Vengeance Bios--Revealed!

General GTG General Discussion
181

Honestly, I'd rather the mechanics came first and the character second (hypothtically of course, I don't know how this game is designed).

Glancing over my game shelves, two games illustrate this well for me.

Talisman (2nd Ed). Very thematic. Adventurers and dragons and spells and battling monsters and fighting to be the one to get the shiny powerful artifact. Great. Gameplay? Dull.

Dominion. Theme? The theme is rubbish. Why does a Festival get you +2 Actions and +2 Money and +1 Buy? But the mechanics are solid, and the game works.

And I'd pick Dominion every time over Talisman, even if you could play Talisman in 30 minutes. It's probably because I'm really a Eurogamer, and definitely prefer function over form.

182

Real quickly, I'd like to quell a couple worries; The Sentinels are actually REALLY GOOD agains La Capitan -- they were, in fact, designed to be, considering they ARE nemeses. They're actually surprisingly good against characters with weak AoE, like Plague Rat and the Matriarch, despite their multiple targets and low individual HP.

 

Parse is also the ultimate hard counter to Miss Information. Having her along is almost necessary; it can lower her apparent difficulty from a 4 to a mid 3. I'll let you decide HOW she's a good counter on your own, knowing how MI works.

183

Well I haven't played Dominion, but based on your information, I much prefer Talisman, though I don't actually play it too often because of the length.  I enjoy evocative, surprising games more than I do math puzzles; the latter have their charms, but art and flavor text and emotional-satisfying, experiential gameplay are the things that keep me coming back for more over and over.  With a mechanical game, I tend to get the feeling of it being "solved" after a while, whether or not I was the one who solved it; it feels like some optimal plays just dominate the game and there's no longer any mystery or discovery to enjoy.  It varies exactly how much of that feeling I get, but most of the strictly mathematical games will give it to me eventually.

184

Dominion isn't that way, mostly because there are SO MANY CARDS to pick from, but you only play with 10 of them at a time, so the experience is vastly different every time.

185

I've played about 1500 games of Dominion and I don't have any sense of it being "solved". There's some maths if you want to approach it that way, but mostly it's about managing your deck, spotting which cards synergise with others, and modifying your strategy according to what your opponent's doing. (I'm not holding it up there as the best game ever, but it illustrated what I wanted to say.)

I personally prefer a bit of thinkiness to theme-coated fluff. A game can have the best, most evocative, most exciting theme in the world but if it's just another roll-and-move (probably my most hated mechanism) or roll-to-gather-resources (you guessed it, I don't like Settlers of Catan either) then it might as well be about filling in tax returns in triplicate, because I'm sure as hell not going to play it more than a couple of times.

That's why I like Sentinels - sure, it's a very thematic game, but there's a solid base under all the chrome and it's got a good slug of crunchiness which keeps me interested. It's be easy for a game like this to play itself, but this game makes you plan, and react, and look for interactions, and make tough decisions.

186

Obviously it's a game, so mechanics come first, it's just that previously they had their cake and could eat it too.

 

dominion is a fun game mechanically, but when you compare it to drafting games with themes (like thunder stone) I have a different play experience.

even MtG has shifted from isolated random s#!t to themeing for each expansion because there is real power when fluff combines with crunch.

 

 

 

187

Going back a bit to how the fluff is related, I think the point that for now it feels unrelated is the point. To me, everything haplening in this set is an unintended consequence of another action. These are the heros that never intended to be heros, but something out of their cintrol forced them inti that role. Knowing the guys, there is somethibg planned latter that will make all of this make a lot more sense. After all, in comics, you don’t always get the whole story up front.

188

I remember when I first read the characters for the television show "Firefly". Burned-out captain, Loyal first mate, wise-cracking pilot, prostitute with a heart of gold, Preacher...with a past, etc.  They felt like the most stereotyped character list out of two genres. When the show came out, though, the execution made it work.

I really liked Firefly.

I've only briefly read the bios.  I think they'll do -- the execution and the quotes on the cards will make the characters breathe.

Most excited about the Archer.

 

189

I think the Vengence Bios are less well written than the previous ones, but that could just be that I don't know the hero first.  All the other heroes I played before reading their Bios (other than Unity) and so the Bio just filled in background on a character that I already knew pretty well.  

It is quite possible that these Bios were rushed a bit, given the sheer volume of work >G is going through right now.  

 

190

i think that's kind of my point: firefly started with archetypes, then let the personality make the characters special.

previous characters in SotM did the same:  take the familiar, add a twist, get something unique

these just don't resonate with me at all.  That being said, art is subjective and if people really dig these guys that's great.  I was just hoping for more out of >G

191

I got a different message from Amnachaidh's post, Melonball. We've only seen the bios (with the exception of the playtesters, and they've only seen the mechanics and bios). For the past heroes, we've seen everything: the art, the flavor text, the whole package. Hopefully, as has happened in the past, we'll see the whole package for Vengeance and they'll resonate.

Or it won't, because maybe these particular heroes just aren't for you. That doesn't seem likely, but it has happened before where someone just didn't like a specific set / group for some reason.

We're all different. :sunglasses:

192

There are all kinds of heroes and villains characters in comic books. Some have epic origin stories making them legendary, or epic powers - like Superman. Some have less "wow!" origins and beginnings.

Like, for instance, a young science geek who was bitten by a radioactive spider and gained spider-powers. This is not the most engaging beginning for a hero. Nor a power-set that would at first sight destine him to fight to save the universe. And his tag-line his "friendly neighborhood super-hero". But he became one of the most beloved and complex heroes.

