by badmike01
Hi guys. Bit of a long 'thinking out loud' type post so sorry in advance lol.So this weekend I'm taking a few mates through the start of a Lair of the Wyrm mini campaign to show them how good the game is. LOTW is my new expansion and Ive yet to play it, also think starting my group of very-casual gamer mates up on a small campaign is the best bet to sell a long years worth of meet ups for a full campaign with the works, as we get to meet very rarely due to all having young kids.
This got me thinking, has anyone found ways of streamlining/smoothing the game? I'm trying to think of "life-hacks" that just make running it easier.
Like I played one of the co-op pod quests past weekend with a few mates and by the end of if we had spread out over the whole (very large) table and there were shop cards, skill, hearts and fatigue everywhere! And the co-ops don't even use half the stuff that's in the box!
I've been racking my brain about maybe some sort of play-mat I can get printed like the MTG ones we use. with all the areas clearly marked out for different cards/tokens that you will enevitable get over a game. I like this idea as I think it will make players more aware of their character and everything they have access to, I myself tend to glance at my cards and sometimes forget I had an ability I could have used at some crucial point because of the semi-cluttered cards.
Also, how do people normally let their hero players choose the missions? As in the past I'm normally the only person who knows the quests and my mates don't seem to get as invested so normally just let me choose or pick one at random.
I'm thinking of making a simple card for each quest (kind of like the rumour cards) with 2 sides, 1 will be a in-game description, maybe even the story part from the quest guide, the other side will be what the actual mission entails, for example "A Fat Goblin: Find a way to store the sacks of grain in the farm before goblin looters can make off with them. Recover as many stolen sacks of grain as possible by slaying looters. Find the goblins lair and rescue any hostages that may have been taken from the farm before your arrival and stop any goblins escaping so they wont return again."
The card would also have an Act 2 update like "If the Heroes won, remove X quest from the Act 2 deck. That quest is no longer available."
I recently discovered a campaign tracking website on the FFG forums which seemed very well done so I will be keeping all the quest and hero info on that at the end of each meet up, as well as lots of baggies for the heroes to put their bits in so we wont have to dig through piles of cards to put heroes back together each week, and everything not used will be stored separate (like unused heroes/class decks). I've even gone as far to make a spreadsheet with each encounter, how many open groups and what traits, and then all available monster units on an encounter as well as ones that are on there as part of the actual quest. I'm hoping this will streamline actually grabbing the monsters from my box and also just going "oh I have access to Kobolds or Ettins this game apparently" and choosing one rather then thumbing the monster cards looking for the matching symbols further trying to speed set ups up and decision making. As Overlord you tend to have to do 99% of the work load I've found. Hopefully after referencing the quest guide for map setup and quick refresh of the scenario boom! we're off.
This is all I can think of so far to cut down on the various sorting and sifting involved in this game so we can get more playing done and I'm not there for hour before we start on the days I have to travel to somewhere with the game for a meet up. I've got my tiles in groups of 10 in plastic boxes, tokens in a screw box all neat, and heroes and monster figs all separated, as well as the cards all bagged up into groups like shop, search item, classes, monsters, bosses, OL cards etc. I'm half tempted to just save more time by setting up a map from an encounter with all the bits on (monsters, tokens) and then just dismantling it and bagging it up so everything I need to remake it is in 1 bag, no searching needed at all? We are only going to do 1 quest per week for start until were are all up to speed. And if it finishes quick we usually always carry MTG decks with us to finish a night.
Are my ideas totally rubbish? Do people already do things like this? I really just need to streamline where I can to keep interest high and gaming to the max on my game nights, we usually do most of our socializing on fb through the week or on phones so we have all committed to meeting every spare hour we can squeezer without kids each week.