Hey guys, so we have a solid group of 9 players that are core to our game night and come every week without fail

Hey guys, so we have a solid group of 9 players that are core to our game night and come every week without fail.

We all want to play Gloomhaven which is arriving to us in summer. What I was thinking of is starting with 4 then playing until character retirement. When someone retires their character by completing their personal quest, they take a break from Gloomhaven and someone else joins in with the new character until they retire.

I haven't found anything about this online, will this work with the games rules?

Kind of sort of, but not really. I'll go into more detail, but first I want to know more about your group. If it's actually 9 every single week without fail, what are the other 5 gonna do while 4 of you play Gloomhaven?

We have lots of other games that we've been playing for a little over a year now. Our game nights are actually split into mini groups with many games going on simultaneously because we have lots of casual drop ins so game night is usually like 15 people (drop ins won't be playing Gloomhaven) and we're always getting a new game every month.

I think it would also be nice for those playing Gloom to reset and play other games they may have missed out on until they come back through the retirement rotation.

I'm curious about the other 5 because sometimes character retirements take a lot of scenarios, meaning that, if you're realistically playing one scenario a game night, and one game night per week, it could pretty reasonably be several months before any character retires, especially when the game is just starting. Retirement can pick up later, but that's obviously later.

our game night lasts 12 hours usually so you're talking around 3 scenarios average.

Ok, first off, your game night sounds awesome and I want to join!

Second, here's how character retirement and parties work. Technically you could do this with 9 people, but it would be a little clunky and slow. I'll propose a different approach later.

Gloomhaven is persistent, and each player makes a character and then they get together to make a party. They then go out as a party and complete scenarios in campaign mode to make progress. Characters definitely progress and level up and all that, but it's really the party that makes campaign progress.

Now, a party can only send 2-4 characters to a scenario at a time, but it can technically have infinite members (though things would get weird with gear). So what is possible is that you have a party, let's call it The Party of Merry Men. All 9 of you could be a member of this party, but only up to 4 of you could play at the same time, and none of the simultaneous four could be playing the same class.

-cont. below-

Holy smokes wow. Also awesome. Now I want to join in even more.

I would love for you to join, it's actually open to everyone but what are the odds of you living in Egypt (would be awesome if you reply saying you did though).

I already have questions but I think you'll answer them in your posts so I'll write them down now and wait until you finish to ask

-cont. from above-

The retirement mechanic you're proposing however, wouldn't exactly work, especially because you're going to have overlap between players as the retirements happen in a staggered fashion.

When a character retires, they sort of stay in the game (no spoilers, I haven't had any characters retire yet, this is just the mechanic described in the manual), there's a town record book that gets opened and presumably something about the retiring character is put in there.

Now, the player whose character retired gets to make a new character. This is presumably where you're thinking a new player could just jump in. And they could, except the game has it that progress is also tracked by player, so when a player makes a new character after they've had one retired, the new character starts with some extra bonuses that a player's first character doesn't. Because of this, things would go wrong over the long term.

For example, I'll call players letters and characters a letter and number combo to keep track of who's who. So players A B C and D make characters A1 B1 C1 and D1. Things are going fine, and then A retires A1. Normally what would happen is A makes A2, with the retirement bonuses. It sounds like in your system, E would instead join in and make A2. This would be a little weird since now E's first character would be more advanced that they're supposed to be, but thematically it works out ok. The problem is that retirements could happen in such a way that A joins back in and now should be making A2 but E is still playing A2. They can't make A3, as A2 hasn't retired, so they could take over whichever character lineage retired to make room for them, say, C3.

However, this is now disconnecting retirement rewards from players, which is what it's supposed to motivate. So players who've earned stronger new characters might not be getting them and players who haven't will.

-cont.-

-cont-

This is getting too lengthy, so let me just sum up and then let you ask clarifying questions.

tl;dr Switching players in as part of retirement lineages will do weird and bad things to the bonus mechanic.

Other stuff. You could just have a new player create a new character, so E makes E1. This is fine, but then they're starting at base with no bonuses, which is also fine. However, you're now managing a a campaign storyline with nine characters. This means that everyone is going to miss out on big chunks. That's not fun.

The game perfectly balances to accommodate changing the number (between 2 and 4) and the levels (you could run a party with lvl 1 chars and lvl 9 chars together). But it's really designed around accommodating the occasionally missing or extra player, not a consistent group larger than 4.

There's also the issue of items I mentioned. The store in Gloomhaven has a limited number of items, so usually 2x of most things, and 4x of potions. Money and items cannot be shared or exchanged between players. This means that as you add new characters, they're buying from an increasingly limited pool as things get bought up by the players before them. Again, you could always house rule this, but, again, you're messing with what seems to be an incredibly balanced and well thought out game.

-cont-

The other issue is party reputation. Events and scenarios happen to parties, and they collectively make a decision and move forward, choosing one route over other routes. This means that your whole party of 9 would only go down path A and path B would be closed off. Also, for each decision, 5 of you would be off doing something else and 4 of you would be choosing for the whole group. Might not be fun.

I get it. Makes perfect sense. It's also impossible to run two campaigns simultaneously because of the sticker thing right (getting removable stickers is not an option for us at the moment).

How do you propose we deal with this (other than buying another copy which is also not an option for us)?

-cont-

But luckily, I think there's an even better solution.

