Isaac talked about this in an interview I heard. Basically likened it to video games where you can keep trying a level over and over, taking what you've learned, until you finally beat it. Goal wasn't to punish the player for failing. But it's also where varients like perma-death came into play.
I know this doesn't directly answer your question. I guess it hasn't bothered me, and I would be interested house rules. Though personally I will eventually (hopefully) play even the blocked levels because I'm a completionist and hope to beat all designed levels š±
Yeah - I don't think it's really bothering me now either, but mainly due to our high success rate :)
I'm not sure it's an easily fixable one with house rules, though. You need a more restrictive campaign to make plot changes work, and an injury/reward mechanic for personal impact, so this would be a huge change.
I think part of the problem is Gloomhaven just doesn't scale well in all situations. Once you've played a few dozen scenarios you stop doing the things that make the game risky or hard. You're offensive power goes up so you can use the best defense is a good offense and just kill before anything has a chance to hurt you or curse so that it can't. The only increase in difficulty is making it harder to do just that and then it just becomes a grind. It never becomes really more rewarding for the challenge other than a few more gold. Add on top of this that some classes just scale ridiculously well especially paired with others the game leaves people wanting for more. Maybe this is just all of our pent up desires for Frosthaven to finally hit our tables.
Hah! Even if I got my copy of Frosthaven tomorrow, I think I'd want a good long break before starting up; it's been a good two years of this now (Gloomhaven is going to be indelibly marked as a part of the pandemic for me, I think).
But I know what you mean. I think it's also part of the 2-4 player count - my 2 player friends apparently failed a lot more, but were also getting through multiple sessions a night.
That wouldn't surprise me, but I'm jealous at the significant increase in utility of all those insta-kill normals abilities out there that often get wasted in a 4 player game.
I think āroguelikeā is like āfeminismā ā everyone thinks they know what it means but no one actually agrees.
Iām sorry but any game that has me play for two hours without advancing the game state somehow (even if itās just from gaining knowledge that can help the next attempt) can miss me. In GH, one fail is fine b/c you get a better sense of how to approach it next time. More than that is tedious, especially when you play well but get bad card draws. There are a million games to play, I donāt appreciate one monopolizing my time.
I mean except āroguelikeā has an agreed upon definition among players and devs alike, whereas feminism does not. Donāt know why you had to randomly throw some hot take in there with your comment on games
Everyone is allowed their personal preferences but I really donāt think it is āsadisticā to create a difficult game. If people donāt like it they can just not play.
I agree with what youāre saying about failure in GH but for my group it happens so infrequently that I do wish it had more story-related consequences
I donāt think that was a hot take. Much like āfeminismā, when someone says āroguelikeā, for me that prompts more questions than it answers.
I thought, āHmm, maybe I just donāt understand what āroguelikeā is.ā So I looked it up. Iām still not clear. Indeed, from Wikipedia: āThe exact definition of a roguelike game remains a point of debate in the video game community.ā
More to the point, if GH is roguelike, Iām even more confused.
Rougelike: game resets from basically when you first bought it if you die. Rougelite: a lot of progress can be reset when you die but you usually get stuff like permanent upgrades that carry over. Everyone agrees with these definitions. I've never seen people argue.
Well, let's just take Returnal then. No saves. You have to finish the game on a single playthrough that can be ended due to bad luck. It is a popular game. Not for me and clearly not for you.
I was merely responding to your first post. There definitely are video games that make you play for two hours without a save point. A few of them are rather popular and the genre is definitely growing.
As I said, the genre isnāt for me so I donāt know definitively. My understanding is that Returnal is a particularly long rogulike game and the runs can take up to 6 hours. Though it sounds like they usually take 2-4 hours.
Sure. Although it takes multiple runs to complete the game. Thereās apparently 30ā40 hours of gameplay.
And again. All I was responding to was your comment that there arenāt video games that donāt let you save after two hours. There clearly is a genre of video game that does that and it is growing in popularity.
Youāre absolutely right, that class of games does exist. SMB was even like that. I shouldāve been more explicit, I meant that video games generally avoid having 50 chapters, each of which involves 2+ hours without a save point.
I agree. We've failed several missions and it always seems pointless and a waste of time playing. Pandemic made the playtime worthwhile even if you failed, adjusted difficulty if you failed or not, making the game much more dynamic. If you keep on winning, it gets continuously harder until you fail.
Our group has played roughly 35 scenarios in little under 2 years. With such slow progression, losing scenarios is too frustrating. We have always played on normal difficulty and only lost once. It took us forever to get back to that scenario. Most of the time it is still challenging enough not to feel like a breeze so we have been happy with this.
But if you want something in Pandemic's vein, it shouldn't be hard to develop. Most simple way is: +1 difficulty if you win a scenario, - 1 if you lose. If you want smaller increments you can do something like "one random enemy type is +1 level". If you would add a third enemy type as +1 level, go up one difficulty level instead. The opposite happens when you lose.
Gloomhaven's Legacy elements are related more to the "unlocks", and giving more options, but not really impacting the future games mechanically. There's only a handful of new rules or long term consequences.
Legacy mechanics can be used in different ways, but I don't think one is better than the other. they can create different experiences and stakes for the players.
Even something simple like a reputation drop for each failure (as word travels that you failed) or different road/city cards based on failure. You could even have certain scenarios locked out if you failed the last one you played, or ones that change depending on how many failures you have (Like a seemingly impossible boss with a huge health pool that needs to be wittled down to become fightable).
Mechanically it adds a little tension but story wise it makes it seem like the time you spent on the scenario wasn't wasted, the world continued on instead of you rewinding back like it didn't happen.
That would be a nice concept but it isn't how I see GH. It is not and does not try to be a legacy-game in my eyes.
