TOPIC: Thoughts on Difficulty

Hardcore is the new normal, anyway.

One thing I've done that seemed to help new players is explicitly letting them know which tokens they could "forget about" after the party card has been filled in.

Once the coach has looked over their tokens, I'll pluck out all the simple stat boosters and say: "You won't need these out anymore. Put them completely away and forget about them."

At this point the majority of their tokens are off the table, which tends to greatly reduce their anxiety.

Garrison wrote: One thing I've done that seemed to help new players is explicitly letting them know which tokens they could "forget about" after the party card has been filled in.

Once the coach has looked over their tokens, I'll pluck out all the simple stat boosters and say: "You won't need these out anymore. Put them completely away and forget about them."

At this point the majority of their tokens are off the table, which tends to greatly reduce their anxiety.

Agreed! When a person realizes they will only have to remember a handful of tokens their trepidation of the coming run is far less.

Tell them, when they are in the dungeon, the only token they *really* need to worry about is their WEAPON token. Always have that close-to-hand.

Everything else is gravy.

I forgot that I did Lycan puzzle run last year with 7 noob friends of mine and just me on Hardcore (it was supposed to be 9 but two flaked). No one died until the last room and still we only lost 2 people. 5 of them are returning this year to join in so I guess they had fun. Again it was puzzle so the tokens didn't matter as much. The wisp gave us trouble though because I have crap for range weapons and couldn't hit the damn thing. Again I had been on the puzzle run 1 before and had done combat a 3 times before that run.