During the preparation of my soon-to-be-released Talisman expansion, I have asked myself a question: How many cards of different types should I include? Will the proportions be different for Adventure, Highland and Dungeon cards? To make the creation process easier, I have counted all the Adventure cards from Talisman and all expansions (except Blood Moon).

The result might make it easier for you to keep the correct card proportions in your expansions - but of course no one will keep you from changing the proportions, if you think that it will benefit the gameplay

Yet another question was concerning the difficulty of the expansion - Is it too easy or too hard? Are there too many negative cards which will spoil the fun, or too many positive cards which will get rid of the challenge and make the game boring? Once again I have counted the cards from Talisman and its expansions (again, without Blood Moon) and divided them into 5 different categories according to their effect on the Adventurer:

Very Positive - strong magical items, cards with positive effects only

Positive - useful items, random cards with a higher probability for a positive result

Neutral - Almost useless items, Enemies with S/C of 1-3 ("easy prey"), random cards with an equal possibility for a positive or negative result

Negative - Enemies with S/C of 4-6, random cards with a higher probability for a negative result

Very Negative - Enemies with S/C of more than 7, cards with negative effects only

I hope it will be useful for some of you!

Nefarious,

You say "my soon to be released expansion". Are you one of the technicians on "Talisman" ?

Will you be updating this graph with Blood Moon, eventually?

What can you tell us not-quite-patient sorts waiting for The City?

thanks!

The graphs are great although it would be really awesome if you could include the actual percentages on the bar graph too for those of us who want to try and hit these proportions.

Oberon → No, I'm not one of those mysterious creators of the City, I'm the not-quite-patient sort

My project is an unofficial expansion for Talisman on which I have been working for more than two years. I believe it might be the biggest unofficial expansion ever released - and a work is getting closer to an end, so soon you will see for yourself…

TheeforsakenOne → Of course, Here are the modified graphs:

Thank you very much. Can see from the percentages that the Dungeon obviously hates players.

Thee Forsaken One said:

Its not as simple as that - first of all, the "very good" cards in the dungeons are usually better than those from the highland. Secondly, the high amount of "negative" and "very negative" cards is the result of dungeon having a lot of high S/C enemies - which is not that bad for a strong adventurer who visits dungeon in order to get some strong trophies.

Average and then Median of S and C for Enemies is a much more useful way to look at them than just positive/negative. As inferred, positive or negative where Enemies are concerned is a matter of the level of S/C that a character has… and that changes throughout the game. The more a character beefs up, the more positive it is to take on Enemies with a higher S/C for quicker character escalation. When combining this with the fact the Dungeon has slightly better overall items for S/C and/or Battle and Psychic Combat, these interactive statistics say more than the bar charts can.

Of course the difficulty is not just a matter of such simple graph. However, my goal was not to make a complete analysis of the adventure decks, as this would require including much more aspects such as the median Enemy S/C (as you suggested), assessing the average boost given by magical items, dividing negative/positive cards by card type etc.

But the goal of those graphs is helping the creators of the custom content to avoid making expansions with too many Strenght 12 epic dragons, or too "overpowered" expansions full of magical items with only a few Events. Its supposed to answer the question concerning the proper compsition of your expansion - not "where should I go to get the best items" or "dungeon is bad".

Here are some numbers:

Card # The Reaper The Frostmarch The Sacred Pool The Blood Moon Adventure Promo Cards The Dungen Adv The Higland Adv Totals %
1 15 8 18 22 15 0 4 5 87 17.94%
2 15 14 7 18 19 1 1 2 77 15.88%
3 11 13 7 18 10 0 0 1 60 12.37%
4 6 8 10 12 8 1 0 0 45 9.28%
5 36 33 20 33 43 0 0 0 165 34.02%
6 7 8 10 8 9 0 5 4 51 10.52%

Totals 90 84 72 111 104 2 10 12 485

NOTE: These are only Adventure cards and % is based off of 485 cards

Check this out

www.dropbox.com/s/wpc11gqx6q3egxk/dat1.jpg

My roommate and I are also putting the finishing touches on a Board Corner expansion and did similar deck breakdowns. We used as qualifiers: Strangers, Events, Objects, Places, Followers, and Enemies in four categories. High Strength (5 or greater) Low (4 or less) and High Craft (5 or greater) and low (4 or less). We have found that in our expansion we have a nice balance closer in difficulty to the Dungeon, which is what we were going for.

We hope to have the expansion done by the end of October, preliminary printings have gone well and we feel that is should be fun. We will post when its done. Thank you for the other deck breakdowns.