Scenarios

General GTG General Discussion
1

One of the things I like about the Legend of Drizzt board game are the scenarios. Each scenario gives you a story-based reason why you’re doing what you’re doing (which is otherwise basically the same dungeon crawl each game), and adds a small change to the victory conditions for each gaming session to make it feel different. I’ve been wondering for a while if there were some way to add that same kind of storyline to SotM, which could connect individual play sessions and make each one slightly different and interesting.

So I wrote up a series of scenarios for SotM. Each one (there are 13 of them so far) fits together like episodes of a TV show so that earlier events affect later scenarios, with the intention being that each time you play a new game of SotM you’ll feel like you’re advancing a story rather than playing something isolated. And the additional victory conditions in each scenario should add a bit of variety to the otherwise usual formula of just beating up the villain until he or she falls over.

Here’s my problem though: my gaming group (the wife and kid) are inconsistent gamers at best, so I don’t have the resources necessary to properly playtest the scenarios. Maybe the additional victory conditions are great, or maybe they just sound good but aren’t any fun in actual practice. Or maybe when I’ve set some value to X, it turns out that’s really too much (or too little) and it should be Y instead. I don’t know.

So I wrote up the scenarios anyway because that was a fun enough project on its own, and I figure I’ll post them here in case anyone out there with a healthy and recurring gaming group was interested in trying these out to add some spice to their normal SotM play sessions. I’m happy making any changes that people suggest after playing through the scenarios, or adding new scenarios based on new ideas. Since I can’t take this any further on my own, it’s time to see if it’s got any legs as an open source thing. :slight_smile:

These 13 scenarios only utilize the base game’s heroes, villains, and environments. I don’t know how many people out there have Rook City yet, so I kept things basic. It would be easy enough to add Rook City scenarios to the list later on.

Let me know what you think.

sotm_scenarios.rtf (70.3 KB)

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This is wonderful. I made an account to ask about something like this, as I have completed most of the story challenges just by playing the game.

Great work! I can pledge my services as a playtester, but unfortunately, I don’t have anything like a stable gaming group. Most of my plays are multi-hero solo. So I can let you know if there are any mechanical problems, but as far as group dynamics, I’ve got not much.

I haven’t read through all of them yet, but are any of these scenarios supposed to be conducted on advanced mode?

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Multi-hero solo should be just fine for playtesting. All we’re looking for is finding out if the new win conditions are fun. And if they’re not, can we change them so that they are?

There’s nothing about any scenario that dictates Advanced mode one way or the other, so if you typically play against a villain in Advanced mode, go for it. My only hope is that the win conditions add complexity or novelty to the fight with the villain without necessarily adding extra difficulty. I trust the playtesting the SotM guys already did regarding the difficulty of the encounters, and I didn’t mean the scenarios to be a second level of Advanced mode. Although, I suppose that if you tell players they can’t win unless they do some additional thing they weren’t planning on otherwise doing, that that must raise the difficulty by some amount.

4

These look highly entertaining, Spiff. Many thanks for sharing - will definitely provide any feedback from our group using them. 8)

5

Wow. These look really good. I only read up through the first three so far and am very impressed both at the stories and at the new goals.

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For #7, Lightning Rod, it looks like there’s no way for the counters to be depleted. All 4-6 only take away one counter, but at the start of the environment turn one counter is added. I may be missing something, but perhaps 5-6 should remove two counters. It might also be a good idea to remove the automatic counter and just make rolls of 1-2 add a counter.

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Good catch. I’ll update my notes to remove the automatic counter. How about if the roll results look like this:

(1) Add one counter to the net.
(2) Add one counter to the net.
(3) Do nothing.
(4) Remove one counter from the net.
(5) Remove one counter from the net and deal 1 lightning damage to each hero target.
(6) Remove two counters from the net and deal 1 lightning damage to each villain target.
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I like it. (6) seems like a good balance of good and bad, too.

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Session reports so far!

Scenario One: My first go was Visionary, Wraith, Legacy, against Advanced Mode. I played Advanced Mode, because that’s how I always play, and I saw no reason for this to stop me. I played Wraith and Visionary because that’s what the randomizer told me to do, not that I was complaining.

With Wraith and Visionary on the team, I must admit, I thought I couldn’t lose. Those two are so good at villain control that I thought they’d have him locked down without a second thought. I screwed up somewhere, though. Probably the first turn, where faced with the choice between Precognition and some ultimately irrelevant thing, Visionary went with the irrelevant thing. Blade took the chance to play “Consider the Price of Victory”. We would go on to reduce him to one hit point, then allow him to destroy the world. Dr. Wagner was fine, aside from that whole world-just-got-destroyed thing.

I immediately set it up and tried again. This time the heros were Tachyon, Legacy, Haka. (Pretty much all of my games are via randomizer.) This proved to be a brutally efficient team, as Legacy got out Inspiring Presence then stood there looking good, while Tachyon chewed through her deck and Haka went to town on Blade and his things. We took out his Impulsion Beam in about five turns, without any especially nasty villain cards getting played. The next round, we reduced his flipped form to dead, thanks to a Lightspeed Barrage for 12 damage, a Synaptically Interrupted Rampage that resulted in 9 damage, a Savage Mana for a relatively puny 6, and then an Airlock Leak for the rest of it. Legacy was there with Danger Sense to guide Dr. Wagner through the worst of it. That was a pretty exciting game, all told.

Review: Adding something else to worry about is very interesting. If I were to do it again, I would have some sort of card to represent Dr. Wagner. To make it harder, you could reduce his health. More later.

10

Fantastic. Thanks for the report.

