Token and Difficulty ratings?

Complete newbie here!

I'm loving the game thus far, but am trying to get a grasp on a few of the different concepts.

First of all, the difficulty ratings that are in the manuals that come with the game and expansions (the 1 through 4)... do those refer to how difficult it is to "win" when the particular deck is in play, or do they refer to how difficult the particular mechanic of that deck is to play?

Second, are there any good ideas out there as to what to use to keep track of hit points throughout the game other than the numbered tokens that come in the box? Some of my friends can't stand all of the little tokens all over the table and the constant "money-changing-like-math" they have to do to  keep track of everything. We've started using sets of 10-sided dice instead, but even that has it's drawbacks.

Finally, I recently bought the new combined Rook City & Infernal Relics expansion, and we got our butts kicked playing against Plague Rat with Legacy, Mr. Fixer, and a third hero (I can't remember at the moment, as I wasn't playing it). Once Plague Rat infected some of us, we basically took each other out due to Legacy's buffs on us (we were at +2 to our damage), and Plague Rat also had multiple "Ongoing" cards out that none of us could get rid of (since they didn't have HP, end-conditions, and none of us had anything in our decks to remove ongoing effects). I perhaps mis-assumed that any villain could be taken out with any combination of heroes... I take it, I was wrong?

Any help and feedback is greatly appreciated!

The numbers next to the villains are difficulty ratings, the higher the number the harder they are to defeat.

The numbers next to the heroes are complexity ratings, how difficult it is to play the hero, the higher it is the more things they can do in a single turn (and the longer they take to set up, usually).

I have heard Christopher say (paraphrasing) that "Any 3 heroes can defeat any villain, on advanced" and I am trying to work my way through all the combinations to see if that is right!

In your game I would recommend looking through Mr Fixer's deck and looking at Jack Handle and Driving Mantis, those 2 cards are particularly awesome against Plague rat

And welcome to the forums.

Any vilain can be taken out with any three heroes. Some of the combinations are just much harder to beat with any given three heroes.

The numbers mean different thigns. For villains, it refers to how dfficult they are to defeat. Baron Blade and Omnitrtron are pretty easy, Chairman and Matriarch are difficult. For heroes, the rating (1-3 rather than 1-4) are how complex the heroes are; Legcy and Ra are straight-forward, Absolute Zero and Argent Adept are not.

Dice are the most common alternative for HP. You can write it down but that's even more hassle than the tokens in my expereince.

I've got some print-at-home solutions to tracking hp and game effects on my site that you may find helpful.

www.spiffworld.com/sotm

My partner and I use dice to track our hitpoints - I have enough dice (from my experience playing a variety of tabletop RPGs) to manage most of the time, unless the combination is something like Akash'Bhuta in the Final Wasteland, in which case I start running out and have to use a d20 to track someone who only has about 10hp or something :D.

Incidentally, while, as people have said, it's (according to Christopher) possible to defeat any villain with any combination of heroes, luck of the cards does come into it, so while you might know the decks inside-out, if you don't get the cards you need at the time you need them, you can still get your arse kicked. Then you can try the same combination (of heroes/villain/environment) again and come out victorious because everything went right. I'm pretty sure that's why this game is so amzingly replayable - the chances of having the exact sam game more than once are so tiny…I think someone worked it out once, actually, in a long post that was full of numbers ;).

I agree on Mantis Jack Handle being epic against Rat :D. If you have Shattered Timelines (though from the sounds of it, you don't), Chrono Ranger (Rat's Nemesis) is great fun against him. Omni-10 has a nice set-up he can get which is pretty good against him too :). One thing about Rat is he can't ever destroy your stuff - the only way you'll lose any cards against him is if the environment nukes it, or you destroy it yourself (for example, Tachyon choosing to destroy Pushing the Limits at the start of her turn). Oh, or if you've got Unity in the game (or Visionary with her Decoy thingy), due to Rat hitting everyone on his turn every time. Unless you've used something like Hypersonic Assault, Grease Gun, Ground Pound, or Offensive Transmutation against him, in which case you can just laugh at his failure to do anything.

