Good morning all! Picked up the 4th Edition of Talisman and literally just played our first game this weekend. It went very smooth, it was great fun, and we had an absolute blast. However, my younger brother encountered a streak of bad luck and his poor dwarf character was mercilessly pummeled over and over again. This brings up the questions I had to the experienced players.

• Is there anyway to increase the character's Life? I'm guessing no, I don't see anyting about it in the rule book. With the streak of bad luck, in both drawing cards and die rolls, my poor brother was constantly limping off to get healed. Can Life be increased like the Strength and Craft attibutes?
• Can greedy characters amass more gold? Back to my poor younger brother. Healing wiped out his gold pretty fast and he had a difficult time getting more. Did we just miss the gold cards in the adventure deck?

Thanks all! We're ready for another round this weekend!

You can always gain stats over your starting values(the ones printed on the character's card).

Whenever you heal lives , you can only gain up to your printed value

Whenever you gain lives, you can gain extras.So a Troll at full health(6 lives)that gains 2 lives, will have 8.

Of course, gaining lives when you're short of your life value is the same as healing.

Same thing with fate, and of course craft and strength.

Except that craft and strength can never drop below the character's starting values.

So a level 1 troll who is instructed to lose 1 craft when he has only his starting 1 craft, will not be affected

Also remember that the highly random nature of Talisman will lead to very different experiences.

Next time you play you might end up with too much gold and nothing to buy.

Thank you Triple "A" and zealot12 . We figured it was just a run of bad luck and my poor brother got the brunt of it. He hung in like a champ and kept on playing; we were all feeling sorry for him. He's already stated next time, it's the Troll for him.