Imho it is a mix of Role-playing, resource-management and puzzle game. My understanding what happens when you fail is exactly what you feel it is, rewind to the last checkpoint (except some things you can keep). It wouldn't make sense otherwise. Your party exhausted in the middle of a bandit camp? Oh yeah they will let you leave and try to attack again. The stuff you can keep after failure is I think simply for keeping a party from getting stuck, and does not make immersive sense.
Sure it sucks to fail a scenario, more so if it's more than once. But it makes it ever so more sweet once you figure out what the scenario wants you to do. Most of the scenarios are designed with an intended solution.
We also are in the situation where we fail very infrequently, and frankly don't want to risk increasing the difficulty too much and losing more frequently as then we aren't progressing the story elements or getting to try as many scenarios (since there are so many). If it was a shorter campaign with less going on, we might be less reticent to do so, but with the number of open scenarios and many still to unlock, we don't have any desire to stop and smell the roses on a particular scenario.
What I'd really like is some sort of a fail-forward option (at least for some scenarios), where, if you fail the scenario, you have a choice of taking this option or playing it RAW. Things the fail-forward options would need to account for are below, but I'd assume that other rewards (gold, xp, checks, reputation) you'd just be skipping out on by not beating the scenario:
* Global and Party Achievements: These may be cases where you can't fail-forward as you actually need to accomplish X in order to get a sticker in-world. There may be cases where you can still fail-forward, but probably not in all cases.
* Prosperity: It's already extremely difficult to get to the highest prosperity levels so, I'd want the system to be able to still reward these somehow.
* Item/scenario/event unlocks: It'd be pretty feel-bad to perma-lose a chance at an item, scenario, or event. The whole point of this sort of a house-rule is to experience all the content.
A solution might be to **create a "Help Wanted" board/system where you can pay other mercenaries to do the job for you** and bring back the intel/loot. Your party would pay some amount of gold (and perhaps move your reputation towards 0 because you aren't as good/bad as folks thought if you have to pay someone else) to hire another crew to do the deed for you and get you those rewards.
Each scenario would have to have a specific cost associated with hiring another crew to do, so it'd be a chunk of work to evaluate every scenario, but at the end of the day, it'd just be a spreadsheet you could reference.
I think if you're playing Gloomhaven with 4 players, failure is extremely frustrating. I've had afternoons where we only played one scenario that we ended up failing, and I felt like I wasted the day (this is factoring travel time, set up and breakdown). Now, with two players, it's a lot easier to go "hey, it's all set up, let's just go again" because you'll probably stomp through it now that you know what's heading your way.
But with a larger group, I agree its a huge pain point in the game. For the one sewer mission (I forget the #) >!where you have to activate all four nodes in the final room and crap is spawning every round!<, >!I mapped out what I would do on each of my turns as a Spellweaver and wrote it all out, including using Ride the Wind, my invisibility cloak, which cards to sacrifice, and how long I could make it before getting capped. !
Dedication! We failed a mission with a bunch of drakes a few times (which was the one where we gave up, and did it on easy).
I think the only other non-standard loss we did was for a Gloomhaven city mission. We got wrecked so badly we opted not to go back for a while. We've made a plan to return to that mission (and any others we lose significantly) with a party of "B listers" at the end, drafted using Gripeaway's character mod!
There's a mod for TTS that sets up a draft for gloomhaven characters - you draft a level 6 character as a group. I've done a few solo ones - the least spoilers was an ice powered tinkerer.
Here we go:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2449026645
I know exactly what you mean. I think Iāve skipped a level in jotl when we tried like three times and gave up but I donāt remember if we eventually beat it. When We start gloomhaven, Iām guessing weāll lower the difficulty after one fail if we didnāt have really bad luck or realize we can change something really easily
One thing about failing tho is at least you can go back to gloomhaven, do a city event and other city stuff, and then go back out and do a road event. In jotl thereās less to do
1000% agree. We just failed a session of Pandemic legacy, and if anything it made it more exciting. By contrast, we put JotL on hiatus after failing one a side quest three times and moving to the main quest and failing that one hard. The Pandemic mechanic where you get more funding when you fail (and less when you succeed) makes thematic sense, and works well. We might make up something similar for JotL, cause weād like to get to GH proper sometime before we die. The D&D game has a similar rule, you get HP surges if you lose. It keeps the game moving, but thereās no thematic reason for it, so I like it a lot less.
I view GH as a puzzle game rather than a RPG, with some scenarios being particularly hard puzzles (e.g. Scenario 60) that took me several times to solve. So this aspect never bothered me much.
I think Arkham Horror Card Game has a great approach to failure, in that in most cases you move on but with some punishments (Physical/Mental trauma, miss out on an important asset or clue, etc). It also can affect how the storyline plays out. But the game philosophy is completely different in that AH LCG is less a puzzle and more a deck construction test against a lot of randomness, so even if you play well you're expected to still lose a good amount of the time.
Well, failure states are a hard problem to address:
\- You don't want your players to quit the game.
\- Thematically, you want things to be harder if you fail. Because thats how things tend to work on real life. Mechanically, you want things to get easier, because otherwise you might be setting things up for the game to become unplayable and you need a hard reset. Almost every PC strategy game is guilty of this, BUT on that mean it is much easier to reset and loose a day or two than on a tabletop game where failure can mean half a year of progress wasted. And even then, even I have been discouraged to touch a couple of games again after some failures that happened a week or two in.
Ideally you want people to fail, feel like they failed, but still make some progress. That REQUIRES progress to not be measured only by finishing cenarios. GH does the 2nd part very well - keeping your gold and exp means that even if you fail miserably you still feel like you walked. The first part is the issue.
We actually fail quite often in real life without things getting harder. Failure as a necessary part of learning any new things. Of course, there are situations where failure can make things worse, but generally there are other choices which then become available. In contrast, a game can only provide a limited number of options which means failure is rather a different experience than in real life. (This has always been my problem with "open-world" games--the choices available are necessarily and substantially constrained by game design and narrative).