There are his Infections, of course, which can be nasty, but consider a buffed Tachyon hitting herself while she has Synaptic Response out, or Nightmist with her Amulet - okay so these redirections only work once per turn but every little helps, eh? And then there's the Adept - if you're new to the game, you probably won't want to plunge into trying to figure out his deck straight away. He's one of the more complicated heroes (he can do a million things, and without neeing to use any maths, unlike Ab'Zero ;)), but he can do so much stuff…including healing everyone for a few hp a turn, which can of course counteract some of what Rat is throwing at you. But I won't get started on the Adept - you won't be able to shut me up (guess who's my favourite hero? ;)).

One more thing - fighting Rat on Mars can be funny if a Meteor Shower comes up - take as long as you like to get set up becuase Rat won't be able to do a thing about it. Then when you're ready, someone gets rid of the Meteor Shower and then you kick his arse :D.

Plague Rat is one of the weaker villains, because of his inability to destroy anything.  He can do a ton of damage, but that's all he does...every time Wraith, Tachyon or the Scholar hits him with a One-Shot which stops him from dealing damage, it's like giving each of the players an extra turn in which the Rat can't do anything.  In particular, if you play with a large number of heroes, PR is unlikely ever to flip, and the Infections will be more useful for boosting your heroes' damage (with Plague Locus in play and/or Advanced text) than they will be harmful to your side.  In a 3-hero game, he flips much faster and might destroy your heroes through sheer speed, but that's really the only hope he has to win the game.  I consider him one of the better villains for a game with new players...Baron Blade is the best closely followed by Omnitron, but after that you have to start getting into the "2" difficulty villains, and of these I don't recommend Spite (fairly easy, but rather boring), Akash'Bhuta (that 200 HP is ridiculously daunting if you don't know about her Limbs damaging herself), or the labeled-as-2-but-really-more-of-a-3 La Capitan.  That leaves Plague Rat, Apostate, the labeled-as-3-but-really-more-of-a-2 Gloomweaver, and maaaaybe the Ennead as decent "intro" villains.  If you do as much "ambassadorship" for the game as I do, you'll get tired of Blade and 'Tron fairly fast, so I recommend getting familiar with these other easy villains as alternatives.  You want a player to have at least one or two games under their belt before they get utterly destroyed by villains as hard as Iron Legacy, The Chairman, Citizen Dawn or The Dreamer (although Grand Warlord Voss is okay, and even The Matriarch is a "low 4" and can be fun for a relatively new player to square off against - she's very dangerous, but in a straightforward way, and the "aha" moment that you get when you realize how to completely shut her down can be a key experience for a relative newbie).

Apologies if this is obvious, but when playing Legacy against Plague Rat, maybe don't Galvanize when you're Infected.

Yeah, that's definitely one of the rare times when Motivational Charge is worth using even without The Legacy Ring.  Heck, I might even resort to Next Evolution, which I virtually never want to use because it's entirely passive (I've only gotten the Lead from the Front combo once, and the environment managed to kill a hero after I made a calculated risk to let them take damage from a villain card which would otherwise have killed Legacy, since the villain in question was dealing multiple damage types).

Holy cow Batman!!! You have some AMAZING stuff on your site! And that's exactly what I was looking for! I'm off to buy card stock!

THANK YOU so much for all the effort you put into making all of that!

You galvanize, inspired presence and have Visionary put TtE on Fanatic, then see who dies first.  

I think Ambuscade is another good intro villain, for what it's worth.

I recently played a game sans my usual tracking and oversized accessories, and it was painful. Sounds like my stuff is right up your alley. 

I have HP tracker cards for villains and heroes, with little transparent counters to indicate the appropriate numbers. Minions have HP tokens.

