by Callidus
We have a somewhat mixed record when it comes to the official co-op expansions, which I am not quite sure is common place. After we lost “Dark Elements” yesterday night, frustration started to show at the table.We are no greenhorns and have seen a lot of play as a group with the original rules set and campaigns, but the co-op experience seems to be somewhat beyond us.
I can easily accept the following reasons which can lose you the co-op quest:
• Too much bad luck while rolling dice
• Imbalanced/non-optimized party (slow, no healing, no stamina recovery, low damage potential, bad spread of attributes, no synergies etc.)
• Dumb play (wasting actions, attacking sub-optimally etc.)
But this rarely was the reason why we lost, at least that’s what we all believe. What happened almost every time is, that we get killed due to fate moving into doom! And this usually happens during the final (someone dying from an act II damage spike) or 1 room earlier due to auto fate advance (see below).
At a 4p game, initially, fate can advance 4 times until it kills you. This is plenty and no problem at all. In the peril deck, there always is one card, which advances doom. This means, you are on a clock and need to avoid resolving too much peril, we got that. But since the total quest length is variable (randomizing the last stack with 3 encounter cards), and the peril deck also is randomized, there is a not small probability, you advance doom by 2 during the course of the quest just because of peril and quest length.
RAW – how we interpret them, that is – force you to either open the door to the next encounter in the same turn you resolved the current one (mostly >50% of hero actions already spent and bad positioning), or accept fate to move forward by one and resolving one peril card. If you choose to open the door, you have effectively 1 turn less to work against the new objective, which most of the time means, you risk screwing up if the dice are not with you. And this disadvantage adds up into the next room!
Yesterday, we were in pretty good shape until fate moved into doom. We dug once through the peril deck, the third card of the reshuffled deck again advanced doom by 1, we got 2 encounters in a row which did not refresh fate and resolved automatically in the overlord effects step (“passage of the …” types in Dark Elements). This means, you cannot prevent fate from advancing, as fate step is next and the exploration card got discarded in the step before! At doom +2 in a 4p game, this means auto death.
In Dark Elements, there are many unavoidable encounter effects, which force you to resolve peril. So preventing doom +1 or even +2 is hard to control. Thus, just normal game progress has a high chance of killing the party!
I understand, there needs to be a clock, otherwise these co-op PODs are too easy as you can play the system, but this auto moving of fate simply seems broken. It comes down to dumb luck, since a high percentage of possible outcomes lead to the party getting killed by fate/doom just due to game mechanic and randomization. This inevitably feels cheap and frustrating.
What are your experiences with the PODs? Are we getting something wrong?
