Ye Olde Inn

So, my gf and I got into the remaster, instantly fell in love with the game (for me again). What's funny is I didn't adequately explain how combat worked, which lead to a misunderstanding that turned out to be more our tastes... so here it is.

MONSTER RETALIATION
When a hero attacks a monster, there is a chance the monster will strike back using their defense roll. The process is as follows...
- if the monster was killed, no retaliation occurs.
- if the monster survived, any skulls that the monster rolled are immediately applied to the hero (who defend, as usual, with their rolled shields).

IMPACTS ON GAMEPLAY
- battles become a lot more stressful
- bigger opponents transform from damage sponges to terror
- we've had to buff the base Heroes a bit (I'll post those in another post). But generally it's a great trade off.


So yeah, probably not for everyone - but we're having fun with it.

This sounds interesting, definitely a way to increase difficulty a bit. You could potentially apply the same concept to the heroes, but I would consider only letting black shields from a heroes defence roll be used for retaliation. Black shields since heroes are already more likely to survive an attack. Would need playtesting to make sure it doesn't over power the heroes.

Love this rule. Your version triggers much more frequently than mine, as I've tied monster counterstrikes to rolling evil symbols + skulls on defense, and only given it to certain foes. I wanted the prerequisite that the monster must defend somewhat-successfully in order to retaliate at all.

Also, am I understanding right that the heroes roll an extra defense roll after attacking, to defend against the monsters counter-damage? I always had them defend based on what they rolled in the initial attack (I use black shields for them too; I wanted countering a counter to be harder), so I would have heroes with better weapons throwing four dice and making "well-rounded attacks" capable of dealing damage and parrying counter-strikes, etc, based on what they rolled. Maybe that's more or less what's happening here too, with no extra defense roll, and I just misread.

Love this rule though, I've been making it rather modular so it can be an ability for certain heroes and monsters, which escalates with their power level, starting out with very little chance for anyone to counter and climbing to the fully-elaborated rule, triggering more often with the chance to parry counter-damage, etc. Love that it can all play out without changing normal dice rolls at all, too. Very elegant.

so, my bad for not communicating clearly - but yeah, there's only 1 roll per combat. If the monster survives and is able to counter attack, the hero can only defend using white shields produced during their attack roll.

so as written above...
- barbarian with a broad sword and rolls 2 skulls and 1 white shield
- abomination/fimir rolls 2 skulls and 1 black shield in defense.
- RESULT = barbarian deals 1 point of damage to the abom/fimir, who survives the attack. The abom/fimir's 2 skulls are then counted against the barbarian's 1 white shield, so the barbarian loses 1 body point.


... next time we go at it, we'll try allowing the hero to count both white and black shields as defense against retaliation strikes. Not sure if that will FEEL fun, but it's worth a shot.

Jonfreeman wrote:so, my bad for not communicating clearly - but yeah, there's only 1 roll per combat. If the monster survives and is able to counter attack, the hero can only defend using white shields produced during their attack roll.

Okay totally; nah that's pretty much what I assumed. I love it.

I've tried white shields and black for heroes to block counters and I think I like how edge-case the black shields make it feel. I also tried variants where you have to miss to be open to retaliation, and variants where it triggers as long as your target didn't die.

I've also tried a variant where you need at least one black shield to even be able to block counters, but also one white shield per damage, so the black or white alone wouldn't be enough. That made counter-blocks a little less common than the single triggers, which I kind of liked, but it also leaned even more in favor of the bigger weapons. I want a way to give smaller weapons a bonus to countering or parrying. I'll see what triggers for retaliation and blocking retaliation I settle on, and then maybe certain weapons can reroll for these triggers, like the rapier or dagger, etc.

Also, I'm considering a variant where rolling the black shield leaves a hero "open" to a retaliation strike. This would naturally make larger attack dice weapons more unweildly and open to these hits, which might help balance their power, I'll see how that works. It would make ranged weapons more tempting but I'm reworking those too so maybe it will all mesh.

Anyway this idea in general has made the game more dangerous and my heroes can only benefit so much from their positioning tricks when the monsters can hit back. Really cool change to up the speed and danger.