by Hansolo88
So my brother and I are going to be playing "Castle Daerion" next week; as the Overlord player I picked it as it looked cool and I had heard mentioned that it favored the Overlord player (after all I'm here to win).HOWEVER, after doing some more extensive reading about this quest it appears that it is essentially broken in favor of the Overlord which is no fun at all. The problems seem to boil down to:
1. Sir Palamon does not have his health adjusted to account for larger/more powerful monster groups when 3/4 heroes are in play so he can go down very quickly in these situations which is a balance issue because...
2. The path between the heroes and Sir Palamon can be easily blocked by monsters. While this is certainly as designed, it causes problems when combined with...
3. The militia figures block hero movement and LOS and can be used by the Overlord player during setup to compact the heroes into the start tile with no way to move or attack out until the militia are able to move or die. This in turn results in frustration because...
4. The heroes can basically be penalized for winning Encounter 1 and saving 3 of the villagers. Rather than being useful in the fight they become a liability, and it is actually in the Overlord's favor to allow at least 3 villagers to be rescued.
This quest seems difficult for the heroes to win in any case, but these four issues turn it from difficult to pretty much impossible barring very extreme combinations of inept Overlord play and/or perfectly situational hero abilities and dice results.
Two proposed solutions that come to mind after reading the extensive
Solution 1: Buy the heroes more time by increasing Palamon's defense dice to 2 gray dice instead of 1 gray/1 brown. Given the game reports I've read, though, I'm not sure this is the way to go and it doesn't solve the problem of the militia crowding.
Solution 2: Set up the militia adjacent to Sir Palamon at start instead of adjacent to heroes. This allows the surviving villagers to immediately be useful in defending Palamon and also solves the problem of them blocking the heroes in. After all, the zombie gets to start near Palamon, why not the militia as well?
I like Solution 2 better and I want to know what you guys think, especially if you have already played through the quest 1 or more times.
I'm not listing this under "variants" because I intend to modify the quest as little as possible and I would be happy to see the quest altered by the developers to make any modification unnecessary.
Some links from prior discussions:
http://boardgamegeek.com/thread/833278/castle-daerion-encoun...
http://boardgamegeek.com/thread/900767/castle-daerion-how-he...
http://boardgamegeek.com/thread/885981/do-players-always-los...