for the heroes. Being that only about 1 in 10 overlord posters find it balanced leads me to think this is a bit of “small pond” situations where the heroes are not very co-coordinated or experienced.

Most of the players that find the cards working well have come up with some kind of house rule that either limits the number of cards that can be in play, or they give a cost of some kind tot he heroes for using the cards.

For those interested. This is the system I came up with; we have tested it through the silver level campaign, and so far found it to be fun, fair and surprisingly balanced.

THE SYSTEM

I call it the Overlord reverse offer cost system.

We play the rules for feats as written in the Tomb of Ice book. Normal hand limit, one feat per hero per glyph opened.

When the players play a feat card, the overlord places a cost on the play of the card, in any combination of Conquest points and/or threat tokens. This is based on the ideal that the campaign was balanced enough that giving the heroes these potentially powerful at no cost to them was a bit on an unfair edge.

Now to keep the overlord “honest” is his demands, the heroes have the option to “pay” the overlord his demanded cost, OR they may reverse his offer, and make the overlord pay them, to discard and not use the card.

This system takes very little time, creates a little bit of interesting debate between the players, and in fact does add another element of choices to the game for both heroes and overlords with out added complications or time consumption.

To keep it simple, there are no back and forth offers and counter offers, and the overlord may not retract his demand. That could become time wasting, and besides this system is fair enough its unnecessary. One overlord demand is made; heroes may pay the cost, or reject, discard the card, and make the overlord pay.

Here are three examples, all real ones from our games.

EXAMPLE #1

A hero want to play the feat that allows the hero to move an extra three points because he wants to move attack to reach a beast man lurking around a corner. I as the overlord demand a cost of three threat tokens. I do not want to make conquest part of the price because one beast man that is likely to die anyways is not worth the risk of reversal.

The hero decides he really would like to kill that beast man and giving me three threat is not that big a deal. I get three threat; hero moves extra three, and kill the beast man. I would have been downright gleeful if the attack failed, but the beast man died. Heroes were happy and thought it worthwhile as it freed up the other heroes in ways they wanted.

EXAMPLE #2

A mage forges ahead of the party into a room to use a breath attack to toast a large group of minor monsters. (I had hordes of the things in play.) He roasts them killing some of them, badly wounding others. He plays the feat card that gives the mage Aura 4. A lot of the beasts are weak enough this means they can’t engage. I am still not willing to put conquest on the line, but I really want to be able to punish that mage. At the same time I can’t cost the card too high that it hurts me a lot of the demand is rejected. I ask for 5 threat. The heroes figure the mage is too vulnerable anyways, and the aura may or may not save him, so they reject my offer, discard the feat card, and I pay 5 threat. A part of this choice was based on the fact that I was low on threat, and I had to discard cards to pay the cost. Heroes were happy, they killed my threat pile for the turn and weakened my hand. I was happy, as I was able to pounce on the mage and kill him.

EXAMPLE #3

Nanok the Blade has only been killed once all campaign. I used green threat to put pierce in the deck and promised myself he would go down in the epic dungeon the heroes were in. On a level where I have a swarm of fast razor wings and Nanok weakened by traps and with a curse token from killing a master dark priest. I throw the wad at him to get those 5 points. On an aimed master razor wing attack I play pierce and rip off his armor. I should kill him with this attack. Nanok plays the feat card the gives him an extra armor 4. This play is enough to make the attack likely to fall a little short, and the master razor wing is my last attack. This feat card is very well likely to rob me the conquest. I demand 1 conquest point for the feat card. I want something out of it. The heroes decide they may loose him anyways as they are not sure they have enough firepower to clear the room enough, and I may just have traps to finish him anyways. They decide to reverse the offer and make me credit the party a conquest point. They also figure this balances off the curse token anyways. I kill Nanok and get 5 conquest, heroes get one conquest for rejecting my demand. I feel the heroes made a good choice because of the unknown of my hand. As it happens I had no damage dealing traps and felt it was now or never, so both parties were happy with this result.

THOUGHTS BEHIND THIS SYSTEM

I have other examples of the systems use in our games. But these stand out as most relevant examples of how it works, plus I remembered them best for some reasons.

We liked this system for the following reasons.

