Hi guys first time here, any way just bought SOB yesterday havent played and am depressed already after reading all this.  But tweaking is what I do after years of running DnD games, I was thinking what would happen if you eliminate seige tokens from a town if  the LT left for any reason I.E. heros ran it off or what ever seems to me this would increase the dificulty to destroy the towns thus making the 5 town victory harder

 This is already how it is.

yup my mistake , it was alot of new info for me to compile since this is my first expansion.  That being said my mind was dwelling on this last as I was trying to sleep, I came to a few different ideas.  I though if you increase the dificulty of destroying the city such as rolling 2 blanks on 2 pwr die, limiting the amount of Lts that can siege at one time.  Also I like the idea of liminting the cities to the heros so I thought maybe the heros would be rquired to remove the seige tokens to enter the cities such as two per turn or something

 Rolling 2 blanks on 2 power dice is nigh impossible, but you're correct that, currently, sieging is too easy. Even rolling 1 blank on 1, though, I think would be much too great a shift of values; the Overlord would lose hard. Improving city defence values would help a little, though. Something like this might be fun 

 At the beginning of the campaign, the heroes get 5 tokens. At the beginning of each game week, they may place one unused token onto any city. Any city with such a token gets +1 to its defence rating for each token it has.

   This would allow the heroes to slightly improve their chances, and adjust it strategically to the location of the Avatar. They can add a little more protection for desirable training locations, and abandon lost causes.

-pw

Phelanward, I think that's a very good idea. Thanks for posting it. One question...you mentioned the capability to "abandon lost causes". Does that mean you could shift tokens that have already been placed on a city to a different city? (You mentioned that the heroes could place one unused token onto any city. That would seem to imply that the already placed/used ones could not be moved, once placed. Is that the way you meant that?) It's an interesting idea, and SOB definitely needs some re-balancing in favor of the heroes, in my opinion.

 When I wrote that, I merely meant that the heroes could choose not to waste resources reinforcing cities that are to far gone, not that they could reuse the tokens.

Having to roll 2 enhancements on 2 power dice for seiges is an alternative which might work.

-pw

Just stumbled upon this thread, so I am going to repost the list of house rules my group are using to “balance” SoB. Sorry to the people who have already read all of this, as I had originally posted this in another thread. But I believe that the rewards of using these house rules are well worth spreading them around a bit. Anyway here goes:

This first one actually comes from another person on these forums. Couldn't find his name, but all credit goes to him:

Sea encounters:

During a sea encounter (involving a Lieutenant or not). The Revenge can only leave the map on the opposite side of its point of entrance (not sideways, not backwards).

The Revenge is, as a general rule, Elevated 1. Forecastle and aftcastle (I think that is what one calls the elevated rear section of the boat) however are Elevated 2. Also it generally costs 2 MP to climb aboard the Revenge and 3 MP to climb directly from the sea onto the forecastle or aftcastle.

The Revenge hosts a transport glyph (as it is present on island level maps there's no reason why it shouldn't always be there, even during sea battles). However, the transport glyph is only active if the Revenge is not moving (anchor down).

These rules change the whole feeling of sea encounters for the better and add some great tactical elements to the game.

During an encounter with a lieutenant:

If a Lieutenant flees, his token is altogether removed from the Torue Albes map . At the beginning of his turn, the Overlord rolls a dice, on Power Enhancement (or Surge, but that could be quite harsh on the Overlord), the Lieutenant comes back into play at his starting location and can be issued an order.

Also during a sea encounter involving a lieutenant, if the Revenge exits the map, the heroes have “outrun” the lieutenant. The lieutenant is then "stunned" for one round, meaning he cannot move or attack (he is recovering from the disgrace of being unable to stop the heroes). This helps to avoid having useless multiple lieutenant battles in a row.

These rules gives a chance for the heroes to do something else besides just chasing the Lieutenants around the map, generally to no avail. Also, a fleeing lieutenant is now a real drawback for the Overlord.

Sieges:

When the heroes attack a Lieutenant besieging a city, if they survive the encounter (and thus exit on the other side of the map), the heroes break the siege. Which means that all siege engines are removed from the current location (but the lieutenant remains if not killed).