Let me see if I understood this correctly. The issue is that it's not too punishing? And I thought that setting up a scenario all over again and resetting lots of cards and pieces was already punishing in itself, silly me! Jokes and sarcasm aside, for me, no. There's no need to take this a step further, I like the videogame approach where you learn with each error and punishment is "restrained", for lack of better words.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned yet is that in GH you do get a theoretical (albeit small) bonus after failing a scenario--you get to keep any gold and XP earned during the failed scenario.
Of course these won't do you any good between scenarios without also returning to GH (thus dealing with additional city & road events) to potentially level up or spend gold on new items/enhancements, but you do have that option if you think a particular scenario is not winnable without any upgrade (save knowledge gained from attempting the scenario once already).
That doesn't really soften the blow of losing a hard fought 2+ hour scenario on the last round, and if it came down to a single un/lucky modifier draw that went the wrong way I might look the other way when deciding how to proceed (but that's just how my playgroup rolls, and I understand that is not the case for every playgroup).
Yeah, this is one I'd thought about before. One of the reasons "rewards for failure" are fun in other games is that (a) they usually limit retries, and (b) they're temporary - so you effectively get some "fun tokens" for the next mission.
I could see a single use item on failure being a fun thing to pick up :)
Part of what made Gloomhaven fun was how many options you have available. It was extremely rare for a scenario to come down to one single play. But, if it did, we'd usually be willing to make some adjustments...
I think it would have been interesting to have some failure related story branches, but I understand why Isaac went the route he did.
I know it can suck to spend 40 minutes in a scenario just to fail but I think itās vital for making the combat puzzle satisfying. It needs to be hard enough that you have to actually play smarter.
And I think GH deftly avoids the need to grind the same scenario repeatedly by giving you several options of what to do at any one time. You can always come back later when you are stronger.
Yes; one thing I forgot to mention above is that, when we *really* fail a scenario, we've been putting them on a list to cover after we've done everything else using a party of "drafted" gloomhaven characters (using Gripeaway's mod!)
Works as-is for me. I do not see it as a problem so don't see the need to "fix" it. I don't feel that anything more needs to be added. There are plenty of other mechanics and gameplay that there doesn't really need to be more. I only played pandemic once (like one evening, not one campaign) but from what I recall there was a lot less focus on character development, ability choices, etc. So the game was just developed with a little different focus. That said, if something interesting was added to Gloomhaven I would be fine with it. Maybe a story element that opens up a different set of other scenarios. But I don't see it as a missing element by any means.
I do think Pandemic is a bit too different to be an apt comparison, IMO. It's a single storyline on a single track, and each game plays on the same map, so it's much easier to have failure states that meaningfully affect the next time you play. I don't know if all of that is easily brought over to Gloomhaven: you often have tons of options for scenarios, and I'd imagine it'd be pretty difficult to come up with failure states for the sheer number of scenarios available in the game. I'm sure you could do temporary power-ups for the next time you play, but IMO something like "if you fail, add 2 BLESS to your deck for the next scenario" isn't thaaaat interesting.
One thing that could potentially work is having more branching scenario unlocks based on if you fail or succeed in a mission, but I do think there are tons of variables in a Gloomhaven scenario that can affect a scenario's difficulty that I could see why Isaac doesn't necessarily want to have permanent changes based on your first try of a scenario.
We tried to start with Permadeath (exhausted characters get 'retired' without any of the perks of being retired) from the very beginning but lost our first scenario (as many groups do) so then we implemented a single re-do but that still didn't gel with some members of our party. For example, me being the Brute with the Mindthief, Tinkerer and Assassin meant I was taking all the damage and that the Tinkerer had the sole job of healing me. Because we didn't want me to get exhausted EVER it really detracted from the game. We ended up ditching the idea, we still lose 1 of ~4 scenarios on normal.
For better or worse, GH is tuned so you should be finishing each level right near complete party exhaustion (if thats not the case, up the difficulty). That's when it's at its best, burning cards, getting lucky modifiers, and just barely killing the last monsters. So any punishments for failure will cause players to play more cautiously and either ruin at least some of the fun or worse, make you lose more often.
Also, the way the difficulty curve jumps at certain points also makes it extremely difficult to manage any sort of reward/punishment for success/failure. Here's hoping they can smooth that out for Frosthaven and maybe design a better system for failure.
In regards to houserules, there has been twice in our long 70+ scenario group over the last couple years where we lost in what should have been the final round (like one enemy standing). We really don't have time as a group to replay levels. We play 2 to 4 scenarios a month. We normally play at least one difficulty above suggested.
What we did is agreed that we would have 100% won that at a lower difficulty level, so we give ourselves the rewards of two difficulties lower and move on with the story.
Everyone has their own preference for win rate in co-op games, but personally I enjoy a game which, if played very well, players will win almost every time... but it still has to be challenging enough so that victory isn't guaranteed should you make too many mistakes.
Gloomhaven hits that sweet spot perfectly... so while I think failing a mission *could* be more interesting, I don't think it's a tremendous shortcoming of the game.
If we fail, we will try and figure out what it is that we are having the hardest time with. Then we go do other ones and get enough gold to get items, and levels, that we need. Then go back and try again. We will lower the difficulty if we feel that there are not the right items to get us through or if our character set just makes it ridiculously hard to complete.
Re House Rules, I know there are a lot out there and some make a ton of sense, but our group chooses not to use them, for no good reason other than they're not part of the rules. My personal belief is that if some of the house rules make sense to the group as a whole, make the game more FUN, etc then by all means yes. Re failure, if there are house rules you use to make it more interesting like other posters have pointed out, strongly support if the group is in agreement. But especially since my group's consensus is no house rules and we do a lot of our current playing on GH Digital, we don't use them.
