Castle Ravenloft: My first game

[DragonLancer]

Since one my friends picked up the game over the weekend we have had several games. We've found it to be a rather good game rather fatal. In fact we've only won two games out of five or six.

The discussion here has helped explain the XP pile because we were giving the monsters XP to the player who killed that monster. It means that levelling is rather slow. Having a communal pile makes sense.

An aspect that has really frustrated us though is that monsters get to attack first as soon as they appear and we are often low on HP very quickly. Having some kind of initiative system would have been better.

Lastly, two healing surges just isn't enough. We've burnt them by half way through the game. Five is too easy but four seems to be the right amount.

 

[MerricB]

An aspect that has really frustrated us though is that monsters get to attack first as soon as they appear and we are often low on HP very quickly. Having some kind of initiative system would have been better.

An initiative system would cause a lot of problems in the game - I can't see a way of doing it without it becoming too complicated. As it stands, a monster "wins" initiative when it appears and acts immediately after the player who revealed it.

There is a real attritional feel to Castle Ravenloft, and part of the joy of the game is getting it to a point where the monsters have trouble hurting you. The fighter gives a +1 AC to other characters on his tile, and that can really help. If you're low on HP, don't reveal a new tile!

By now, I've played the game nine times: 2 times solo (won both) and 7 times with 3-5 players (won 4, lost 3).

We played the Howling Hag adventure on Saturday: each of the four heroes in that game began on corner tiles of a 5x5 crypt. The Hag would ambush a hero, teleport him away, and getting back to the centre to stop the ritual was very tricky. We managed to win it with no surges left...

Another interesting part of that mission was that it used the monster tiles: when we revealed a new monster, there was a 25% chance of no monster appearing, a 25% chance of 1 monster appearing, a 25% chance of 2 monsters appearing, and a 25% chance that the Hag would teleport to the new tile!

Things got a *lot* easier once we killed the Hag, but there was the possibility that an encounter card might place a new dungeon tile... and the Hag would be reborn! Luckily that didn't happen. Well, luck, and a bunch of XP.

Cheers!

 

[vagabundo]

I'm going to say that it just shows you that people's grasp of grammar is lousy.

The exact phrase is "The Heroes' Experience Pile". It isn't "The Hero's Experience Pile". No, it's one pile that belongs to all the heroes. When monster death is covered on page 10, the player discards the monster card in to "the Experience Pile". Not "his experience pile", but "the".

This might be an easy mistake for RPGers to make, since they would assume each hero has their own experience pile.

Old dogs, new tricks...

 

[DragonLancer]

An initiative system would cause a lot of problems in the game - I can't see a way of doing it without it becoming too complicated. As it stands, a monster "wins" initiative when it appears and acts immediately after the player who revealed it.

That was the problem. Monsters always winning initiative makes the game much tougher and ensures characters are low on hit points almost from the get go.

I did ponder how an init system could work and what made the most sense was for each monster and character to have a fixed init score running low to high. I agree that it isn't perfect.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

I'm going to say that it just shows you that people's grasp of grammar is lousy.

I agree. I think it was just us assuming that when you kill a monster one player has to get the XP. I'd never played a game where the XP pile was communal, so I didn't even think about it.

Plus, there is a sentence in the rules saying that all the players share the Healing Surge pool. But there is no such clarifying statement about XP. I just think it would have been nice.

We played again this weekend with the correct rules and it was significantly easier. However, we discovered another apparent rules gap. The game includes coffin tokens but(in our 10 minute search of the rules) we could not find any reference to what to do with them. There are coffin spaces on the board and we were assuming you needed to put coffin tokens on them. But the rules only use the word "coffin" once (I just did a search on the PDF to be sure), when they list the contents of the box as 10 coffin tokens.

We didn't manage to completely read the adventure book. I can only hope that there is a reference to the coffin tokens in at least one of the adventures.

 

[pedr]

The game includes coffin tokens but(in our 10 minute search of the rules) we could not find any reference to what to do with them. There are coffin spaces on the board and we were assuming you needed to put coffin tokens on them. But the rules only use the word "coffin" once (I just did a search on the PDF to be sure), when they list the contents of the box as 10 coffin tokens.

We didn't manage to completely read the adventure book. I can only hope that there is a reference to the coffin tokens in at least one of the adventures.

As far as I can tell, the coffin tiles are only used in the final adventure. I expect that some future scenarios might also use them, but for now they're of very limited use. Similarly, I think, various other of the tokens, such as the Monster tokens.

One rules question I had was 'do you shuffle the Event Treasure cards into the Treasure Deck?'. Apart from that, having played it through once I had similar queries to the ones listed here, but found that the rules were in the book, if not exactly expressed as I'd have expected first time!

 

[pedr]

...

 

[pedr]

[(sorry for the triple-post. Thing was timing out and I couldn't check what had happened)

 

[malraux]

One rules question I had was 'do you shuffle the Event Treasure cards into the Treasure Deck?'. Apart from that, having played it through once I had similar queries to the ones listed here, but found that the rules were in the book, if not exactly expressed as I'd have expected first time!

I wouldn't think so. Because they are differently backed, I'd think you would only use the correct one.

 

[MortonStromgal]

I played it at PAX and really wished they had less choices with the characters options and removed the movement to be more like Betrayal in the House on the Hill. But it was overall ok but was a bit too D&D 4e for me and my friends.