I don't like to use dice because they're easily bumped and I'm inclined to forget what number I'm searching for when I have to adjust them. Roll-down dice would be easier but I don't own any and they are expensive.

I like the Sidekick app for solo games, but my iPad mini screen isn't really big enough for the whole table to see it comfortably in non-solo ones. 

My group uses two ten-sided die for each hero and the villain (and sometimes other targets with exceptionally high Hp).  We use a set of six-sided dice for the hit points on everything else.  It works very well.  Both a set of 10 d10s and a set of 36 d6s can usually be found for only a few bucks at most game stores.

You can buy HP trackers from a game shop.

I know people have used knitting stitch counters as well. They usually go up to 99 and are pretty cheap. 

For hero and villain HP, we use jagarciao's tracker mat available on Spiff's site.  We're very much looking forward to it being updated for Vengeance... we have a stack of wooden disks just waiting for it.

As far as I'm concerned, it is the single greatest thing ever created by man.

Back in the First Edition Age, I tracked HP with round beer coasters that I had written some numbers on and a paperclip. ('We had nothing back in the old days, and not even half of that!' *cranky old man voice*)

I also went through a dice phase, and then through a dice and stitch counters (like Silverleaf suggested) phase. My parents still use them with their copy. Personally, after hours of slinging tokens at the booth in Essen last year, I started to use the tokens whenever I play. I realised that I actually like doing a bit of math and handling those little cardboard coins.

Or maybe that was just a side effect from being brainwashed and conditioned.

My group likes using dice, but I'm totally cool with the counters.  Every time I use them at a convention (or the Gathering of Heroes, recently) with the >G crew, I always am amazed at how little time it takes to add up hit points with those little tokens.  The dice are just add a little extra fun for us, since I have a lot of them and a variety of colors.  I love using a cyan/purple d4 and blue/green d10 to track Tempest's hit points, for instance.  There can be issues with jumbling the board, but typically everyone watches out for each other, since we're usually pretty attentive to who has the most/least HP.  Tracking that has caused us to be pretty vigilant of all the heroes' HP.  Worst case scenario, we favor a more challenging number than we remember ("Wasn't Fixer at 22?  I can't remember.  I'll set him at 21 to be safe."  "Was Apostate at forty-five or forty-six?  Huh...forty-six it is!").

Good idea!  Though I might round the other way against the villains and environments that I usually lose to.

I don't blame you.  Some of those Villain and Environment decks can be a real nightmare!  Fortunately, we're usually pretty good about remembering HP totals, so it's not too often that we have to use that method!

Me, too. When EE was coming out and Christopher told me that I'd have to use the tokens when introducting the game to people, instead of dice, I was really dreading it. Now, though, I find the HP tokens faster than using dice. Maybe if I'd used dice as much as I've used tokens I would have learned exactly what rotations were necessary to get from each face of a 10-sider to each other face, but instead of I've learned how to do all of the common subtractions for HP readily, like when doing 22 minus 4, ignore the 2, just grab a 10 or five and replace it with a five and one or just a one.

I would guess that holograms > dials > tokens > dice > pencil & paper > memory > stonecarving.  Not everyone can afford the dials, so the fact that the game comes with tokens is convenient.

One trick I've developed during solo play is that every hero gets a 10 and two 5's. Then I set that stack apart from the 1's (and additional 5 for crazy people like Haka) so I know at a glance that hero has at least 20. then I tend to keep the 1's in stacks of 3 or something else easily countable.

Villains are the hard ones, all those tokens, I stop trying to keep track of the exact number which can be trouble when I start letting a villain heal over their hp limit

I've been growing increasingly frustrated with the tokens as my game count exceeds 100; it's certainly better removing HP than adding damage as I did in my early games, but sometimes it can be hard for me, with characters that heal a lot, to constantly make and unmake change or tell when I'm at the cap.  If I ever get prosperous again, I might well invest in spinnable trackers or something; they are definitely starting to seem like a valuable enhancement.  And lots of other Spiffworld stuff might help me...whenever I can afford to go to a print shop.

