Ye Olde Inn

by **Jazzdrummer** » April 29th, 2018, 3:46 pm

Not sure if this is the best place to ask this but I know there are quite a few custom armories out there. Is there one that is considered to be the most balanced to the vanilla game that doesn't go overboard?

Mine is kept the same for original items. For new items i tried to balance them by looking into how much each extra Cd6, added feature like diagonal, to negative like 2 handed.

Link to Armoury

The powerful items are RARE. Before buying an item a Hero needs to roll for stock, this can result in it being unavailable, last one (double price) or a discount. Using the Charm potion before rolling increases the result. Spicing up the pre/post quest game. The prices on a few things have seen a few small tweaks here and there over the years but I'm still a bit unsure on the 20's and 50's, should we use 80's or 75's/25's etc. I wanted to try add a hidden logic, theme to the maths. There's also a body restriction worked in, replacing 'May not be used by the Wizard' as there are many other non Wizards that we all begin to add, that wouldn't be able to use them.

The list grew over time, adding what different people wanted to play, hopefully something for every one. Many bring about lots of other game mods that have been discussed over the years. It's not really mine but a compilation of all the ideas I've seen, a best of.

Any ideas or new weapons people want to see, I'd love to discuss it, get them added.

by **Anderas** » April 30th, 2018, 1:53 am

I put some thought and effort in my equipment system.
The equipment progression is at a very measured step;
the price table is not written on the cards to make it
changeable;
There are items up to 4 and a half, 5 dice;
and there are lots of gaps to put custom selfmade
items in between.
I use the colored HQ dice, however for most cards I also
made a pure white combat die variant.
Check out also Cynthia's and Mohawk's posting in my
thread, they are nice idea-givers for custom items.

The cards have a super-thick boundary so that the
professional printer won't complain. They fit with the
small card standard size, so you could for example
use Zombicide dashboards with them. :-)

Those
dashboards are quite cool, it's the only part of the
game that i still use.

Click here to seem my cards

That said, the base game has quests with very different
difficulties. If you talk about balanced equipment, you
also talk about balanced quests.

The Maze, the rescue of Sir Ragnar and
the first Witch Lord Quest are probably the easiest
ones. Ollar's labyrinth is maybe the most difficult.
The Trial is super-difficult for beginner Heroes, on the
other hand, for Heroes with 3-dice-weapons the quest
is quite measured, for Heroes with 4-dice-weapons
the quest is a bit too easy.
If you play them exactly in order, the difficulty ramps
roughly up - that has been well designed as far as you
can go with playtesting -
but if you want to profit from some of the great stuff
here in the forums, you should let yourself the freedom
to throw in a side quest here and there. I can really
recommend Whitebeard's Questpack, Goblin-King's
Labyrinth, The rescue of Sir Ragnar (as quest pack),
Slev's custom quests... And that are only the ones I read
in detail. Knightkrawler takes another attempt to the
Base Game Book by freeing the map and the monsters
from their positions, changing a bit the way that the
game plays.
There are lots more that i didn't mention even if they're
really worth it, sorry to all the others!

However; there is one problem connected if you throw
in the other Quest Packs as side quests or parallel quests:
The Heroes buy their equipment and then the difficulty
is not anymore appropriate everywhere. To solve this,
I made a quest book in four colors so that you can roughly
ramp up together with the Heroes. You can find it in
my signature. It is not as beautiful as other fan made
quests, but has inherent balancing. I tinkered with the
balancing instead of the design.

If you use that, you can use any equipment system you
like. Play the rescue of Sir Ragnar with fully equipped
heroes, they will lose as many body points as a newfound
group in the original quest.

You can also balance the quests yourself by using Mohawk'S
Questimator.
It's a tool that calculates the fights with a Marcov Chain.
It can calculate the fights only, but it is sufficient.
So you add the traps that you guess the Heroes will spring
and three times the wandering monster, and any magical
or special effects that shortcut the fight calculation, and
then your are there.
Questimator gives you the estimation with +/- 5 BP, but
that's ok: from my experience the heroes themselves
work toward the average in the middle of the range.
If they lose more, they become very careful, if they
lose less BP, they search a lot more for treasure. :mrgreen:

From my experience, if you make quests
that cost roughly 15 to 17 BP, you risk losing the life of one
Hero and threaten the others enough to make it exciting.
For comparison, The Trial had 21-22 BP as difficulty for
a beginner's group and often costs 2-3 Heroes the life.

For adults, i would recommend 17 BP quests,
for kids rather 10-12 BP in order to be not frustrating.

Wow

sorry for the rant. I'm at home looking for my sick child
who's in the bed anyway.