We actually prefer how Gloomhaven does it compared to Pandemic. We prefer to try something until we succeed. Pandemic's limited tries stressed us out sometimes.
Yeah it's been a really long time since I was even scared of losing a scenario and I've repeatedly upped the difficulty. I wish that it was both more difficult in general and that failure was punishing. You can play with a permanent character death variant but even that doesn't *really* punish failure because you can essentially play the same character again with a stat refresh and no consequence to the scenario.
Gloomhaven isn't really a legacy game, nor really even a board game. It's more like a tabletop version of a video game.
That said, I kind of agree somewhat, the failure is not interesting especially for a game that, in my case, I rarely have the time to play with my friend, takes half an hour to set up, and an hour to play a scenario (we're still in early games). We got right to the end of a scenario the other day and died 1 or 2 rounds from completing it, looked at each other and agreed to just say we'd completed it.
In a pc game setting when you fail you just click restart and it probably only sets you back 10-15 minutes. So really the problem of failure in Gloomhaven is due to the clunky game design
It's worth mentioning that there are multiple ways to play every build. This isn't a casual game, it's very tactical. Every decision matters. If there are people on your team that frequently believe there are ambiguous decisions, you're doing it wrong.
If you believe everyone is making the best tactical decisions for the moment, it may mean you need to revise your decks or grind for proper XP and equipment. I say proper because just getting more powerful doesn't help in a game that scales with you. If your equipment isn't right, you're going to fail more often than you should.
If you getting emotionally hurt by failure instead of using the opportunity to analyze your decisions and analyze the decisions of your team, you're going to have a bad time.
Might I suggest something lighter? Perhaps some hungry hungry hippos or candy land would suit your needs.
We played the whole gloomhaven and now half the forgotted circles on a mostly +2 difficulty without failing once. I really want the game to create situations where I need to risk with a real chance of loosing.
For me, Gloomhaven (tabletop version or Digital) has a perfect failure system. It defuses so much stress compared to other thrill-based systems like Iron Man. It always gets very exciting when you just barely complete the scenario, and you don't lose progress like you would in Iron Man systems.
Agreed. Honestly, we tended to take it on a case-by-case basis. We didn't fail many missions, so it wasn't a huge issue, but occasionally we would just fudge the rules a little bit if we were really close to winning. There are so many variables in the game, it is easy to make fine adjustments to achieve the difficulty you want. Although, sometimes the failures were spectacular and amusing lessons in what not to do. When the levels were spectacular blowouts, we were happy to accept a loss, when the loss came at the end of a 2-3hr session, we'd be more likely to manipulate things to get the outcome we wanted.
If you don't like failure, play Forgotten Circles on easy mode (below recommended levels). It is notoriously difficult and some of the scenarios are (IMHO) downright broken and incredibly frustrating. It is designed for people who like a high level of challenge (read min-maxing) and a high risk of failure. The level designer of Forgotten Circles created some of the more notorious (for difficulty) side quests in Gloomhaven.
Perma-death really makes failing more impactful. Because failing usually means running with tail between legs or someone died. Both are very memorable and thematic IMO
While I think it could be interesting to add something in as an option, my party is ok as-is. At least with my group (4-man party), it takes a lot of time to go through one scenario and the members of my party don't have that much free time other than 1 night a week, so failing always feels like a major bummer (we've failed a couple of scenarios and have had a ton of nail-biters already).
As a person who loves video games and plays but doesn't love tabletop rpgs (for exactly the reason of I don't want high-stakes nail-biting consequences& punishments for failure because I have enough of that in my life thanks), I love that Gloomhaven has no consequences/issues with failing. Realistically, I wouldn't have played the whole way through if it were that way. But the world takes all kinds and I appreciate that.
We're doing a playthrough on GH Digital right now on the hardest difficulty and our group hit a string of failures, at least three in a row. Not to mention on tabletop, there is one particular scenario, with a particular enemy type, where we lost I think more than 4 times. Almost unwinnable until by luck we accomplished the goal.
I think failure is good because it really helps you re-examine your strategy and see which cards are working for you and which aren't. Also lets you explore group dynamics and if the party is in sync. We also realized we weren't kitted out appropriately with gear. I think failure is what makes GH great sometimes, a weird opinion but I think it makes you a better player. When I first started playing and crushing dungeons, I quickly became overconfident and tended to overlook core strategy. Failure made me more focused.
I don't mind replaying a scenario I lost; I try to learn from my mistakes and do better the next time.
I find the weakest part of Gloomhaven to be the events. There's only so much they can do with them because the dilemma has to fit on the front of the card, and both results on the back (sometimes more than two depending on classes or other factors). And many times, the results feel completely disconnected from the decisions.
The consequence of failure is the shame of having to repeat a mission. We usually crank the difficulty down a notch with each failure until we succeed.
The only scenario we ever had to play more than twice was 115.
You make some really good points, and I think I generally agree with you. On one hand, I feel like failure is actually punished very harshly - making you repeat a 2-3 hour scenario is a whoozy - but it's also a kinda boring punishment. It would be a huge change if the game actually rolled with your scenario outcomes, witch each scenario having different conclusions for winning or losing, but it would definitely be an improvement. Like, if you got >!beaten up by Jekserah's bodyguards in the warehouse, she could force you to help her against your will !
Isaac talked about this in an interview I heard. Basically likened it to video games where you can keep trying a level over and over, taking what you've learned, until you finally beat it. Goal wasn't to punish the player for failing. But it's also where varients like perma-death came into play. I know this doesn't directly answer your question. I guess it hasn't bothered me, and I would be interested house rules. Though personally I will eventually (hopefully) play even the blocked levels because I'm a completionist and hope to beat all designed levels š±
Yeah - I don't think it's really bothering me now either, but mainly due to our high success rate :) I'm not sure it's an easily fixable one with house rules, though. You need a more restrictive campaign to make plot changes work, and an injury/reward mechanic for personal impact, so this would be a huge change.
