Dimitri Mazieres
Explorer
Right, but I still can't figure out where does the female ranger sculpt come from
Castle Ravenloft: My first game
- Thread starter MerricB
- Start date
Yeah, I played it at Gencon as well. And I wasn't all that thrilled with it. I felt like the rules weren't very well written and left a lot of room for interpretation and judgement calls. And with no DM to facilitate that, it left everyone at the table kind of lost and confused. Maybe if I started with this game, then moved into normal D&D I would have liked it. But as it is, I felt like it was really taking a step backward.
My 2 cents.
My 2 cents.
malraux
First Post
could you give some examples? Thus far, the only ambiguous issue I see is monster AI for exact movement and attack targeting. But I don't see either of those being all that significant.
DragonLancer
Hero
How does it compare to something like Descent?
Saeviomagy
Adventurer
How did you manage to find people who play D&D and have no idea (or way of finding out) who Strahd is?
Majoru Oakheart
Adventurer
I played this at GenCon too. We found that there were a number of edge cases where it sort of confused the people playing. For instance, the rules say when you defeat a monster to put its card in "The XP pile" or something like that. But it never actually says which player to give it to. A number of us assumed it should be the player who defeated the monster, since that made the most sense. However, we eventually agreed that it was the player who drew the monster card from the deck and was controlling the monster that gets the XP no matter who defeats it(since that appears to be what the rules say).
I know that the guy who was showing us how to play skipped every item that said "Play this card immediately" when we were getting starting treasure, since he claimed it didn't make sense for us to play anything before the game even started(and some of them are especially bad if drawn as your starting treasure), but there is no support in the rules for this. It just says to draw a treasure card.
There were a couple of times where an Event or Monster card would give an instruction that allowed some options and it confused the people I was playing with if we could make bad decisions for the monsters/events on purpose given that we were also the PCs. I didn't see any problems with it, but some of the other players seemed to think it was kind of dumb that we could make the enemy purposefully move into a bad position for it, just so we could kill it easier.
I know there's a bit of a disconnect in the fact that the enemies all move by tiles but the players move by squares. It confused some of the players when monsters said things like "Attack the nearest PC if they are within 1 tile or move 1 tile closer if they are not", since people were wondering if a monster can run all the way from one side of a tile to the other side of the next tile(which they can, as far as I can tell...but it seemed wrong).
Overall, I really like the game, however...it's just the rules can be a little unclear. Also, we lost the game BADLY. And the game they had played right before us was lost badly too. And I talked to a couple more tables playing the game and they had all lost as well. In fact, I couldn't find a group who won their game.
I'm kind of surprised, MerricB won. We found that since events were happening almost every single turn(any turn you don't reveal a tile and every turn you don't reveal a tile with a white arrow...and as far as I can tell 90% of the tiles have black arrows), and the tiles were things like "TRAP: affects all players on this tile and all adjacent tiles. +7 vs AC for 3 damage, 1 damage on a miss"
Since the Wizard has 6 hitpoints, and an AC of 14....and events would happen 5 times between the end of your turn and the beginning of your next turn....it meant you could sometimes die without having much chance to stop to. And each death results in the loss of a Healing Surge. The default game says to play with..2 or 3, I can't remember...we were playing with 6 of them and still lost.
That's pretty much in line with the frustrations my table had. We did win, but just barely in the time that we were alotted to play. Also, WotC had one guy facilitating four games at once. We had to just read the instructions on our own and figure it out, and the guy we could talk to wasn't interested in explaining stuff.
On the subject of that XP Pile, we had the same confusions. But eventually we realized that we were supposed to be putting it into a communal XP pile. One pool of XP for the whole party. And when there was enough for one character to level up, he or she did. But it was uneven with the rest of the party. The other strange thing is that you were allowed to burn XP from the pile to make an event card go away. It felt... weird. And disjointed.
On the subject of that XP Pile, we had the same confusions. But eventually we realized that we were supposed to be putting it into a communal XP pile. One pool of XP for the whole party. And when there was enough for one character to level up, he or she did. But it was uneven with the rest of the party. The other strange thing is that you were allowed to burn XP from the pile to make an event card go away. It felt... weird. And disjointed.
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