What Gloomhaven is REALLY well designed to do is have multiple parties in the same world. Now, if you really have 9, that's gonna be slightly more tricky than if you all want to be in a party of 4 and had 8 people playing. But it would still totally work.

Here's what I suggest. Either make two parties, one with 4 and one with 5 and rotate out one person, or even better perhaps, make three parties! You could do three parties of 4, 3, and 2 players, or three parties of three! More complicatedly, you could do three parties of 4 and just have three players playing in more than one party.

No no, not only is it not impossible, it's PREFERABLE to run multiple parties. Here's why!

It's true that you would be impacting each other's games. But you want that!

First, the main progression element of Gloomhaven is the prosperity of the town itself. And if you had multiple campaigns going, each would be contributing to the town's prosperity.

Just take notes, stickers are useful but not essential

Also, because of the branching storylines, one party would be off doing this story thread, while another would be off doing a different one.

Furthermore, this would solve the items problem, as each party gets access to the store uniquely.

Now, this will be a bit of paperwork and tracking, as you're going to be sharing character envelopes (which you would have been doing anyway sort of ). Why does this matter. As characters progress, they change their items and decks and stuff. Normally when you're dong for the night you just dump all that stuff back in the character envelope and it's there for you next time. But if someone else is playing that character, and with only six starting characters, there's gonna be some overlap, you'd have to reset the character envelopes back to default each game night so the next person could rebuild the character the way they had it. Not at all a big problem, just a little extra bookkeeping. This would, of course, becomes less of a problem as you start unlocking more characters and there's less overlap.

Sadly, I'm not in Egypt, sounds super cool though.

This whole situation is made even better by the way the campaign/casual modes are interchangeable and that you could play multiple scenarios each game night. Basically you could be on a three week rotation. So, Party 1 plays Gloomhaven while 2 and 3 do something else that night, then next week it's Party 2, and so on. Or, depending on how the timing works out, you could even have each party play one scenario each game night. Would be more bookkeeping work, but could also be cool.

Basically you have a lot of cool options to make this work and have all 9 of you participate in an even more dynamic instance of Gloomhaven than just a single party of 4 would experience.

Ok, enough blathering. Question time!

>9 Players
>12 Hour Sessions
>Every week without fail

So OP, have you heard of this thing called a West Marches Campaign. Google it, I'm too fucking sleep deprived and confused to explain it properly, but it's basically made for situations like this.

I think this makes the most sense, so even then there can be breaks in the middle to prevent burnout and there's no sense of confusion and overlap but this means that WE HAVE to take branching paths right (because of stickers)?

Excellent question. The game will actually take care of this for you. Some scenarios have prerequisites (like having completed another scenario earlier), that breaks it off into little mini paths of like 2-4 scenarios each.

Also, there's the campaign mode and casual mode. You can only complete each scenario once. Once it has been successfully completed, it's marked off on the map and it can't be done again for scenario specific rewards. But any party can choose to do any unlocked scenario in casual mode (either because they just want to or because there is numbered treasure that they didn't loot when they completed the scenario). This means that no scenarios will be blocked off from being played, it just removes the weirdness of having story events happen twice in the same world and keeps the parties distinct, as some having accomplished just these things while others have accomplished those other things.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean very well, you recommend we take branching paths? What about before branching paths appear, how will the second party approach the early scenarios after the first party completes and stickers them?

and can different parties play the same scenario twice for each of their campaigns (I'm assuming yes under the logic of completing the first scenario each) but just want to be sure.

Yeah, so in campaign mode, which is how campaign progress is made, once a campaign has been successfully completed, it cannot be done again in campaign mode.

I'll try to do this spoiler free: The first two scenarios are very good training scenarios for new players. Even though Party 1 will go through and complete them, Party 2 and 3 should still play them on casual mode as well. In casual mode they won't do city or road events, and won't earn scenario or global achievements, but everyone will still earn gold and xp, complete battle goals, and make progress toward personal goals.

After #1 and #2, there will be different options available to each party to attempt in campaign mode, or they are free to replay any already unlocked scenario in casual mode.

Yeah, for example, I've played the first scenarios several times for people's first games when they join.

so from what I gather, scenario rewards don't benefit the party but benefit something else? (I'm guessing the city?)

voxic#8049 that's my discord I think it'll be easier for us to talk there rather than here

hey you there?

Scenario rewards do benefit the party, and can also benefit the town, but are limited to happening only once

This keeps the story consistent. Like, you kill Mr. Bossman Jones, it doesn't make sense that someone else could kill them too.

But wouldn't that limit one of the two parties in the sense that one would be more powerful than the other (gold rewards/experience rewards?)

Possibly, in an absolute sense, but not in any way that would matter. Each scenario scales to the number of players and level of characters, so you could technically play each scenario with only lvl 1 characters if you kept making new ones each game night.

Also, while replaying scenarios to gain xp and gold is not necessary (see game balance above), it's always an option.

I see what about if you have 3 level 5 characters and 1 level 1 character, would the scenario also scale?

Yes. The number of enemies and their elite status depends on how many players you have.

The difficulty of the scenario, and thus the level of the enemies, depends on a calculation that uses the average level of the players.

It's a pretty clever system and it really does allow for a wide disparity in group size and level from one scenario to the next.

Good thread but... that picture... show me more.