Obbas

Did not know this, but suspected as much from clues. Reason I do it here is mainly because here is where the game refers one when asking for feedback. On the whole I agree completely (except possibly about the probabilities). Easy to misunderstand my point really. I prefer the large party format on the whole. I have played all the currently released adventures all the way through with all but one character (the monk is lagging a bit), mostly with large groups (5 or 6) except in the beginning. The bit about feeling well equipped I agree on, but I note that it is in general just that, a feeling. Think about it. You might have characters and items that cover most situations, but there is no reliable way to make the skill meet the need except by luck. It is just as likely that your rogue runs into a magic puzzle (and fail) while your wizard runs into a pit trap (and fail, in pain... ...probably together with the poor monk, who can't use his skill to stop the stupid wizard dumping both of them in the hole) as the opposite. And since the pit trap gets shuffled away, there is no real point counting on the acrobatics there next turn, since it might now be at the bottom of the deck. The one exception to this is, of course, location specific needs. Those can be rather demanding and really benefit from specific talents. The main issues here is the fact that, in general, you either loose due to time or win so completely it's almost sad. And that the difference between these two is often one, or possibly a few, die rolls somewhere past the mid-game. Succeed and you curb-stomp the villain (two successive combat rolls of expected average 30+ usually suffice), but if you fail there is virtually no chance to recover. (E.g. 8 turns left, encounter villain with (you think) reasonable preparedness (having found it with spells and moved the right heroes to the right positions). Then miss one simple temp-close (1/8 chance), which makes you not close another by banishing a card. Then miss a pre-battle check by rolling less than 5 on 2d12 [a 1/24 chance]-> bury virtually entire hand, including weapons/spells -> loose fight -> get hit with a 4 damage hit that hits everyone at location and may not be reduced, then loose 2 card from the blessings deck and loose track of where villain is with 7 turns left on tracker and very few cards in hand for at least 1 other hero... optionally, burn almost every booster every character have to avoid getting smashed down -> same situation, except that now every character has used most blessings they had on hand and you have one turn more, still... good night) The extremely limited turn count makes it all about luck more often than not, since there is no real room to recover from a failure. And this... is at normal difficulty... (and yes, the above example actually happened) But I used the phrase difficulty multiplier, and it is on heroic and legendary that this problem actually becomes aggravating. Since even minor increases in roll difficulty makes above scenarios a lot more likely (because of the nature of multi-die probability curves), even ignoring any scenario special rules like "each time you find a foe, manage a difficulty x or get cooked for y damage" or similar. Several of the scenarios are virtually unplayable with a large party at higher difficulty in my experience. But on the whole my peevishness is not really caused by changes in difficulty (2 char parties are mostly boring, im,nsh,o). My problem is one you pointed out. That it becomes, for all intents and purposes, different games. This was the point which I suspected I would get most general agreement on. I'm glad I seem to be right about that at least.

Ok, lets see. The game has been asking me for my feedback since I started playing and I felt it was time to begin. I do not like to whine, since I do enjoy the game, but these are the issues that are most annoying and undermining of that enjoyment. At least relating to direct difficulty. It will also, unfortunately, be a rather long text since I really hate whining without arguments to back them up (or refute). (And because I'm a long-winded old bore, of course) 1. My number one issue with the game design is the one directly related to the topic title, "The nature of difficulty, and how it changes with numbers". More specifically, the number of heroes in the party. There is something innately crazy about a game that gets more difficult as a whole (as opposed to more difficult on an encounter-level) when you have more heroes, but that is not really what is annoying. The annoying part is that the change in difficulty is a matter of statistics and luck independent from the abilities of the heroes in question. More precisely, it becomes a matter of initial card order and little else. The problem, simplified, is this: The game is set up so that you have 29 turns in total. These have to be enough to work through a number of 10 card piles equal to the number of heroes plus two. Over time we can count on the henchman/villain in each location being on average the 5 or 6th card. An average becoming more and more likely as we increase the number of piles. The increase in difficulty for party size is almost solely linked to this fact of statistics. A party of 1 needs an average of 16,5 explorations to even find all of them, much less beat them. A party of 2: average 22 A party of 3: average 27,5 (break point) A party of 4: average 33 A party of 6: average 44 This means that the difficulty of a large party has nothing to do with the difficulty of encounters and challenges. It is the difficulty of actually finding the villain at all, a matter of almost pure luck. A party of 4 or more will be required to use up abilities for the sole purpose of skimming cards and hope they do not run into something inconvenient. Even finding the villain early can also be more of a disaster for a large party if you fail to defeat it, or it escapes somehow, since it then eats one turn for each open location... Of course, you might point out that a larger party has access to more in the way of items, blessings, companions and spells, but these too suffers from the same basic problem. There is no guarantee the cards you need are in the right place at the right time, and the chance of them being so decrease with the number of locations. In short: Each heroes functional worth decrease in a manner that parallel the difficulty-increase, not counterbalancing to it. This in itself is bad enough, but this is a difficulty multiplier in those scenarios when enemies become stronger based on numbers, such as Mom in "them ogres..." To beat her you need to keep the cards you will have to use up in order to find her in the first place... 2. Check difficulty and higher levels. The progression of difficulty for some checks feels skewed. They progress to keep them difficult in relation to those classes that specializes in those stats, in general. They should progress more in relation to those in the middle. A wizard should have serious difficulty avoiding things like dragonfire or rocks unaided. A rogue or monk should not. Especially when those checks have to be made by a random character (or several) almost every other round. Blessings are useless in these cases, since you really can't afford to use the 2-3 blessings needed to give a D4 character a reasonable chance at a difficulty 8+ check. 3. The third thing that annoys me, on a much much lesser level than the first two, also relates to difficulty. Why is the limitation on movement only used in on legendary difficulty? The restricted movements challenges the players skill in planing his deployments and encourages the use of movement related abilities. It should be a separate difficulty option, since I think it would be fun to occasionally play with restricted movement without the horrors of two wildcards.

I have the same problem, at least in quest mode. Same version as above (I think)