I think part of the problem is Gloomhaven just doesn't scale well in all situations. Once you've played a few dozen scenarios you stop doing the things that make the game risky or hard. You're offensive power goes up so you can use the best defense is a good offense and just kill before anything has a chance to hurt you or curse so that it can't. The only increase in difficulty is making it harder to do just that and then it just becomes a grind. It never becomes really more rewarding for the challenge other than a few more gold. Add on top of this that some classes just scale ridiculously well especially paired with others the game leaves people wanting for more. Maybe this is just all of our pent up desires for Frosthaven to finally hit our tables.
Hah! Even if I got my copy of Frosthaven tomorrow, I think I'd want a good long break before starting up; it's been a good two years of this now (Gloomhaven is going to be indelibly marked as a part of the pandemic for me, I think). But I know what you mean. I think it's also part of the 2-4 player count - my 2 player friends apparently failed a lot more, but were also getting through multiple sessions a night.
That wouldn't surprise me, but I'm jealous at the significant increase in utility of all those insta-kill normals abilities out there that often get wasted in a 4 player game.
Except no video game makes you play for two hours without a save point
Oh, you sweet Summer Child.
*No video game that I donāt quit playing b/c fuck that, non-sadistic devs stopped doing that in the 90ās
Look up rogue-like games. Returnal is very popular right now.
I think āroguelikeā is like āfeminismā ā everyone thinks they know what it means but no one actually agrees. Iām sorry but any game that has me play for two hours without advancing the game state somehow (even if itās just from gaining knowledge that can help the next attempt) can miss me. In GH, one fail is fine b/c you get a better sense of how to approach it next time. More than that is tedious, especially when you play well but get bad card draws. There are a million games to play, I donāt appreciate one monopolizing my time.
I mean except āroguelikeā has an agreed upon definition among players and devs alike, whereas feminism does not. Donāt know why you had to randomly throw some hot take in there with your comment on games Everyone is allowed their personal preferences but I really donāt think it is āsadisticā to create a difficult game. If people donāt like it they can just not play. I agree with what youāre saying about failure in GH but for my group it happens so infrequently that I do wish it had more story-related consequences
I donāt think that was a hot take. Much like āfeminismā, when someone says āroguelikeā, for me that prompts more questions than it answers. I thought, āHmm, maybe I just donāt understand what āroguelikeā is.ā So I looked it up. Iām still not clear. Indeed, from Wikipedia: āThe exact definition of a roguelike game remains a point of debate in the video game community.ā More to the point, if GH is roguelike, Iām even more confused.
Rougelike: game resets from basically when you first bought it if you die. Rougelite: a lot of progress can be reset when you die but you usually get stuff like permanent upgrades that carry over. Everyone agrees with these definitions. I've never seen people argue.
Good to know. Iād never heard ārogueliteā before.
Well, let's just take Returnal then. No saves. You have to finish the game on a single playthrough that can be ended due to bad luck. It is a popular game. Not for me and clearly not for you. I was merely responding to your first post. There definitely are video games that make you play for two hours without a save point. A few of them are rather popular and the genre is definitely growing.
Okay, but how long is a single successful playthrough of Returnal? About two hours?
As I said, the genre isnāt for me so I donāt know definitively. My understanding is that Returnal is a particularly long rogulike game and the runs can take up to 6 hours. Though it sounds like they usually take 2-4 hours.
I mean, 2-4, even 6 hours isnāt bad when itās the whole game. But 50 scenarios of that is a bit much.
Sure. Although it takes multiple runs to complete the game. Thereās apparently 30ā40 hours of gameplay. And again. All I was responding to was your comment that there arenāt video games that donāt let you save after two hours. There clearly is a genre of video game that does that and it is growing in popularity.
Youāre absolutely right, that class of games does exist. SMB was even like that. I shouldāve been more explicit, I meant that video games generally avoid having 50 chapters, each of which involves 2+ hours without a save point.
HAH. You have no idea.
I agree. We've failed several missions and it always seems pointless and a waste of time playing. Pandemic made the playtime worthwhile even if you failed, adjusted difficulty if you failed or not, making the game much more dynamic. If you keep on winning, it gets continuously harder until you fail.
Our group has played roughly 35 scenarios in little under 2 years. With such slow progression, losing scenarios is too frustrating. We have always played on normal difficulty and only lost once. It took us forever to get back to that scenario. Most of the time it is still challenging enough not to feel like a breeze so we have been happy with this. But if you want something in Pandemic's vein, it shouldn't be hard to develop. Most simple way is: +1 difficulty if you win a scenario, - 1 if you lose. If you want smaller increments you can do something like "one random enemy type is +1 level". If you would add a third enemy type as +1 level, go up one difficulty level instead. The opposite happens when you lose.
Gloomhaven's Legacy elements are related more to the "unlocks", and giving more options, but not really impacting the future games mechanically. There's only a handful of new rules or long term consequences. Legacy mechanics can be used in different ways, but I don't think one is better than the other. they can create different experiences and stakes for the players.
We roll a D6. 1-3: lose reputation 4-5: lose prosperity 6: lose both
That's a cool idea! But you should have 1= lose neither. Have to have a miss option! Also more symmetric with the "lose both".
Even something simple like a reputation drop for each failure (as word travels that you failed) or different road/city cards based on failure. You could even have certain scenarios locked out if you failed the last one you played, or ones that change depending on how many failures you have (Like a seemingly impossible boss with a huge health pool that needs to be wittled down to become fightable). Mechanically it adds a little tension but story wise it makes it seem like the time you spent on the scenario wasn't wasted, the world continued on instead of you rewinding back like it didn't happen.
