by Callidus
In our group, we recently completed LotW. Before that, we played the other two officially released mini campaigns, MoR and TF. I’m not about to start another thread comparing quality, balance or anything else. Thing is, the somewhat mixed experience compared with the full-scale campaigns left us wondering, why exactly the game designers created and tweaked the mini campaign rules the way they did.A note up front: All observations are based on a 4-heroes-setup and all officially released D2E content used (except the conversion kit). We don’t use treasure rooms due to various reasons. We rotate the OL job between campaigns. All players are reasonably experienced with the game and have tactical prowess. Hero parties are built with all the roles in mind (damage/control/search/support), but we avoid optimizing too much since this mostly ruins the game. It’s hard enough for the OL as it is ;-)
For us, MoR was very close and exciting (heroes won), TF similar (OL won, but nearly died from exhaustive scheming ^^) and LotW was a total one-sided disaster, in which the OL got her ass handed to her.
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The basic differences between a mini and a regular campaign seem to be the number of act 1 quests (3 vs. 5), the number of act II quests (1 vs. 4), the number of encounters per quest (mostly 1 vs. mostly 2), and the starting resources for both sides (4xp/hero, 100g/hero, 4xp/OL vs. nothing at all).
The most obvious and in my opinion most critical are the starting resources. Based on these, one could try to roughly translate the power level at the start of a mini campaign to equivalent progress in a regular campaign:
4 XP available per hero: 4 quests (7 encounters) played, next: interlude
400 gold: A search token is on average worth ~33g (hard to factor in the chest correctly), so a total of ~12 searches accomplished in 7 encounters, implying 1 to 2 max. per encounter, which seems quite low.
Additional quest rewards in act 1 are either relics, 100 gold for the heroes, or +1xp for the OL. These seem to not have been factored in at all.
Equipment: No relics, just a single shopping step. This is extremely luck dependent with 400 starting gold. The heroes could end up with nothing useful or crazy stuff like bearded axe, rune plate or mana weave.
The mini campaign quest structure somewhat resembles 3 interludes in a row, followed by an act II finale with only a single act II shopping step in between. The quest rewards are extreme, as the winner in addition to the basic 1xp is often granted a relic and a free item (heroes) or +1xp (OL). The act II transition seems to be awfully late, putting game deciding emphasis on a quest with mostly just 1 or 2 act II items available to the heroes can become harsh.
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We argued and discussed for a long while after each finale, but we could not really point a finger on what feels wrong with the mini campaign rules. The general consensus was, that the OL probably should get a boost in resources right at the start, e.g. additional 3threat/1xp, his choice.
The Epic play variants take a different approach to adjusting the starting power level for both sides, which is hard to compare due to the free choice of items. That also left us wondering.
What are your experiences with the mini campaigns and what do you think?