How are people doing with Blackstone Fortress?

[Inquisitor Eisenhorn]

I had my first real play through to a Stronghold and to be honest, I found it overall to be kind of disappointing, which is EXTRA disappointing because I painted the whole set beforehand and honestly I'm feeling like it wasn't worth the effort, not to mention that I saved this for a holiday hang with a good friend I get to game with maybe twice a year.

 

We got through a few expeditions only by basically ignoring a few really really stupid random events that would have just outright murdered our characters.  We played a stronghold and it got even worse.  

 

A few things that particularly irritated us:

 

Recovery rolls:  we had only a single wound healed through a basic heal action in 3 expeditions in a stronghold.  We felt like we rolled these enough that the rolling averages for healing wounds is too random and need some sort of probability mitigation, or maybe just let us automatically heal a wound on a higher value activation?  Even if this was the intended result by the designers, as a player it felt just awful to fail healing rolls 99% of the time with no recourse.  

 

Greivous wounds:  one of the most unclear things in the rulebook.  We actually thought that you had to roll to heal wounds once you got to Precipice because it doesn't say they heal automatically, and you have to roll to heal in all other circumstances anyways.  That made taking grievous wounds extremely frustrating during expeditions since we had such terrible luck healing even normal wounds, and because of this misunderstanding we definitely played the game in a tactically conservative way that wasn't much fun.  We actually decided we were going to just heal wounds automatically at Precipice since we weren't sure what was correct, and they actually had to FAQ this we discovered halfway through our session!  

 

3 Rulebooks, terribly organized.  This is such a common problem of course, but these stand out for how frustrating they are to jump between.  And somehow between different aspects of rules for wounds in two different books, they failed to make clear how grievous wounds are healed!  

 

Encounter Events:  One of our encounter events was essentially a d20 test to see if your character dies outright on a 1.  Well you guessed it, one of us rolled a 1!  So I guess just like that a character we've been cultivating for hours is just dead.  Wow, how fun for the player, and immersive to boot!  I know I'm being a bit short here, but this sort of thing is just poor design.  

 

By comparison, I played a session of Silver Tower earlier this week, and our session was full of fun immersive narrative events where there was a sense of danger, but nothing that ever happened that just outright ended the game for someone with nothing more than an unmodified die roll.  Like, we had to decide whether to jump into a vortex leading to who knows where, (it ended up fine) or when someone decides to drink a potion and they end up getting stronger, but also are now a revenant who cannot speak to us (but has to mime clues for a puzzle for us).   This had us all laughing and it broke up the combat to keep things from getting stale.  I really wish that there was more to the non-combat encounter cards than what we mostly experienced, which were mainly sequences of die rolls and nothing else required of the players.  Maybe there are some of those and we didn't draw them, but I'd say the ones we did were a real bummer.

 

Combat Cards:  Reading where the borders on these are to discern the shape of the tiles you need to fetch was more difficult and took longer than it should have; honestly they really needed to bold the outlines, not sure how this got past editors.  There is also no narrative text on these cards, so it just feels like a random encounter; a sentence of flavor text alone would have been great.  

 

Special dice:  Shifting between all of the special dice felt really fiddly and somehow made the rolls probabilities feel obscured and overly random.  Again this compares unfavorably to Silver Tower where the use of D6 for everything felt completely fine and didn't need fixing.  

 

Enemy Activation:  Rolling on a behavior table for every single model in an 8 man traitor guardsmen group was really tedious after a while; just active the whole group with one roll!  It just feels nuts that you have to roll behavior for every single enemy; there are so many a lot of the time lol.  

 

Inspiration Points:  It was unclear to us from the rules whether these carry from expedition to Precipice or if you have to discard them at the end of each expedition.  We thought that you must carry them through to Precipice because it's extremely hard to get 3 points.  Similarly, maybe we just had terrible luck but getting inspired was just almost impossible for our characters, via secret agenda or points.  

 

Reinforcement rolls:  You basically have to steer clear of any vault portals at all times because if reinforcements are summoned they will immediately attack the nearest explorer, and even a small group doing single attacks can outright kill you. (Take a wild guess if this happened to us)  That's not fun, and it's also not super fun to just roll a die to see if you randomly get your progress killing enemies erased.  I'm not opposed to having more enemies appear in principle, but again this felt fairly abstract and unthematic and I wish they had handled this differently.

 

Ok obviously I'm just venting, and I don't actually hate the game because obviously it's super awesome in a lot of ways.  Even with all of these stupid things that were annoying we still think it's such a cool setting and it's fun to just roll through and experience.  But too often we basically had to choose between having fun, or playing the game the way the rules stated, which to me suggests that the game needed a lot more refining of the ruleset; the issues are mostly about lacking a sense of narrative immersion and random spikes in difficulty that felt unfair rather than challenging and meaningful.  