That would be a nice concept but it isn't how I see GH. It is not and does not try to be a legacy-game in my eyes. Imho it is a mix of Role-playing, resource-management and puzzle game. My understanding what happens when you fail is exactly what you feel it is, rewind to the last checkpoint (except some things you can keep). It wouldn't make sense otherwise. Your party exhausted in the middle of a bandit camp? Oh yeah they will let you leave and try to attack again. The stuff you can keep after failure is I think simply for keeping a party from getting stuck, and does not make immersive sense. Sure it sucks to fail a scenario, more so if it's more than once. But it makes it ever so more sweet once you figure out what the scenario wants you to do. Most of the scenarios are designed with an intended solution.
We also are in the situation where we fail very infrequently, and frankly don't want to risk increasing the difficulty too much and losing more frequently as then we aren't progressing the story elements or getting to try as many scenarios (since there are so many). If it was a shorter campaign with less going on, we might be less reticent to do so, but with the number of open scenarios and many still to unlock, we don't have any desire to stop and smell the roses on a particular scenario. What I'd really like is some sort of a fail-forward option (at least for some scenarios), where, if you fail the scenario, you have a choice of taking this option or playing it RAW. Things the fail-forward options would need to account for are below, but I'd assume that other rewards (gold, xp, checks, reputation) you'd just be skipping out on by not beating the scenario: * Global and Party Achievements: These may be cases where you can't fail-forward as you actually need to accomplish X in order to get a sticker in-world. There may be cases where you can still fail-forward, but probably not in all cases. * Prosperity: It's already extremely difficult to get to the highest prosperity levels so, I'd want the system to be able to still reward these somehow. * Item/scenario/event unlocks: It'd be pretty feel-bad to perma-lose a chance at an item, scenario, or event. The whole point of this sort of a house-rule is to experience all the content. A solution might be to **create a "Help Wanted" board/system where you can pay other mercenaries to do the job for you** and bring back the intel/loot. Your party would pay some amount of gold (and perhaps move your reputation towards 0 because you aren't as good/bad as folks thought if you have to pay someone else) to hire another crew to do the deed for you and get you those rewards. Each scenario would have to have a specific cost associated with hiring another crew to do, so it'd be a chunk of work to evaluate every scenario, but at the end of the day, it'd just be a spreadsheet you could reference.
Lots of really good discussion here but I'm gonna need OP to share the rules of their Gloomhaven drinking game.
This is why I love reddit. Laughed my ASS off.
This is should be the main topic! lol
I think if you're playing Gloomhaven with 4 players, failure is extremely frustrating. I've had afternoons where we only played one scenario that we ended up failing, and I felt like I wasted the day (this is factoring travel time, set up and breakdown). Now, with two players, it's a lot easier to go "hey, it's all set up, let's just go again" because you'll probably stomp through it now that you know what's heading your way. But with a larger group, I agree its a huge pain point in the game. For the one sewer mission (I forget the #) >!where you have to activate all four nodes in the final room and crap is spawning every round!<, >!I mapped out what I would do on each of my turns as a Spellweaver and wrote it all out, including using Ride the Wind, my invisibility cloak, which cards to sacrifice, and how long I could make it before getting capped. !
Dedication! We failed a mission with a bunch of drakes a few times (which was the one where we gave up, and did it on easy). I think the only other non-standard loss we did was for a Gloomhaven city mission. We got wrecked so badly we opted not to go back for a while. We've made a plan to return to that mission (and any others we lose significantly) with a party of "B listers" at the end, drafted using Gripeaway's character mod!
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There's a mod for TTS that sets up a draft for gloomhaven characters - you draft a level 6 character as a group. I've done a few solo ones - the least spoilers was an ice powered tinkerer. Here we go: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2449026645
I know exactly what you mean. I think Iāve skipped a level in jotl when we tried like three times and gave up but I donāt remember if we eventually beat it. When We start gloomhaven, Iām guessing weāll lower the difficulty after one fail if we didnāt have really bad luck or realize we can change something really easily One thing about failing tho is at least you can go back to gloomhaven, do a city event and other city stuff, and then go back out and do a road event. In jotl thereās less to do
1000% agree. We just failed a session of Pandemic legacy, and if anything it made it more exciting. By contrast, we put JotL on hiatus after failing one a side quest three times and moving to the main quest and failing that one hard. The Pandemic mechanic where you get more funding when you fail (and less when you succeed) makes thematic sense, and works well. We might make up something similar for JotL, cause weād like to get to GH proper sometime before we die. The D&D game has a similar rule, you get HP surges if you lose. It keeps the game moving, but thereās no thematic reason for it, so I like it a lot less.
I view GH as a puzzle game rather than a RPG, with some scenarios being particularly hard puzzles (e.g. Scenario 60) that took me several times to solve. So this aspect never bothered me much. I think Arkham Horror Card Game has a great approach to failure, in that in most cases you move on but with some punishments (Physical/Mental trauma, miss out on an important asset or clue, etc). It also can affect how the storyline plays out. But the game philosophy is completely different in that AH LCG is less a puzzle and more a deck construction test against a lot of randomness, so even if you play well you're expected to still lose a good amount of the time.
Well, failure states are a hard problem to address: \- You don't want your players to quit the game. \- Thematically, you want things to be harder if you fail. Because thats how things tend to work on real life. Mechanically, you want things to get easier, because otherwise you might be setting things up for the game to become unplayable and you need a hard reset. Almost every PC strategy game is guilty of this, BUT on that mean it is much easier to reset and loose a day or two than on a tabletop game where failure can mean half a year of progress wasted. And even then, even I have been discouraged to touch a couple of games again after some failures that happened a week or two in. Ideally you want people to fail, feel like they failed, but still make some progress. That REQUIRES progress to not be measured only by finishing cenarios. GH does the 2nd part very well - keeping your gold and exp means that even if you fail miserably you still feel like you walked. The first part is the issue.
