Token and Difficulty ratings?

Other Games SotM Game Engine
1

Complete newbie here!

I'm loving the game thus far, but am trying to get a grasp on a few of the different concepts.

First of all, the difficulty ratings that are in the manuals that come with the game and expansions (the 1 through 4)... do those refer to how difficult it is to "win" when the particular deck is in play, or do they refer to how difficult the particular mechanic of that deck is to play?

Second, are there any good ideas out there as to what to use to keep track of hit points throughout the game other than the numbered tokens that come in the box? Some of my friends can't stand all of the little tokens all over the table and the constant "money-changing-like-math" they have to do to  keep track of everything. We've started using sets of 10-sided dice instead, but even that has it's drawbacks.

Finally, I recently bought the new combined Rook City & Infernal Relics expansion, and we got our butts kicked playing against Plague Rat with Legacy, Mr. Fixer, and a third hero (I can't remember at the moment, as I wasn't playing it). Once Plague Rat infected some of us, we basically took each other out due to Legacy's buffs on us (we were at +2 to our damage), and Plague Rat also had multiple "Ongoing" cards out that none of us could get rid of (since they didn't have HP, end-conditions, and none of us had anything in our decks to remove ongoing effects). I perhaps mis-assumed that any villain could be taken out with any combination of heroes... I take it, I was wrong?

Any help and feedback is greatly appreciated!

 

2

The numbers next to the villains are difficulty ratings, the higher the number the harder they are to defeat.

The numbers next to the heroes are complexity ratings, how difficult it is to play the hero, the higher it is the more things they can do in a single turn (and the longer they take to set up, usually).

 

I have heard Christopher say (paraphrasing) that "Any 3 heroes can defeat any villain, on advanced" and I am trying to work my way through all the combinations to see if that is right!

In your game I would recommend looking through Mr Fixer's deck and looking at Jack Handle and Driving Mantis, those 2 cards are particularly awesome against Plague rat

 

And welcome to the forums.

3

Any vilain can be taken out with any three heroes. Some of the combinations are just much harder to beat with any given three heroes.

 

The numbers mean different thigns. For villains, it refers to how dfficult they are to defeat. Baron Blade and Omnitrtron are pretty easy, Chairman and Matriarch are difficult. For heroes, the rating (1-3 rather than 1-4) are how complex the heroes are; Legcy and Ra are straight-forward, Absolute Zero and Argent Adept are not.

 

Dice are the most common alternative for HP. You can write it down but that's even more hassle than the tokens in my expereince.

4

I've got some print-at-home solutions to tracking hp and game effects on my site that you may find helpful.

www.spiffworld.com/sotm

5

My partner and I use dice to track our hitpoints - I have enough dice (from my experience playing a variety of tabletop RPGs) to manage most of the time, unless the combination is something like Akash'Bhuta in the Final Wasteland, in which case I start running out and have to use a d20 to track someone who only has about 10hp or something :D.

Incidentally, while, as people have said, it's (according to Christopher) possible to defeat any villain with any combination of heroes, luck of the cards does come into it, so while you might know the decks inside-out, if you don't get the cards you need at the time you need them, you can still get your arse kicked. Then you can try the same combination (of heroes/villain/environment) again and come out victorious because everything went right. I'm pretty sure that's why this game is so amzingly replayable - the chances of having the exact sam game more than once are so tiny…I think someone worked it out once, actually, in a long post that was full of numbers ;).

I agree on Mantis Jack Handle being epic against Rat :D. If you have Shattered Timelines (though from the sounds of it, you don't), Chrono Ranger (Rat's Nemesis) is great fun against him. Omni-10 has a nice set-up he can get which is pretty good against him too :). One thing about Rat is he can't ever destroy your stuff - the only way you'll lose any cards against him is if the environment nukes it, or you destroy it yourself (for example, Tachyon choosing to destroy Pushing the Limits at the start of her turn). Oh, or if you've got Unity in the game (or Visionary with her Decoy thingy), due to Rat hitting everyone on his turn every time. Unless you've used something like Hypersonic Assault, Grease Gun, Ground Pound, or Offensive Transmutation against him, in which case you can just laugh at his failure to do anything.

There are his Infections, of course, which can be nasty, but consider a buffed Tachyon hitting herself while she has Synaptic Response out, or Nightmist with her Amulet - okay so these redirections only work once per turn but every little helps, eh? And then there's the Adept - if you're new to the game, you probably won't want to plunge into trying to figure out his deck straight away. He's one of the more complicated heroes (he can do a million things, and without neeing to use any maths, unlike Ab'Zero ;)), but he can do so much stuff…including healing everyone for a few hp a turn, which can of course counteract some of what Rat is throwing at you. But I won't get started on the Adept - you won't be able to shut me up (guess who's my favourite hero? ;)).

One more thing - fighting Rat on Mars can be funny if a Meteor Shower comes up - take as long as you like to get set up becuase Rat won't be able to do a thing about it. Then when you're ready, someone gets rid of the Meteor Shower and then you kick his arse :D.