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Scenario 2: Ancient Programming

This scenario is brutal! It may be a factor of how I choose to play, but still.

Now, I know Omnitron takes a lot of crap for being easy, and I’m not saying he’s not. To me, though, he has always been the villain most likely to surprise you. You’re having fun, knocking his drones aside, blowing up his components, then out he comes with one of his big three threats: Electro-pulse Explosives, Sedative Flechettes, and Technological Singularity. Or he plays Terraforming, and throws down more than one! Without stuff, what are you going to do about that Disintegration Ray or Interpolation Beam he just played? And he’s on damage reduction mode. You weather it for a round, so he slaps down Electro-Pulse Explosives. Guess you have to kill that, huh? Or try. And he still has what, 85 hit points left? This is going to be a long game. Maybe the Environment will help!

Which brings me to the most unpredictable environment. Atlantis is usually rated as easier than Mars, but if you don’t rely on equipment, I find Atlantis much harder. Toxic Seaweed, Hallway Collapse, and Mystic Defenses are just nasty. The Krakens, though they are good minion control, will often smack a hero when they first come out. Atlantean Font of Power and Pillars of Hercules are just extremely dangerous. All told, the combination makes for a very volatile game.

So, my first game featured Wraith, Absolute Zero, and Ra, I don’t remember what order. It was one of those games where he played the EPE right away, and they could barely do a thing to hurt it. The team recovered, somewhat, but it still didn’t take very long.

My next game was a much more cohesive affair. Bunker, Haka, Ra took on the great machine, and handled it well. It turns out, though, that when you have an enemy and environment as unpredictable as Omnitron in Atlantis, you don’t have a lot of time to go hunting for artifacts. Ra found two before he bit it. Bunker and Haka were in a holding pattern, with Omnitron fluctuating around ten life. They had him dead to rights, but still needed to skip seven plays! Bunker managed to find a couple more, but then he was Singularitied. Then Haka got Krakened down to one, where a lowly assault drone got the last laugh.

So basically, Omnitron on Atlantis is far from unbeatable, but having to skip 3H plays to do it is going to be really tough. This one probably requires a strategy reevaluation. You don’t beat Omnitron until all of his devices are dead, so maybe try to keep a repair drone around to give you time to find the rest of the artifacts, or something. Though the environment will certainly try to kill it.

I’ll see what I can do with four characters.

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This one is the one I’m most unsure about. I agree that having to waste your card play multiple times seems to be a killer. If there’s a better, more fun way to represent finding artifacts, I’m all ears.

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Okay, did it with four, it wasn’t too horrible. Tachyon, Legacy, Ra, Fanatic were able to control the unpredictability of the combination pretty well. Legacy stood there taking punches, absorbing the damage from Sedative Flechettes with Superhuman Durability, Fortitude, and Lead from the Front. Having done that, the Krakens bounced off his Danger Sense. Tachyon blew up his EPEs with Synaptic Interruption. Ra and Fanatic did their solid damage dealing. Ra seems fairly good for this scenario, as he doesn’t seem to have to play a lot of cards to do effective damage. He found five artifacts. Tachyon is great in this scenario as well. Even though she only found three artifacts for me, her card suite makes it so that she can find them while still being effective.

Review: I like the idea of artifact hunting, but card plays are so precious that something seems off about this scenario. It’s great for a challenge, though. Maybe only look for 2H artifacts, or like you said, use another method to find artifacts that we haven’t thought of yet. Thematically, I’m not sure why the heroes can’t just round up the artifacts after Omnitron is dead. :slight_smile:

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Sounds like maybe we should table this one and move on. I can’t just drop it from the line-up because many of the later scenarios build upon the “find the artifacts” events of this one. But the mechanism for finding them isn’t great. I’ll keep trying to come up with a better alternative.

15

What about a die roll used by skipping any phase of your turn? Could be something like

  • Increase next damage to your hero by one (representing not paying enough attention to the fight).
  • End your turn.(losing track of time in your search)
  • Nothing
  • Draw a card (representing finding something else in your searches).
  • Complete the action you would have skipped.(a quick glance revealing it’s not there)
  • Find an artifact.
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That sounds like a good suggestion, though with my general inability to roll sixes, I would have to suggest needing a lot fewer artifacts. Maybe one per hero if we use that chart, or two per hero if you can find an artifact on a 5-6? A chart is nice, because then maybe you don’t have to completely miss being effective. To play devil’s advocate, it was nice to have a tangible measure of how many artifacts each hero found (as represented by burned cards).

Looking ahead, I don’t anticipate much problem finding the Coronal Cortex in scenario three. Fighting Dawn is hard, of course, but Haka and Visionary already do two different kinds of primary damage - another hero with a different damage type should make the requirements almost nonexistent.

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I like the idea of substituting skipping a phase of your turn for burning a card. That would, at the very least, provide a bit more flexibility.

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Okay, so I took Tachyon, Visionary, Absolute Zero, and Haka into the jungle to find the Coronal Cortex, and they defeated Dawn handily, but I appear to have made a miscalculation. I unlocked the Coronal Cortex using H=3, instead of H=4. Given that the heroes won handily, and had in-hand access to six different types of damage (Fire and Cold from Zero, Melee and Toxic from Haka, Psychic from Visionary, and Sonic from Tachyon), I feel this was a technicality. Nevertheless, I didn’t beat the scenario, so I should try again.

The game itself showcased the power of Tachyon when boosted by Visionary. Tachyon did 58 damage, everybody was cheerleading. And I guess finding that Cortex.

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You never cease to amaze me Spiff.

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In a good way, I hope (?) :slight_smile: