by Kurgan » March 12th, 2019, 6:53 am
We're also assuming then, that if you kill off the bad guy figure who was the source of the controlling spell, that also frees the Hero, because otherwise my motivation as another Hero player might be to kill the tainted comrade as quickly as possible, as opposed to just backing off to allow him to keep trying to roll to save himself (while being a threat to everyone else).
A dominated Wizard is going to be pretty dangerous, but have many more opportunities to escape with his high mind points, so there's that.
When I played a scenario where I basically forced the Heroes to try to "cure" an infected Hero, it was quite a contest. Of course in that scenario I basically reduced him to the powers of a Zombie rather than giving him everything he'd normally have. It wasn't quite the usual scenario we are talking about here. Interesting stuff...
So if we say the other ways to free the Hero, other than some kind of counter-active potion, or the Hero rolling out of it, were to kill the Hero or to kill the bad guy who put him in that state, that seems reasonable. If Zargon can just suicide the Hero, that is a sneaky way to force him to use a life-saving ability or item, but the real thing is we want to see one of the Heroes suddenly becoming a threat to the others, then get saved at the last minute, right? Even if somehow Zargon takes control of a Hero, wipes out all the others and is just moving this guy all over the board, that guy still is "alive" in the sense that the player can keep rolling every turn to try to get out of it, and once he does, the Hero side has a chance again...
But the wild card here is that we agree the commanded Hero can do things a monster wouldn't otherwise be able to do... opening doors... Zargon could have him go searching for stuff, knowing he'd be triggering traps and wandering monsters (that wouldn't attack him, presumably, because they're on the same side?). Then again if we were to take the card literally and minimally, it just sounds like he can move and attack other heroes, period. I want it to be threatening I just don't want to open up a scenario that breaks the game.