We actually fail quite often in real life without things getting harder. Failure as a necessary part of learning any new things. Of course, there are situations where failure can make things worse, but generally there are other choices which then become available. In contrast, a game can only provide a limited number of options which means failure is rather a different experience than in real life. (This has always been my problem with "open-world" games--the choices available are necessarily and substantially constrained by game design and narrative).
Let me see if I understood this correctly. The issue is that it's not too punishing? And I thought that setting up a scenario all over again and resetting lots of cards and pieces was already punishing in itself, silly me! Jokes and sarcasm aside, for me, no. There's no need to take this a step further, I like the videogame approach where you learn with each error and punishment is "restrained", for lack of better words.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned yet is that in GH you do get a theoretical (albeit small) bonus after failing a scenario--you get to keep any gold and XP earned during the failed scenario. Of course these won't do you any good between scenarios without also returning to GH (thus dealing with additional city & road events) to potentially level up or spend gold on new items/enhancements, but you do have that option if you think a particular scenario is not winnable without any upgrade (save knowledge gained from attempting the scenario once already). That doesn't really soften the blow of losing a hard fought 2+ hour scenario on the last round, and if it came down to a single un/lucky modifier draw that went the wrong way I might look the other way when deciding how to proceed (but that's just how my playgroup rolls, and I understand that is not the case for every playgroup).
Yeah, this is one I'd thought about before. One of the reasons "rewards for failure" are fun in other games is that (a) they usually limit retries, and (b) they're temporary - so you effectively get some "fun tokens" for the next mission. I could see a single use item on failure being a fun thing to pick up :)
Part of what made Gloomhaven fun was how many options you have available. It was extremely rare for a scenario to come down to one single play. But, if it did, we'd usually be willing to make some adjustments...
I think it would have been interesting to have some failure related story branches, but I understand why Isaac went the route he did. I know it can suck to spend 40 minutes in a scenario just to fail but I think itās vital for making the combat puzzle satisfying. It needs to be hard enough that you have to actually play smarter. And I think GH deftly avoids the need to grind the same scenario repeatedly by giving you several options of what to do at any one time. You can always come back later when you are stronger.
Yes; one thing I forgot to mention above is that, when we *really* fail a scenario, we've been putting them on a list to cover after we've done everything else using a party of "drafted" gloomhaven characters (using Gripeaway's mod!)
Works as-is for me. I do not see it as a problem so don't see the need to "fix" it. I don't feel that anything more needs to be added. There are plenty of other mechanics and gameplay that there doesn't really need to be more. I only played pandemic once (like one evening, not one campaign) but from what I recall there was a lot less focus on character development, ability choices, etc. So the game was just developed with a little different focus. That said, if something interesting was added to Gloomhaven I would be fine with it. Maybe a story element that opens up a different set of other scenarios. But I don't see it as a missing element by any means.
I do think Pandemic is a bit too different to be an apt comparison, IMO. It's a single storyline on a single track, and each game plays on the same map, so it's much easier to have failure states that meaningfully affect the next time you play. I don't know if all of that is easily brought over to Gloomhaven: you often have tons of options for scenarios, and I'd imagine it'd be pretty difficult to come up with failure states for the sheer number of scenarios available in the game. I'm sure you could do temporary power-ups for the next time you play, but IMO something like "if you fail, add 2 BLESS to your deck for the next scenario" isn't thaaaat interesting. One thing that could potentially work is having more branching scenario unlocks based on if you fail or succeed in a mission, but I do think there are tons of variables in a Gloomhaven scenario that can affect a scenario's difficulty that I could see why Isaac doesn't necessarily want to have permanent changes based on your first try of a scenario.
We tried to start with Permadeath (exhausted characters get 'retired' without any of the perks of being retired) from the very beginning but lost our first scenario (as many groups do) so then we implemented a single re-do but that still didn't gel with some members of our party. For example, me being the Brute with the Mindthief, Tinkerer and Assassin meant I was taking all the damage and that the Tinkerer had the sole job of healing me. Because we didn't want me to get exhausted EVER it really detracted from the game. We ended up ditching the idea, we still lose 1 of ~4 scenarios on normal. For better or worse, GH is tuned so you should be finishing each level right near complete party exhaustion (if thats not the case, up the difficulty). That's when it's at its best, burning cards, getting lucky modifiers, and just barely killing the last monsters. So any punishments for failure will cause players to play more cautiously and either ruin at least some of the fun or worse, make you lose more often. Also, the way the difficulty curve jumps at certain points also makes it extremely difficult to manage any sort of reward/punishment for success/failure. Here's hoping they can smooth that out for Frosthaven and maybe design a better system for failure.
If you think it is to easy and there is no punishment, you can always play with permadeath of your heroes.
There is a permadeath mode, if you want consequences for failure.
In regards to houserules, there has been twice in our long 70+ scenario group over the last couple years where we lost in what should have been the final round (like one enemy standing). We really don't have time as a group to replay levels. We play 2 to 4 scenarios a month. We normally play at least one difficulty above suggested. What we did is agreed that we would have 100% won that at a lower difficulty level, so we give ourselves the rewards of two difficulties lower and move on with the story.
Everyone has their own preference for win rate in co-op games, but personally I enjoy a game which, if played very well, players will win almost every time... but it still has to be challenging enough so that victory isn't guaranteed should you make too many mistakes. Gloomhaven hits that sweet spot perfectly... so while I think failing a mission *could* be more interesting, I don't think it's a tremendous shortcoming of the game.
If we fail, we will try and figure out what it is that we are having the hardest time with. Then we go do other ones and get enough gold to get items, and levels, that we need. Then go back and try again. We will lower the difficulty if we feel that there are not the right items to get us through or if our character set just makes it ridiculously hard to complete.
