by TomChick
dukedave10 wrote:
The fun of the game is in scaling it up and down in difficulty as your skill and understanding of the game grow.
That might work for you, but I don't consider it my job to figure out how to find the "fun" in a game. That's sort of what I'm expecting the designer to do when I pick up a game. Flexible difficulty levels are great and all, but they need to be quantified so new players understand what they're dealing with.
So, yeah, making a map that disadvantages the Dead King by laying out longer treks for him to make? That's obviously going to make the game easier. That doesn't really help me and it's not the advice you seem to think I was "asking for". This thread is about trying to suss out how the player count impacts the difficulty level and where the sweet spot might be. If there even is one.
Anyway, to the end...I just lost another game with two characters to -- guess who! -- the Shambling Zombies again. I leveled up a bit this time, and was careful not to expose myself to random Circumstances. I eventually chose the zombies intentionally, figuring I could take them on. But their default attack with its incurable disease is just too painful. 6 points of inviolable defense on all damage inflicted by each of my two characters is just too much for me to overcome. So the zombies whittled down each character's health and it was game over. I even had a Grey Dwarf who could have spent energy to remove Conditions, but there's no indication that the zombie disease penalty is a Condition. Is that intentional? Seems odd to take a creature ability outside the existing framework for debuffs.
Again, I don't think this would be so difficult with a larger party. I guess it's time to knuckle down and line up four characters. I'd love to hear from anyone else who can comment on how character count is affecting their difficulty level.
-Tom