6

Plague Rat is one of the weaker villains, because of his inability to destroy anything.  He can do a ton of damage, but that's all he does...every time Wraith, Tachyon or the Scholar hits him with a One-Shot which stops him from dealing damage, it's like giving each of the players an extra turn in which the Rat can't do anything.  In particular, if you play with a large number of heroes, PR is unlikely ever to flip, and the Infections will be more useful for boosting your heroes' damage (with Plague Locus in play and/or Advanced text) than they will be harmful to your side.  In a 3-hero game, he flips much faster and might destroy your heroes through sheer speed, but that's really the only hope he has to win the game.  I consider him one of the better villains for a game with new players...Baron Blade is the best closely followed by Omnitron, but after that you have to start getting into the "2" difficulty villains, and of these I don't recommend Spite (fairly easy, but rather boring), Akash'Bhuta (that 200 HP is ridiculously daunting if you don't know about her Limbs damaging herself), or the labeled-as-2-but-really-more-of-a-3 La Capitan.  That leaves Plague Rat, Apostate, the labeled-as-3-but-really-more-of-a-2 Gloomweaver, and maaaaybe the Ennead as decent "intro" villains.  If you do as much "ambassadorship" for the game as I do, you'll get tired of Blade and 'Tron fairly fast, so I recommend getting familiar with these other easy villains as alternatives.  You want a player to have at least one or two games under their belt before they get utterly destroyed by villains as hard as Iron Legacy, The Chairman, Citizen Dawn or The Dreamer (although Grand Warlord Voss is okay, and even The Matriarch is a "low 4" and can be fun for a relatively new player to square off against - she's very dangerous, but in a straightforward way, and the "aha" moment that you get when you realize how to completely shut her down can be a key experience for a relative newbie).

7

Apologies if this is obvious, but when playing Legacy against Plague Rat, maybe don't Galvanize when you're Infected.

8

Yeah, that's definitely one of the rare times when Motivational Charge is worth using even without The Legacy Ring.  Heck, I might even resort to Next Evolution, which I virtually never want to use because it's entirely passive (I've only gotten the Lead from the Front combo once, and the environment managed to kill a hero after I made a calculated risk to let them take damage from a villain card which would otherwise have killed Legacy, since the villain in question was dealing multiple damage types).

9

Holy cow Batman!!! You have some AMAZING stuff on your site! And that's exactly what I was looking for! I'm off to buy card stock!

THANK YOU so much for all the effort you put into making all of that!

 

10

You galvanize, inspired presence and have Visionary put TtE on Fanatic, then see who dies first.  

11

I think Ambuscade is another good intro villain, for what it's worth.

12

I recently played a game sans my usual tracking and oversized accessories, and it was painful. Sounds like my stuff is right up your alley. 

13

I have HP tracker cards for villains and heroes, with little transparent counters to indicate the appropriate numbers. Minions have HP tokens.

I don't like to use dice because they're easily bumped and I'm inclined to forget what number I'm searching for when I have to adjust them. Roll-down dice would be easier but I don't own any and they are expensive.

I like the Sidekick app for solo games, but my iPad mini screen isn't really big enough for the whole table to see it comfortably in non-solo ones. 

14

My group uses two ten-sided die for each hero and the villain (and sometimes other targets with exceptionally high Hp).  We use a set of six-sided dice for the hit points on everything else.  It works very well.  Both a set of 10 d10s and a set of 36 d6s can usually be found for only a few bucks at most game stores.

15

You can buy HP trackers from a game shop.

16

I know people have used knitting stitch counters as well. They usually go up to 99 and are pretty cheap. 

17

For hero and villain HP, we use jagarciao's tracker mat available on Spiff's site.  We're very much looking forward to it being updated for Vengeance... we have a stack of wooden disks just waiting for it.

As far as I'm concerned, it is the single greatest thing ever created by man.

18

Back in the First Edition Age, I tracked HP with round beer coasters that I had written some numbers on and a paperclip. ('We had nothing back in the old days, and not even half of that!' *cranky old man voice*)

I also went through a dice phase, and then through a dice and stitch counters (like Silverleaf suggested) phase. My parents still use them with their copy. Personally, after hours of slinging tokens at the booth in Essen last year, I started to use the tokens whenever I play. I realised that I actually like doing a bit of math and handling those little cardboard coins.

Or maybe that was just a side effect from being brainwashed and conditioned.

19

My group likes using dice, but I'm totally cool with the counters.  Every time I use them at a convention (or the Gathering of Heroes, recently) with the >G crew, I always am amazed at how little time it takes to add up hit points with those little tokens.  The dice are just add a little extra fun for us, since I have a lot of them and a variety of colors.  I love using a cyan/purple d4 and blue/green d10 to track Tempest's hit points, for instance.  There can be issues with jumbling the board, but typically everyone watches out for each other, since we're usually pretty attentive to who has the most/least HP.  Tracking that has caused us to be pretty vigilant of all the heroes' HP.  Worst case scenario, we favor a more challenging number than we remember ("Wasn't Fixer at 22?  I can't remember.  I'll set him at 21 to be safe."  "Was Apostate at forty-five or forty-six?  Huh...forty-six it is!").

20

Good idea!  Though I might round the other way against the villains and environments that I usually lose to.