I got a two-fold question I´m hoping someone will be kind enough to answer for me:

First of all, I´ve noticed that the experience counters are not evenly divided among the 3 combat stats (ranged, melee and magic). To be more precise my game has twice the number of experience counters for melee than for ranged and magic individually. I´m wondering if that´s how it is meant to be and if so I´d really like to know why that was decided.

Secondly my gaming group and myself have wondered if the heroes are limited to raising their level by the number of experience counters. In other words: if you run out of experience counters does this mean you cannot gain any more levels? (not that we have run out of all the counters but last game we ran out of ranged and magic counters)

Nerdmeister said:

Melee has more counters because is the easier feature to improve and most Challenges rely on high Melee values. The majority of Heroes is also Melee-related, even though you can develop them as you wish, and many Items are designed for Melee. Counters and Item types are strictly connected: Ranged = less items and counters, Magic = average items and counters, Melee = many Items and counters. Of course Mind (Ranged) is the best trait to improve and it should be limited somehow; Spirit (Magic) has many Items and Hero Abilities to be used "Before Combat". Body (Melee) is brutal hand-to-hand combat, with the only exception of White Blade.

Nerdmeister said:

I cannot recall where I read this, but somewhere it is written that you can keep track of experience on a piece of paper, if you don't have Counters. But come on! How many bonuses do you need to win the game?

The_Warlock said:

Actually I agree very much with this. The other 2 people I was playing with last game could´ve finished it at least 1½ before they finally did but for some reason they found it funny(!?) to just keep drawing sea adventures going about it with a "my stats are so high this is an automatic success so Im not even gonna bother rolling the dice"-kinda attitude. They only tried the Island of Dread part when I pointed that out to them . At which point the first of them to try it walked all over the encounters there.

And in case you´re wondering: I was in bad luck that night, seeing as I couldn´t get the items I wanted and kept having allies dying on me. Otherwise I´d have gone for it myself alot earlier . As it was I was actually trying to buy time while they where busy being cool to try and swipe victory from them. Yet another drawback for me and time slipping from us I decided to point out their flaw (foolishly perhaps)

Anyways thanks for answering it´s been a real help

Nerdmeister said:

Unfortunately Runebound and many other games where time is not limited can turn into such bad experiences. Once it happened that I played a 5-player game and was the most unlucky one, rolling 5,4,3,2 when all I needed was a 6. Runebound is really harsh if your game goes wrong and other players linger in their wealth and power. It's really annoying to see people being able to win and refuse to try it. The only way to avoid such situations is the Doom Track (base game only!), but people that have such power-player attitudes usually refuse the Doom Track, because they can't accept the risk and the strict strategy needed for victory.

I like Runebound very much, but if you play it with the wrong persons it can be frustrating. The worst situation was a 5-player game that lasted from 15.00 until 22.30 in the evening, with a break for a pizza at 20.00; that's way too much for Runebound. Doom Track would have stopped the game at 19.00, which was the right time (40 mins per player is the right time); I gave up the game at pizza time, 'cause I had been too unlucky and other players depleted all Green and Yellow Jewels, even though they were able to face Red Challenges. And I hate the result of these games, as people begin to consider Runebound and such complex games as incredibly long adventures that take a full day to complete, eventually refusing to play too often. It's not the game, it's how you play it!

I fully agree with you...it's not the game, but how you play it!

I've have had my own share of 4 player 8 hour Runebound (no class cards) and 4 player 10 hour Runebounding (with class cards). I have eventually managed to whittle down the game time to under 3 hours including setup and take down (with class cards) with the same group! This is considering all the expansions and hairy house rules thrown in, which inevitably bog down our games. It is doable people! Believe it!!

Now once I order 3 sets of movement dice, things may be kicked up another notch!

Pass the movement dice after someone moves, and while he does his adventure phase, another player can roll..

What we usually do for lack of exp counters is to stack up the exp counters on our char sheet so that only the top one counts. I.e there might be 3 in a stack where the bottom two are not mind but if the top one is all of them are. We also limit it to 3 a stack to make it easier to count total bonus. Components tend to run out pretty fast in a 6 player game, it's not even enough for all the players to go +2 life each, or 3 players who each want four +2 mind or magic.

I disagree though that most challenge are melee oriented, hence melee is most often used. We find that all 3 traits seeing roughly equal use in the game.

Sorry to be bumping an old post but i thought it best not to start a new thread on this. Anyway to the point, while playing the basic runebound game recently I had a discussion with another player on wether or not the experience markers were actually meant to limit the amount of levels the total number of player could gain in a given stat. Let's say we have 15 ranged experience markers does that mean that among the four players we could only gain 15 levels in ranged and then no more?

I argued that the rules are "no limitations on experience counters gained" (paraphrasing) so if we run out of counters we can record it somewhere else. He was adament that once the counters run out no one else could gain a +2 to ranged, since it was his game we were using he won the argument. Anyway by what I am reading here it sounds like I was correct but I can not find information in the errata or FAQ to confirm this.

Does anyone know of an official release I can bring to back me up next time?

Thanks

When we play (usually 3 players), we limit ourselves to only those counters in the game. To us, this adds another strategy. Usually competition for the range tokens.

In the booklet it clearly states in the experience section, "There is no limit to the number of experience counters you can have."