Playing Vengeance Villains Individually?

Well, seeing as the idea of Vengeance is that you play against H of them, this mean that H villain cards get played each turn.  Thus, while you would still need to do something to their hp (multiplying by H might be too much, but scale it some), you could fairly easily make them scaling by playing them like a full Vengeance team.  Just let the specific villain play a card between each hero's turn, and it would be similar to playing against the V5, but just with one.

Edit: To be clear, you don't need to adjust their damage to scale with H, as they'll be playing H cards each full turn.

That's... actually a pretty elegant solution. I agree they'd need an HP boost (<= startingHP * H) and a couple of cards would need to be handled differently (like certain Friction cards causing other villain decks to play cards... I guess you could just have her play H-1 additional cards in that case), but that's all pretty manageable.

Thanks for the idea, broccoli.

Keep in mind that Friction (in particular) would be MUCH more powerful in this format, because Surges would build up in the trash far quicker, and Proletariat as well probably, because clones, clones, clones.  This is why I mentioned that HP*H might be too high.

   They should have set the villans up to were you could play them bouth ways. There is also no filp abilty. I just wish I could also play the villans the regular way also. I do not think the new villans can take on 4 to 5 heros in regular mode they would just get beat down.

     I usely only play this game with my one friend and it hard enught to keep track of everything as it is. With eleven diffferent deck to keep trak of for the vengeance style of play it is going to be even harder. I look forwored to playing the game this way. I just wish I could also play the villans the regular way also. With that being sead are they going to come up with more villans for the vengeance style of play and villans for the regualer way to play the game also. If thats the case than thats cool because than you have two diffirent way to play so your not looked in to one style of play.

Actually H is never supposed to be lower than 3.  Two hero games are home made idea and not part of the base game.  Generally I belive the idea is that for any H-X always use a minimum value of 1.

Yeah, it's a 2-5 player game but it's a 3-5 hero game; if you're playing with 2 players, you'll want to play 2 heroes each (or something like that). Having said that, as Sefirit mentinoed, there are home-brewed rules for 2-player games, but that's not the way it's supposed to be played. 

While my main playtester buddy and I have never had problems playing 2 heroes each, I have to admit, with V5, it does get a bit crowded and harder to manage for just 2 people.  Not impossible by any means, but trickier.

Yeah, the 2 <= H bit was a slipup on my part because I often play the game with two players... each controlling two heroes. I recognize that it should be a 3 to 5 range. Oops.

Agreed.

There is also no filp abilty.

Disappointing!

When you have your own game company you can do it your way. Until then… 'they should have' is pretty rude to say.  Far better to parse yourself with 'I would have liked to see this' - they /should/ do nothing for you, the fact that they provide an amazing game that we all enjoy playing many many times over deserves an iota of respect for their design process and their design decisions. 

Cue MOAR ENTITLEMENT!

I'd rather have one brilliant way to fight them then two okay ones hamstrung by forced compromises.

Yeah the V5 are much more complex than the other villain encounters in the game. But thats the point right?

Thats the one thing I dont understand about all the threads and comments about the V5 not being newbie freindly or too hard to keep track of. Thats why its an expansion. Thats why we keep saying its not a "stand alone" in the traditional sense. Its like putting a calculous problem in front of a 13 year old and saying "you know how to multiply and divide, so this should be easy for you"

Also, the V5 villain decks are smaller than normal villain decks.

As to the HP, it'll take a lot of play testing, but you could start with x2 and go from there.

If we're lucky, they might do some additional V5 decks/mini-expansions that take other, existing villains and turn create V5 versions of them.

If we're lucky! 

So I suppose you never second-guessed George Lucas's decisions about what should happen in the Star Wars prequels?  Everyone in America (and most if not all other countries) has an absolute, inherent right to be part of the peanut gallery and to say any damn thing they want about the creative efforts of others.  They may not be in a position to be able to do better, but this in no way un-entitles them from their opinion.

Just because you have right to say what you want doesn't mean someone is not being rude when they imply that they know better than the team that spent hundreds of hours designing and playtesting the game.

Its not about what I feel. its about how I say it. 

/Should/ implies you are better than them and you know better. there are terms for this. Armchair quarterback. Backseat driver. And others. 

You have every right to your opinion, but there is an amount of common politeness and manners fall upon one to use when dealing with peoples work that they poured blood, sweat, and tears into. Telling them they did a labor of love wrong is not only rude, but downright brutal.

I do not like the Prequals. I never have said that George Lucas /should/ have done it a certain way. I was not on set. I never have made a movie. I have never acted in a movie. I have never written one. I have never been to hollywood or dealt with the people that make movies. I have never been involved in movie making.  I can express an opinion of dislike all I want, but i have no right to tell him how he /should/ have done it.

Shater - I have no issue with people looking to make house rules or custom rules, or variants of any type. By all means - explore those, they will only bring more awesomeness to this game.

I do however have an issue with people who affect an air of arrogance that they know better than others simply because they 'are' without any sort of experience with the actual product or process. Envisioner was not involved in the development of this expansion, he is entitled to his opinion as to what he would have liked to have seen, but not to a position that anyone /should/ have done anything differently.

Oh. And.