There's a pretty nice Android app called Sentinel Commander that I've been using for solo games.  You can keep track of all the targets in play, and sort them by hp.  It's problematic during group games, 'cause only I can see the hp, but for solo games it works great.

I prefer the 10 sided dice method over using the tokens, because you can see at a glance what HP everything is at rather than having to ask everyone, or start shuffling tokens about while counting them. It is a bit of a faff rotating the dice though (and d10s are surprising expensive just to use them as token alternatives, unless you order them online). I've recently started using the sentinels sidekick ipad app for my solo games and it's really good, but I haven't had the chance to try it in a group game (it'll probably work well with my mother because she has the same app and could connect to my games with me, but I don't know how easy for everyone to see the single screen)

I sort health out at the beginning in token counts that allow all possible health combos (at least 4 ones, and 1 five) and then keep them right by the hero when they lose health, so I can see the health remaining and lost, and never have to get tokens from the token pile for heroes or the villain character card.

EDIT:  I got this from someone here on the forums saying they did it that way.

I use the checkerboard mat for the main heroes and villains, and dail indicators from Spiff for mooks, golems, minions, etc.  What I like about the system is that it is very east to, for instance, who is the third highest hit point target.  Card stock and elbow grease.  

Depends on what kind of dice they're using. Tokens I think are easy as long as people don't stack them(!), which I recently discovered some people have the habit of doing.

Anyway, I don't like using dice as counters because I'm clumsy and absent minded, so I'm likely to knock them or reroll them.

The people I play with do tend to stack tokens when they have a pile of them, hence my not being able to count them easily. The dice we use are all white with big black numbers so you can see from the other side of the table who's on what HP. I've not had too many problems with dice being knocked myself but could see it being a problem if your playing in cramped quarters.

I've found the tokens quite easy to use. I just tend to use high-denomination tokens when possible (don't want a mountain of 1s) and stack like denominations; so if there's a 5 on top of a stack, everything below it is a 5. Between these two, it's usually pretty easy to tell HP at a glance and it's bump-proof.

For targets that heal a lot, you can start with their max HP on the card in denominations that allow for all values without needing change (a 12-HP target would have a 5 and seven 1s). When they take damage, move the corresponding HP off the card, but keep it nearby instead of throwing it back into the general pool. This makes it easy to heal them the right amount without going over their max HP.

We stack, but keep the numbers seperate, so 1s are stacked only with 1s.  It makes it pretty easy to tell what is happenning.

In my experience, there are not enough 1s to go around on a typically cluttered battlefield if you ever use more than four of them on one target.  If you're fighting Spite or are in an almost target-less Environment, you can get away with a little largesse, but otherwise, against a large army of Citizens and Dinosaurs, you run out.

My general standard for tracking HP with tokens is the following:

1. Heroes: A '10', two '5', and however many '1' as their remaining HP.  Might give Haka or Legacy an extra '5' instead to save ones.

2. Villains: They get 10 '1', and a bunch of '5' and '10', with Omnitron and the high HP ones using some '25' tokens.  When a villain loses HP I shift their loses to a separate pile near them for easy tracking of villain healing.  And as they lose the '1's I occassionally exchange 5 '1's back to their main stack for a '5'; a couple of '5' for a '10', etc. etc.

3. Everyone else.  They get initial tokens from the remaining pool, usually all '1's or a '5' and then '1's.  The Heroes will be donating a bunch of '1' chits to the pool early on in most cases.

From there it's pretty easy to look at hero token stacks to see who is above/below 20, above/below 15, etc.