Again, this was successfully tested and gives the heroes a real reason for attacking lieutenants at last.

Game mechanics:

Monster attacks:

We've been using since RtL the possibility for the Overlord to either convert 2 surges to 1 threat (as per the official rules) or convert 2 surges to 1 damage.

Best idea ever, it also makes gold and silver dice useful for the overlord and makes for some very interesting and intense battles. This should have been in the core rulebook from the start.

As a thematic house rule, we also decided that during the game the heroes can only acquire the type of skills as allowed on their character sheet. This gives the characters more specificity; e.g. a pure mage will not be able to acquire melee skills. On the other hand, weaker characters like Red Scorpion, who is allowed the three types of skills, get more choices and flexibility.

Last but not least, we use the semi-random treachery rule: At the beginning of a dungeon, the Overlord draws 8 treachery cards of the given type for every point of treachery he possesses and chooses his card(s) amongst this limited pool of cards.

This really adds a lot of variety and also avoids having to ban or limit some treachery cards.

In our opinion all of these rules actively contribute to making Sea of Blood (Road to Legend, when applicable) playable, tense and interesting as it should have been designed in the first place. We are now really having a blast with the game. And the outcome of the campaign, which at first seemed to lead to  a final Overlord crushing victory, is now much less obvious.

Any comments/questions/suggestions are really welcome.
 

Just as a sidenote concerning the siege dice rolls. I had 2 lieutenants sieging two different cities and I managed to blow away about 5 turns, by NOT rolling a single surge on approximately 10 dice rolls (something like a 3 % chance of that happening). Granted, I was unlucky, but hey, s..t happens.

re: patmox

I just got Seas of Blodd myself and have yet to play it, but reading through these threads gives me pause for concern. your simple house rules seem like they would go a long way to improving the most common issues, but I do have a question still. Do you use Divine favor and if so, do you use any modification for this?

I personally do not like this rule for all the reasons stated by others in this thread and am wondering if it should just be tossed? What is your take on this?

Bravo McWilley said:

We tossed the Divine Favor rule, and thanks to that we still have a tiny chance of reaching the final battle.

We are behind 150-221 in conquest and regularly get pummeled in dungeons (facing gold monsters with 3 heroes still wielding copper weapons doesn't help), but at least time progresses fast conquestwise. With Divine Favor, we'd have no chance because our OL would have eons to raze the three remaining cities he needs to win.

Divine Favor was a really bad idea. Without it, the OL has about 30 to 40 weeks to achieve his victory conditions against heroes who play relatively efficiently in terms of map traveling but get killed about twice per dungeon level. With Divine Favor, that duration can probably be stretched to more than 50 weeks, which becomes a piece of cake for the OL.

One way to make Divine Favor playable would be to make the end of the campaign depend not on the total conquest, but on the heroes' conquest only. Like, the final battle starts when the heroes reach a total of 250 conquest, whatever the OL's total is.

This would also prevent any "we-kill-ourselves-50-times-or-let-the-OL-cycle-his-deck-once-every-level-to-end-the-campaign" shenanigans.

This might actually be a better way of "timing" a campaign than the current one.

interesting idea iSpher. I agree with your Divine favor thoughts. I aksed this because during our last RTL campaign we found that there were exactly these type of shenanigans that could happen that breaks the game entirely. Im still not sure if/how this can be avoided, but this might work.

basically it came down to this:

I was to a point where I could upgrade to silver. The heroes realized thisdecided that it was better for them to continue through the end of the dungeon instead of running, because the OL could only buy one upgrade each week.  By forcing through the dungeon the OL now has the stupid problem that if he continues to kill the heros, the CT would rack up too muchthus advance the campaign at such a fast rate that he would not be able to buy enough upgrades to do anything worthwhile, but if he stops killing the herosbasically moves all his minions away, the party gets easy CTthe game basically becomes broken. Lose/lose for the OLWin win for the heroes.

I know its metagamy, but the fact that things like this cando happen is a major issue.