 

I'm sure I'll try soloing it and now I think I have a good handle on the rules after consulting the internet a bunch of times.  Anyways, does any of this strike a chord with anyone else or am I massively missing something?  For the record I do think I have cleared up all of the issues we had about wound healing and inspiration points holding over (they don't)

[Kythnos]

Well, let's start with saying that I also do have a few gripes with the game, though not as many as you do. Many do overlap though. Generally speaking, the game has a few unwieldy mechanics and can be decisively random to the point that it impairs the enjoyment of the game.

My biggest gripe is that it is too easy for the heroes, especially as the heroes make their way through more game sessions. The upgrades of the fortress can not keep up with the improved gear of the explorers.

 

However, we are still enjoying the game and only need to play the session for the vault. I just don't see us buying the expansions at that price point for a game that has too many mechanics we don't enjoy.

 

More specifically to your points:

Healing and wounds: Since we have the priest in our group we never had too much trouble with healing. Grievous wounds however can severely limit an explorer's capabilities, which is fine in my book. But we also had to find the FAQ to learn that these are healed at Precipice. Annoying editing for sure.

 

3 rulebooks:

I think the split into three rule books is fine, but at many places it is difficult to find what you are looking for quickly, even once you have adapted to the layout. The summary pages are also missing bits that would have been important. I definitely agree here.

 

Encounters:

I agree that most encounters seem not very creative. However, since the actual battles are rather easy, these help to put a few wounds on characters and increase the difficulty a bit. Some are even quite entertaining like the duel.

 

Combat card layout and dice:

These haven't bothered us at all. It actually felt nice to have different dice than D6's.

 

Activation rolls:

Totally agree. You will get quicker with these after a while but it is still tedious.

 

Inspiration:

Collecting inspiration points is also tedious. In fact, I think we only had one explorer inspired by these. All the others were triggered by their agendas, which have very different difficulty levels.

 

Reinforcement rolls:

I do think that the reinforcement rolls are definitely needed for the antagonist. In my opinion, they could even be a bit easier for the antagonist 3/20 are not great odds in any case.

As to the Portals, we've been there too. You just have to plan for it as with any other placement factor like cover or LoS.

[Inquisitor Eisenhorn]

Thanks for the reply!  It sounds like our woes playing through aren't totally our own, then.  I will definitely grant that we both acknowledged that we had some bad roll streaks that fell outside of average probabilities, but I really wish there were something mitigating the terrible streaks we had since it really did make the session a lot less enjoyable.  And such probability mitigation really didn't seem considered for things like inspiration points or secret agendas.  In theory, I can see certain character agendas being more difficult to achieve.  That is rather thematic.  But inspiration points should really act as mitigation for this, to give certain characters a chance to flip the cards in scenarios where their agenda is off the table due to enemies not being present, etc.  But in reality, the fact that inspiration comes down to how many wounds you can lay down in a single turn means that certain characters will excel at this mechanic over others as well.  

 

I think you're right that the encounter cards are more about getting wounds on characters than anything else, but I'd prefer if they were mainly to provide a bit more narrative heft to a session instead, which I think Silver Tower handled a lot better.  

 

I'm surprised you found the heroes overpowered though!  Our first group used Espern, Amallyn, UR-025 and Rein/Raus and we just got smashed. I swapped UR and R/R for Taddeus and Vorne and had a much better time, but that was disappointing in its own way, as I really like the background and theme of the other characters as well.  Amallyn also seemed to be extremely powerful compared to the other characters in general, and her "drawback" of being relatively fragile never really came up.  

 

I'm going to give the game a few more sessions now that I think I have a handle on what to do to stay alive, but my hopes for this being a core game system to enjoy have been pretty dashed thus far, which is a shame because it suits the realities of my gaming life better than a lot of other tabletop systems.

[Kythnos]

I guess the difficulty does depend on the choice of explorers as well (our group consists of Espern, Vorne, Taddeus and Amallyn). But in general we found it rather easy to restrict options for the antagonist and let the explorers strike first by good placement. Cover and LoS denial can neuter the enemy's numerical superiority quite well most of the time. And as I said, once you start collecting gear it gets a lot easier. You will find the mitigation for bad rolling in there.

[Inquisitor Eisenhorn]

I had another session with a different friend, and we just sort of tailored the experience to our own needs, including a smaller exploration deck and a few other details I'm forgetting and had a much better time. Plus I'm getting the hang of remembering all of the different rules and that has helped. Thinking of trying the Penitent mission from the White Dwarf to put my new sisters box to use a bit as well.

[killersquid]

My girlfriend and I had a blast playing through the core box. We thought it was a lot of fun.

[Noserenda]

+1 for it being too easy UR-025 in particular seems to make the game a lot easier one he has a couple of upgrades and can easily tank any incoming fire. 

Some of the rules are definitively a bit clunky too, especially enemy activations, though that does indeed come with practice, it works best if you work as a team, one person with the card reading, one moving minis and one rolling dice. Having breezed through the main plot and Ambull we are mixing in some rookie explorers to make it a bit challenging and that made our last session a lot more fun. There are dangerous situations but once youve completed one or two strongholds you should have some decent permanent items and a golf bag of one use trash to burn. At least that was our experience.