1) Doesn’t monkey with the system for getting feat cards. Some common house rules involve only the hero that opens the portal gets them. Or they like to limit the hand size. I think that would be fair too, but this barely gives a taste of feats to the players. This system allows for full use of the feat cards.
2) It recognizes that there is a value to the cards, the heroes must consider when and where they play them.
3) It is overall more of a boost for the party then the overlord, as it should be, but they are not without a consequence.
4) The reverse offer aspect ensures the overlords demands are not unreasonable, what he demands must be a price is he willing give up.
5) A “real market value” is placed on the cards. I have read of some house rules creating different values for different feat cards, as some are clearly better then others. Problem is that the value of the cards is highly situational. An extra three movement on a hero that just wants to catch up to the party, is worth much less then a battle action that lets a heavy fighter attack an end boss twice! This system allows the cost of the cards to be scaled according tot he situation.

Now there may be some players that have introduced the feats to RtL and have no problems with it. Cool that’s great for you. This post is for players that have found the cards to be fair in stand-alone dungeons where the overlord gets full treachery, but find them a little too much in the heroes favor in RtL.

This sounds like a fantastic way to handle feats in RtL. I'll be sure to try it out in my next campaign. Thanks for sharing it.

Okay, this is a house-rule I like. Now, to persuade the guys we want to pull out Descent again.

Was able to test this a little bit more on the weekend. This system appears to work very well.

I would like to get some input from others that try it to see there experiences.

It is an interesting idea. It is, of course, (almost, except see below) a STRICT advantage for the players, since unless the Overlord offers 0 threat, they could ALWAYS accept the offer and therefore always be SLIGHTLY better off than before (of course, I admit than in practice the Heroes would almost always keep playing the Feats if the cost was only 1 threat).

There is, however, a major problem in allowing Conquest to be part of the deal. This is that Conquest beyond a certain point is useless, and that the Heroes can't SPEND it fast enough. As a simple example, if I were using your system, then whenever the first Feat card hit the table, I would demand 600 Conquest. The heroes won't pay me of course, so THEY get the 600 conquest. But then as soon as they finish the current dungeon, the end-game triggers immediately and they will be going up against the Avatar with only 1 Training session in Tamalir to use their precious 600 conquest. Now the Avatar fights ARE easy, but shop heroes still won't stand a chance. For this reason, I think you'd have to limit it to Threat being the only price that can be offered, or at the very least cap the amount of Conquest that can be offered at something very low (no more than 5 for sure, maybe less).

A couple of questions require clarifications:

1) What happens when the Overlord cannot pay the Threat he demands, even if he drops his whole hand?

2) What happens in the Final Battle, when both threat and CT are non-issues?

Ty for comments. I didn't think about an artifical end game from that system. See we are introducing feat cards at the beginning of silver, so that kind of end game effect was not on our mind. I was also considering that the overlord LOOSE the amount of conquest he put on the line instead, could go same way for heroes... I will have to think about that more. Perhaps a cap of 5 would be a simple solution

As far as herog advantage goes, I agree. However it is still better then the heros getting the power of the feat cards with no cost. And yes the overlord can issue no threat demand if he is willing to eat whatever feat cards the heroes throw at him and dosn't want to risk lossing threat. Since rules as written heroes just get off the feat cards with no cost or issues, I still see this as an improvement. In fact I have given out no cost demands on cards I thought the heros might be willing to toss out just because.

We do play that the cards get tossed out at the end of each dungeon. After all in the regular games you do not carrey them from quest to quest. We thought that was fair. It also means the heros have no feat cards till they hit a portal, so they can't hose the overlord too bad in the first dungeon. I know this is a small change from what I said up above. I would make the same call for the final battle. The avator is soft enough vs tooled up heros, so they do not need help at all there.

So fair I have ruled that the overlord must pay threat he is short out of future cards/threat before he can play cards again, otherwise he can make crazy demands with impunity when he is low on threat/cards. But THIS can be too hard on the overlord on the back end. I will have to think about that more. Perhaps I should rule this one in favor of the overlord and say he only has to pay what he has, and to balance that you make a cap on the threat demand that can be made.

I tried to make the system workable, but keep it as simple as possible. So far this system worked very well for us, but I can see benifits to the system both ways by putting caps on the overlord demands in order to cut out "gamey" abuse of the system, because obvisosly that is not my intent.

For conquest bets, an abundance of conquest only hurts the heroes' cause, so it's always worth the OL's time to bet the max conquest possible, even if the bet cap is very low (5 ct or lower). If the mechanic is for one side or the other to gain conquest, it won't work, since it artificially speeds up the game. I'm not sure what conquest loss would do.

Threat bets work, because feats generally negate the effect of the OL's threat expenditures. To me, a good hard cap for threat bets is whatever the OL has when making the bet, allowing threat-boosting discards before betting. This simplifies and prevents the main abuse of the threat bet, namely betting more than you have in an attempt to get back more than you started with.