Bravo McWilley said:

The fact that the game mechanics let one have these thoughts is indeed annoying.

If campaign progression was based on the heroes' conquest only, it seems to me that the problem would be avoided without any inconvenience (that I can think of).

We could even introduce difficulty levels:

"Easy/short campaign": 60/120/180 as hero conquest totals for the end of copper/silver/gold ages

"Medium campaign": 80/160/240 as hero conquest totals for the end of copper/silver/gold ages

"Difficult/long campaign": 100/200/300 as hero conquest totals for the end of copper/silver/gold ages

This way, Sea of Blood could at least be winnable by heroes at the "easy" level...

In addition to Ispher's thoughts, I've come up with one or two other ideas to improve sea encounters.

Once the heroes have acquired Elven Sails and Dead Man's Compass (which is usually the first thing they get at the beginning of the campaign), sea encounters practically never happen. We are currently close to Gold and we've *never* had any sea encounter up until now, only Lieutenant fights.

In order to correct this problem I've modified the Lawlessness Overlord card by adding: "Trails which do not have any threat markers now have one marker of the follwing type: 1 red marker for secret trails and 1 yellow marker between Bright Sea and Midnight Cove". At least we might get to witness one of these encounters now.

This has not been tested yet, but during encounters which don't involve a ship (like Lieutenant encounters), creatures cannot move further than 8 (or 6 or 10, not sure yet) squares away from the Revenge.  If a Lieutenant does that, he flees. This also means that monsters start of at 8 squares distance around the Revenge at the beginning of an encounter.

I have the feeling that this could lead to more tense battles as, for instance, Lieutenants like the Siren wouldn't be able to hide on the opposite side of the map just doing nothing.

Concerning The Kraken, without going into too many details on tentacle movement and so on, I am considering allowing the Kraken to attack the Revenge: for each tentacle aboard the Revenge, instead of attacking with a tentacle, the Overlord may roll one silver power die per tentacle in order to inflict damage on the Revenge. If a tentacle is busy doing something else (grappling an adventurer), the tentacle cannot damage the Revenge.

My idea is that a Kraken is a huge beast and is supposed to try and sink boats. This rule also solves the problem of the adventurers hiding on the opposite side of the boat in order to avoid the tentacles. With this idea, the heroes will be forced to deal with the Kraken if he attacks the Revenge.

Finally, in addition to this, The trails leading to buried treasures do not count as movement. For example, if the heroes travel to Mountain of Ash they can claim the buried treasure without actually having to spend movement to get to the X marker.

There is absolutely no reason to penalise the party further by making them travel *two" weeks to get a treasure.
 

My general idea with these house rules is to make the game playable without having to go in to too many card or basic rules modifications. I think that we might be now getting close to something playable. But still, all of this should have been thourougly tested and debated by the designers from the start.

Patmox, for whatever it's worth, I attended the Realms of Terrinoth I event in Roseville in 2010 and Kevin Wilson was asked about the Kraken attacking the Revenge. He responded that he thought that the Kraken should be allowed to attack the Revenge. This was just a quick comment in passing and no further details were mentioned. I came away with the impression that he is encouraging of players making up their own house rules as kind of a matter of course. I didn't get the impression that anything further would be forthcoming pertaining to Sea of Blood or the Kraken rules.

I find this entire situation extremely odd. Maybe someone with a better idea about game company politics could advance a theory, but I'm personally mystified in that he acknowledged that the Kraken should be able to attack the Revenge and yet that is not built into the official Sea of Blood rules... Additionally, the Kraken is kind of the "poster boy" for Sea of Blood, by virtue of being prominently featured on the box cover art. Yet the Kraken rules are such a mess that nobody seems to want to touch them (or the Kraken) with a 10-foot pole, via FAQ or errata or whatever. It's just very odd. We have simply eliminated the Kraken from being played in SOB because he is such a headache.

It's a game with so much potential, in my opinion, and yet with so many warts that one has to avert one's eyes. The only answer appears to be house rules. Thanks for posting as I continue to watch other players' house rules for SOB with interest.

If anyone ever fixes the Kraken I hope they will post their solution here.