I disagree with you Evisioner that everyone is entitled to their opinion. that sense of entitlement is a very inherant problem with society. People are not /entitled/ to anything. They must work hard for what they want, and opinions are worth next to nothing without hard work to back them up

Also saying that the game should be different is insulting to all the hardworking playtesters as well as the designers, implying that none of them did their job properly.

I for one am grateful to everyone involved in allowing me to play this, my favourite game ever. Thank you, I do appreciate it. Sure, in an ideal world I'd change a few minor things about it (mostly "scanability" of cards/effects), but I'd never tell a designer that they should have done something differently. (I might however ask about the thought process behind a particular decision or whether a certain situation came up in playtesting or similar, because it's extremely possible that I don't like something because I don't understand it properly.) I'm not a game designer and I don't presume to know better than people who do this for a living.

I totally get people wanting to play the VV as individual villains.  The Vengeance format can be a real hoot, but it also takes a lot of space.  The format was incredibly different, however, and much of our playtesting efforts were dedicated to balancing it.  I'd've been quite impressed if the VV could be played as individual decks and (H) decks as a balanced format, but between that and the heroes/environments it never was a subject that anyone really seriously attempt on top of everything else.

I definitely get people criticizing the way people criticize, but I'm all for criticizing.  It tells >G what people love, what they hate, and what they would like to see for the future.

Be brutal to the things you love, folks.  It shows a lot of thought and care was put into what you have to say.  Just makes sure you criticize constructively rather than incessantly.

And note that if you're the guy that continuously bitches about various aspects of something and practically demands that stuff be changed (or says that it's stupid that things are this way in the first place), it's highly unlikely that anyone's going to listen to you and take your criticism on board.

If I whined constantly about how the game boxes so far suck because they aren't purple and called Adam an idiot for not making them purple and threaten to refuse to buy any future non-purple boxes and say that all the art on the cards that aren't purple is a huge mistake, I'd totally expect the guys to ignore me and make the next box green if green is the planned next box colour.

There's totally a difference between that and saying that you love a particular card because of its purpleness and that you'd like to see more purple in future, and maybe if the next box colour's not been decided yet they could you consider purple please? Option two might actually get me some purple.

Compare and contrast:

I can't believe there aren't more environments! I'm getting bored of these ones and require many more, it's a massive mistake if you don't cave in to my demands and that will make you bad at your job. But hey, you're bad at your job anyway because you didn't make more environments in the first place. Plus some of your heroes are crappy because they don't do exactly what I think they should do all the time. Give me more heroes!

Me and my friends are having great fun with this game and were wondering if there are any plans for new environments - we'd love to see some more generic ones if possible, like under the slide in a children's play park or a busy motorway or a completely mundane 50s-style diner which has run out of cheese for the cheeseburgers. And we never seem to be able to keep Ostrich Envelope Boy alive for longer than three turns, are we missing something? Could we please have more weasel-based villains?

And now I believe that THAT point has been emphasized effectively, and we should return to the origional topic of the thread which was, if I may summarize:

"What would be the best way to house rule the V5 so that we could play against them individually".

Broccoli suggested playing H villian cards each turn, but was unsure how to multiply their health.

One way to possibly determine health would be to play against them to exhaustion - i.e. play until all the heros are dead, and then record how much damage the villian took.  Do this a dozen times and then average the score, and voila!  (Note:  I'm not sure this would actually work)

Well, we've only spent about a fifth of this page delving into the horror started by a poster using the word "should" in regard to Vengeance villain mechanics.  I'm sure we can sprout off yet ANOTHER Off-Topic forum post on the nature of being angry at someone saying something we didn't like on the internet.

In other news, my group played a three player game against Fright Train during playtesting.  I can't remember how different he was then compared to now, but it was as on ok game.  I'd rank it as a quicker Ambuscade or Baron Blade game.  A few (H) effects, more HP, and an interesting flip mechanic may do him some good.  I'd see him redoubling his efforts after being reduced to 0 HP, so you could probably do a cool flip mechanic based on him being scuffed up and angry.  You may not even need to raise his front side's HP by much.

Maybe the flip mechanic could be that once you flip an individual V5's character card, they become another member of the V5, starting at full health.

You'd probably need to give them some sort of advantage too.  If the heros are all set up, while the villian has completely reset, then they'll be at a severe disadvantage, especially if the heroes' setup includes DR or deck control.  Yes, they'll be at a bit lower life, but I don't think that'd matter much.  I'd say give each of them a unique "explode" effect, e.g. "When you kill Baron Blade, he destroys all ongoings and turns into Fright Train", "When you kill Fright Train, he deals each hero 10 damage and turns into Friction".

This doesn't feel quite the same as fighting an individual character to me, though.  Interesting, but not quite what we're after.

10? WOW

MUCH DAMAGE

MANY PAIN

SUCH TEARS

WOW

Eh.  It was just an example to get the point across.

He's just referencing Doge, not knockin' ya.


The flip = replace and nasty rider effect is interesting. However, having the villians tagteam seems like a different gameplay variant. I would prefer to introduce as little change as possible, ideally just introducing some H values and increasing the hp an appropriate amount and sticking with the same hero the entire time.