The Hulk is just, in the beginning, a scientist who, after exposition to gamma rays, has the uncontrolled power to change into a big green megastrong, indestructible, stupid colossus. And he can't control neither his "power" to transform, nor what his transformed self does.

Or let's take Shadowcat, because I am a fan. It was just a young girl with the power to become intangible. A mascott for the X-Men. Who would have thought she would become one of the more popular X-men, lead her own team of misassembled heroes, save the universe, and even team-up with Spiderman in an alternate time line/ book line ?

What makes a super hero memorable is more than his origins/begginings backstory, but the stories he is in, the issues he is confronted to, and what  "life" and meaning the writers can give him.

Of course, as the SotM heroes and villains don't have a line of comic books to fully "fluff" them, we, players, are in the same position as someone who would look at the beginning backstory of Spiderman without knowing anything else about him, and would wonder what the fuss is. Untill we can see them in play, read the fluff text on the cards and see the art. Then it will help our imagination to "connect" with the submerged part of the SotM iceberg - all these fictional hundreds of comics >G has planned as the background of the game.

I don't react in the same way with all heroes - I find some "lackluster", simply because, at first sight, they are not the kind of heroes I am interested in, from a story point of view. And other players will find other heroes uninteresting. I am a big fan of the Scholar as a character, for instance, (and I can easily imagine the kind of storytelling he can be used in) - but I know that some other players on this forum find him ridiculous. I feel no interest, right now, for K.N.Y.F.E. or The Naturalist as characters, but that's fine, I feel no attraction to Cable or the leader of Wakanda either, but they are part of the whole story and have their place in it.

All this wall of text just to say that even if I don't find all the heroes backstory engaging or "strong",  I am very satisfied with the "big picture" of the multiverse as a fictional comic book line written by many different authors for many different audiences. But everyone can react according to his tastes and preferences - I just do't think that any hero we have is a "writing failure", just a facet of the multiverse we may not like.

193

Fair enough.  I don't feel that way but I can definitely respect such a feeling.

It's be easy for a game like this to play itself.

Actually my only major criticism of Sentinels as a whole is that it can do exactly that at times.  You frequently have only a few meaningful choices; I worry that sometimes I'm killing a new player's ability to enjoy the game by having to tell them "this is the correct play, don't do that instead"…but it's a team game, so you have to sometimes tell the other players what the optimal play, if they can't figure it out themselves, because otherwise the entire team loses.  This came up in a recent game against Omnitron, where Fanatic's player wanted to kill a particular target, but I convinced him that we needed him to hit something else instead, and then the player was annoyed at me when an Environment effect came out and made him suffer for having followed my advice (which was completely tactically correct at the time).

I love Thunderstone, like Ascension, and am currently going nuts trying to think of a third fantasy DBG similar to Thunderstone which I remember liking more, and haven't played in too long.  Perhaps I'm imagining it.  More recently, I've fixated on "Legendary", a Marvel Superheroes DBG, as well as the two Lord of the Rings movie DBGs (a bridge between the two exists in the form of the DC Heroes DBG, which is a little too simplistic for my taste, and very badly flavored).  I was also lucky enough to playtest an Egyptian-themed DBG that may or may not ever get published, and was very fond of that one for thematic as well as mechanical reasons.

Magic, IMO, has long since jumped the shark.  I like that they have a different world every year, but the way that they design cards (making the vast majority of them worthless in order to drive sales, as players are forced to chase powerful rares which are both more fun and vastly more likely to win) has gone from simply pissing me off to utterly disgusting me.

194

I think there's a bigger issue at play, there. I hold to the following position, myself: It's a team game, but we also should respect other people's choices. There's rarely a "correct" play/action - there's an answer that might result in more damage or a better tactical position, but often it's more fun to do whatever we feel like doing. One of the keys to a team game is each player gets to make their own decision; the rest of us should contribute information and make sure everyone understands our thoughts and preferences, but in the end that player should make the decision.

For example, when we're doing demos at Cons, I will often point out cards that are useful or appropriate, but if someone says they want Tempest to play Cleansing Downpour as his first turn play (even though he has far better choices), I'll make sure he understands what the other cards actually do then move on - it's that player's choice. They have a lot more fun because they're able to actually make choices and experience the consequences (positive or negative) of that choice.

I've been on both sides of this situation, and in general I've found everyone has a much more enjoyable game when they're allowed to do what they want, even if someone else at the table doesn't agree with it. :sunglasses:

195

I wish I could remember exactly what the situation was...I was playing Nightmist, so I had significant reason for being a control freak, but I can't recall exactly what was going on, and I don't own the Environment we were fighting in, so I can't currently reconstruct the situation.  And I was definitely being a bit of an arse, because a guy I dislike had been enrolled in the game over my objections (he was not the other player previously mentioned, it's just that his presence at the table was leaving me on-edge...he later had the gall to say that SOTM is "always the same", just as I had said of his favorite trick-taking card game, which should give you an idea of why he and I don't get along).

196

 

Excited to see some of the art hopefully as we get closer to February/March.  When I first get a hero deck I like the card mechanics to be a surprise, but I will flip through and look at the artwork to try and get a feel for a character.  I feel the artwork in the deck gives me as much or more insight into a character than their bios and also gives me an idea of who I want to try first.

197

Could it be Shadowrift?

198

Never heard of it.  As I said, I may be imagining things.

199

Nightfall?

200

Rune Age?