Warning: Potential spoilers for Off the Rails adventures.
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So I was reading through the Off the Rails adventure, and it seems like the first scene might be almost impossible to get through at low player counts. The scene starts the heroes in the last car and they are ultimately trying to get to the front car, and there are six cars to get through with only eight scene tracker entries.
Moving between cars is done one of two ways: getting two overcomes to break through the airlocks between cars or getting one overcome to climb outside the train, make your way to the next car, and enter the next car from the outside. Taking the latter "outside" approach also introduces an extra environment threat to the scene.
My first question is: Are the overcome actions required to move to the next car per-hero or per-group? In other words, does each hero have to get these successes individually to move, or does only one hero need to get them for the entire group to move? The first method (overcoming the airlock doors) sounds like it should only need to be done once per group, because once the airlock is broken through, no one else should need to do it. But the second method sounds more like a per-hero thing (because it's described as literally going out, hanging on the side of the train, and making your way over to the next car - not something someone else could do for you). The text states that the latter method is faster, but it seems like it would be slower, because everyone would need to do it - in a group of five heroes, you could break the airlock with two total actions, but to go outside would take five. And even if the outside method could also be done by a single hero for all the other heroes, it's still not any faster if the extra environment threat it introduces causes even one hero to spend even a single action to deal with it. Only if the extra threat results in zero actions taken by heroes to deal with it does it actually become faster.
My second question is: Doesn't this setup mean that the scene tracker is woefully short for the task at hand at low player counts? The adventure says it's appropriate for 2-6 players, and I'll probably be playing with the low end of that - two or three players. With two players, the scene tracker allows the players sixteen actions total before the scene ends in defeat.
- If twelve of those are taken up with opening the six airlocks, that leaves only two non-door-opening actions for each hero in the entire scene. With those two actions, they have to deal with six superpowered lieutenants plus whatever the environment and twists throws in!
- If they go outside and we rule those overcome actions are per-hero, that's still 12 actions needed, so they're still looking at having only two actions each to deal with everything, only now they have six extra environment threats on top of what they'd deal with by going through the airlocks.
- If they go outside and we rule only one hero needs to overcome the challenge for both of them to move, then movement between cars only takes six out of the sixteen available actions, but that still leaves each hero only five actions each to deal with six lieutenants, six extra environment threats, and all threats introduced by twists and the environment turns, which is better but still doesn't seem realistic.
(Things ease up a bit at three players, but also keep in mind that the above is assuming that all those overcome-to-move checks are passed, too, which certainly isn't a foregone conclusion when multiple entities they'll encounter are hinder-givers. One of the lieutenants even has the ability to prevent up to three heroes from moving!)
So, there are a lot of cool enemies and challenges going on in this scene...and the heroes will be spending most of their time just opening doors, unable to do anything to really interact with the villains and environment threats. Seems like that will be a drag for the players. Am I missing something here with the way this scene is intended to be run?