At the request of one of my players, I have been using the critical hit deck for a while now and it has been working really well (we use it any time a player rolls a critical hit and any time a creature of at least the players level rolls a critical hit) so I unilaterally decided to try out the new hero point deck.
Having just played my first game using them (a Legacy of Fire conversion) I figured I would share my thoughts:
Note: rather than assign one hero point every hour, I just give each player a point every two hours.
Having just played my first game using them (a Legacy of Fire conversion) I figured I would share my thoughts:
- I chose the usage where the players are individually assigned cards and can’t swap.
- I was a little worried purchasing it because I house-ruled hero points into “fortune points” that only allow a reroll but none of the cards deal with stabilizing using hero points so this was a non-issue.
- It made it very easy for the players/me to track their points (we play in person).
- The effects on the cards are powerful but they didn’t impact play that much because either the players had cards that were useless for them or they would rather save it to reroll.
- I was worried that the powerful effects on the cards would lead to hoarding (which is what my houserule is made to prevent), but that didn’t happen and the players spent the points freely. Though this may be because of my custom magic item system in the game conditioned the players not to hoard (almost all items are custom consumables I printed on index cards to encourage spending).
- The cards didn’t slow down the game at all.
- At the end of the game all the players said they liked the deck and wanted to continue using it.
Note: rather than assign one hero point every hour, I just give each player a point every two hours.