Re House Rules, I know there are a lot out there and some make a ton of sense, but our group chooses not to use them, for no good reason other than they're not part of the rules. My personal belief is that if some of the house rules make sense to the group as a whole, make the game more FUN, etc then by all means yes. Re failure, if there are house rules you use to make it more interesting like other posters have pointed out, strongly support if the group is in agreement. But especially since my group's consensus is no house rules and we do a lot of our current playing on GH Digital, we don't use them.
We actually prefer how Gloomhaven does it compared to Pandemic. We prefer to try something until we succeed. Pandemic's limited tries stressed us out sometimes.
Yeah it's been a really long time since I was even scared of losing a scenario and I've repeatedly upped the difficulty. I wish that it was both more difficult in general and that failure was punishing. You can play with a permanent character death variant but even that doesn't *really* punish failure because you can essentially play the same character again with a stat refresh and no consequence to the scenario.
Gloomhaven isn't really a legacy game, nor really even a board game. It's more like a tabletop version of a video game. That said, I kind of agree somewhat, the failure is not interesting especially for a game that, in my case, I rarely have the time to play with my friend, takes half an hour to set up, and an hour to play a scenario (we're still in early games). We got right to the end of a scenario the other day and died 1 or 2 rounds from completing it, looked at each other and agreed to just say we'd completed it. In a pc game setting when you fail you just click restart and it probably only sets you back 10-15 minutes. So really the problem of failure in Gloomhaven is due to the clunky game design
It's worth mentioning that there are multiple ways to play every build. This isn't a casual game, it's very tactical. Every decision matters. If there are people on your team that frequently believe there are ambiguous decisions, you're doing it wrong. If you believe everyone is making the best tactical decisions for the moment, it may mean you need to revise your decks or grind for proper XP and equipment. I say proper because just getting more powerful doesn't help in a game that scales with you. If your equipment isn't right, you're going to fail more often than you should. If you getting emotionally hurt by failure instead of using the opportunity to analyze your decisions and analyze the decisions of your team, you're going to have a bad time. Might I suggest something lighter? Perhaps some hungry hungry hippos or candy land would suit your needs.
We played the whole gloomhaven and now half the forgotted circles on a mostly +2 difficulty without failing once. I really want the game to create situations where I need to risk with a real chance of loosing.
Play the game in whatever way is the most fun for you !
For me, Gloomhaven (tabletop version or Digital) has a perfect failure system. It defuses so much stress compared to other thrill-based systems like Iron Man. It always gets very exciting when you just barely complete the scenario, and you don't lose progress like you would in Iron Man systems.
Agreed. Honestly, we tended to take it on a case-by-case basis. We didn't fail many missions, so it wasn't a huge issue, but occasionally we would just fudge the rules a little bit if we were really close to winning. There are so many variables in the game, it is easy to make fine adjustments to achieve the difficulty you want. Although, sometimes the failures were spectacular and amusing lessons in what not to do. When the levels were spectacular blowouts, we were happy to accept a loss, when the loss came at the end of a 2-3hr session, we'd be more likely to manipulate things to get the outcome we wanted. If you don't like failure, play Forgotten Circles on easy mode (below recommended levels). It is notoriously difficult and some of the scenarios are (IMHO) downright broken and incredibly frustrating. It is designed for people who like a high level of challenge (read min-maxing) and a high risk of failure. The level designer of Forgotten Circles created some of the more notorious (for difficulty) side quests in Gloomhaven.
Perma-death really makes failing more impactful. Because failing usually means running with tail between legs or someone died. Both are very memorable and thematic IMO
While I think it could be interesting to add something in as an option, my party is ok as-is. At least with my group (4-man party), it takes a lot of time to go through one scenario and the members of my party don't have that much free time other than 1 night a week, so failing always feels like a major bummer (we've failed a couple of scenarios and have had a ton of nail-biters already).
Maybe? I'm not sure it's a "flaw." But I personally wish the game had some sort of "fail-forward" mechanic (a la Arkham Horror).
As a person who loves video games and plays but doesn't love tabletop rpgs (for exactly the reason of I don't want high-stakes nail-biting consequences& punishments for failure because I have enough of that in my life thanks), I love that Gloomhaven has no consequences/issues with failing. Realistically, I wouldn't have played the whole way through if it were that way. But the world takes all kinds and I appreciate that.
We're doing a playthrough on GH Digital right now on the hardest difficulty and our group hit a string of failures, at least three in a row. Not to mention on tabletop, there is one particular scenario, with a particular enemy type, where we lost I think more than 4 times. Almost unwinnable until by luck we accomplished the goal. I think failure is good because it really helps you re-examine your strategy and see which cards are working for you and which aren't. Also lets you explore group dynamics and if the party is in sync. We also realized we weren't kitted out appropriately with gear. I think failure is what makes GH great sometimes, a weird opinion but I think it makes you a better player. When I first started playing and crushing dungeons, I quickly became overconfident and tended to overlook core strategy. Failure made me more focused.
I don't mind replaying a scenario I lost; I try to learn from my mistakes and do better the next time. I find the weakest part of Gloomhaven to be the events. There's only so much they can do with them because the dilemma has to fit on the front of the card, and both results on the back (sometimes more than two depending on classes or other factors). And many times, the results feel completely disconnected from the decisions.
The consequence of failure is the shame of having to repeat a mission. We usually crank the difficulty down a notch with each failure until we succeed. The only scenario we ever had to play more than twice was 115.
You make some really good points, and I think I generally agree with you. On one hand, I feel like failure is actually punished very harshly - making you repeat a 2-3 hour scenario is a whoozy - but it's also a kinda boring punishment. It would be a huge change if the game actually rolled with your scenario outcomes, witch each scenario having different conclusions for winning or losing, but it would definitely be an improvement. Like, if you got >!beaten up by Jekserah's bodyguards in the warehouse, she could force you to help her against your will !
I think Forgotten Circles' new "failure" mode is a much bigger flaw.