Anyone with 28 or higher HP gets 2 10's, 1 5 (Haka gets 2) and then at least 4 1's (28 hp have one sitting off their card waiting)  Lower than 28 get 1 10, 2 5's, and 1's to make up the difference

Villains get 25's if there is at least 25 hp after the 25 to make change with, then just like heroes. (then 1 10, 2 5's, 5 1's to make the small number 25, then add the biggest you can to make up extra HP.

I just use dice and save messing around with a million little pieces of cardboard all over the place ;).

I use color coded dice, white for hero characters, red for villain character, black d6s for other targets. I got sets of d10s of different colors for The Ennead and other high HP targets like Gloomweaver's Relics. The Sentinels get their own set, color coded for each of them. All dice are solid color dice, except for the transparent ones I use for Shu. I have 2 cases with the same dice in each so that we can split into 2 games if needed.

I use these Iris cases to seperate my tokens/dice.
http://www.irisusainc.com/p-816-llb-8.aspx

Got my stuff sorted into 8 of these.
Start/End tokens
Damage tokens
Effect tokens (immune to fire, can't draw cards, etc.)
HP tokens
d6s
d10s (x2)
small villain character cards

Makes it very quick and easy to set up and put away.

I also use one of these for my Oversized Villain cards.
http://www.irisusainc.com/p-493-kp-pc.aspx

Dice, urgh. They get bumped and you spend half your time turning the dice over and over trying to find the seven. Far fiddler than tokens, IMO.

My players prefer HP tracker cards with transparent counters to cover the appropriate number(s). 

And those never get bumped, unlike dice?  (The hunting for numbers across dice faces issue is still valid, unless you use spindown dice.)

Unless the whole table gets shoved, the bingo markers don't shift that far when bumped.

Just throwing this out there, but I can think of one form of tracking that's pretty much jostle-proof - cribbage boards or similar peg-in-hole arrangements.  (If anyone remembers the 3M Bookshelf games such as Twixt and Feudal, those are the best example of what I'm talking about; cribbage is a more mainstream version where the pegs are not quite as well-secured.)  This doesn't necessarily make for the best way of visualizing hero HP, but at least it's very well stabilized against the possibility of accidents.

Sentinels sidekick is pretty stable as well (until your battery runs out)

If you are after shuffleproof solutions, I suppose printing the numbers on paper, then gluing said paper on a magnetic sheet and using washers to track the Hp would work pretty well, too, for either individual or communal trackers. Or, If you store your game in a case, you could even have one big tracker in the lid or something. And if it's a ferromagnetic case , you could paint the tracker straight onto the case and track with magnets.

Of course magnets and electronic devices don't play together nicely, but at least that might stop people from checking their frakking mobile whenever it isn't their turn.

My spinner trackers are jostle-proof as well.

I can attest to our group having good sessions with the dice systems. We use nothing but d10s. Honestly though, I really do think it comes down to preference. I really don't think tokens and my group mix, really.

We only use the tokens as start ans end of turn markers... Dice fulfill hp duty. D10's red for single digits and green for the tens and a d6 pool for when target rich setups get pulled out.

Sure, this thread is a couple weeks stale now, but I'm just catching up, and I would have chimed in earlier if I had seen this earlier.

I actually used this exact HP token system before this token system was released.  With my complete despise of using dice to remember current values, and finding both tracking boards to be less than adequate (it was very simple to have a marker move to another digit), I brought a pocket full of coins (likely close to $15 worth) to one of the Comic Carnival meetups.   I was happy when I saw the token boards using 1, 5, 10, and 25.

When I use tokens, I always keep the tokens simplified.  I always use a 25 token for all heroes (with exception to The Sentinels and The Argent Adept, for obvious reasons), and always make exchanges which result in the fewest number of tokens required to display the amount.  It helps that I am always rather quick at figuring how to efficiently combine and separate the values.  By keeping simplified, it is quick to add up exact totals.  However, by using a standard setup (such as those who use a 10, two 5s, and multiple 1s), it is much quicker to see who is lowest and highest.