Running Cursed City campaign with more than 4 players?

[warhammernerd]

Hey all, I plan on starting a campaign once I’ve got everything built and wanted to  ask if anyone on here had experience with running a campaign on any of the previous Warhammer Quest editions with more than 4 players? I guess what I’m specifically interested in, is how or if players levelling up at different paces is much of a problem? The reason I suspect this will be the case, is because my wife and I will choose 2 characters who will always be present in each game, whereas the other players might only play every other game depending on availability?

Which leads onto a follow up Q, which is what can I anticipate being the rough total number of games needed to complete the game? Just so I can manage expectations across the 7 players taking part, ie this might take us a year of one game a month?

 

[RuneBrush]

Cursed City uses the highest character level to work out how many enemies are placed on the board, so character level disparity will ultimately make quite a bit of difference if you're looking at more than a couple of levels different.

Nothing in the box caters for more than 4 characters, however you could quite easily just increase the number of enemies generated by +25% for each character.  You do have two issues in doing this for a party of 7 - firstly you would need to increase the number of miniatures you have available - so for 7 characters you'd want 21 skeletons for example (12 + 3 x 25%).  That's not too difficult to do if you have a second box available, but the second issue is that the board sections will restrict how many models you can actually place.  Less models in play will give the party a much easier time.  If models are being placed on a board section that contains heroes then there's a risk of filling up the board and ending up inflicting 2 damage onto heroes as you try to place an enemy in their square.  You would need to keep an eye out that one person doesn't end up killing too many things and gaining more than their fair share of inspiration points.

Another issue that would arise is that larger parties are going to be loot starved because many of the quests use a preset number of mysterious objectives.

Personally I would suggest you and your wife playing a standalone campaign with 2 characters each (involving nobody else), then running a second (and possibly third) campaign using different characters (but just one each) to cater for playing with your friends.  Length of campaign will vary wildly because you have a choice of quests to go on each time you play.  There's nothing stopping one of you taking a "GM" style roll either and being the person who moves the enemy around.  If you're only playing with a couple of friends they could take over one of the characters you and your wife has been playing too.

[Perturbato]

You could add one more player doing the dungeon master by copy work from shadow over hammerhal.

[warhammernerd]

Thanks both, perhaps I wasn’t super clear. What I was thinking, is that the 7 or more players wouldn’t necessarily or likely play at the same time. So, it would always be a run of 4 characters, but some of the 7 wouldn’t play. Likely two characters would always play, as that would be my partner and I, but the remaining characters / players wouldn’t all be able to play be present in same space. Which is what I was asking, kinda. Would it work if, say for example two people in the group were levelling up faster than the rest of the group, on account of getting more playtime? Would it mean these two characters would end up doing most of the heavy lifting and get the lions share of the rewards? Would it work to offset it, if these two characters were more support heroes, i.e the healer / spell caster types?

Edited April 13, 2021 by warhammernerd

[Praecautus]

I houseruled Hammerhal to have 5 or 6 players. It wasn’t amazingly successful. Mobs got cut down easily but no one really levelled up. It’s best for 4 I think. Plus easier to get your group together

[RuneBrush]

OK, bit of an update having read a bit more of the rules.  First off I don't think running a game with anything other than 4 characters will work.  The whole game mechanics are based upon 4 unique characters being played and I think you'll be fighting with the rules quite frequently.  That's not to say it isn't possible, but I'd likely want to play an entire campaign before I attempted to make such drastic changes.

What you're suggesting  could work although it does risk skewing a campaign a bit.  What you have is 4 different missions (Journeys).  3 of these are "normal" journeys that you complete to either lower influence/fear or gain realmstone and gear.  The other is a Decapitation Journey where you basically hunt after one of the main protagonists.  These Decapitation Journeys also act as a level gating system, so until you've completed the level 1 Deliverance Journey "Fell Guardian" characters cannot gain any experience beyond level 1.  The enemy groups on the table are always based off the highest character level, so if you have a level 1 in a party with a level 3 you're going to face 4 bat swarms instead of 3 - however you may also face Radukar instead of a Kosargi... 

Having the party within a level of each other is going to be pretty key to ensuring the lower level characters don't get wiped out - this actually leads into my last point that there is a rule that once 5 characters have died the game is over...  Basically each character can only be played once in a campaign and there are only 8 characters (well 9 if you include the chap from the novel).

Your idea of two characters carrying the rest of the party I'm not convinced will work because you need everyone pulling weight to complete journeys - they actually look like a challenge.  That said having not played any games it may be possible. What I'd suggest instead is that you simply don't chose to complete the Decapitation Journey until all the characters have hit that pre-requisite level - so you and your wife's characters will simply not gain any experience whilst you're waiting for your friends characters to catch up.  That should ensure that the difficulty of the journeys won't outpace people who play less often 😊

There isn't a healer class (unlike classic quest) because all characters are able to make recuperate actions.  I'd  say that having a Stalwart character in the group is fairly essential - these are your tank class who have a number of damage mitigation mechanisms in place once they start levelling up and start off with a good defence & vitality roll

Hope that makes sense?

[Taxidermied]

On 4/13/2021 at 8:52 AM, warhammernerd said:

Which leads onto a follow up Q, which is what can I anticipate being the rough total number of games needed to complete the game? Just so I can manage expectations across the 7 players taking part, ie this might take us a year of one game a month?

 

Expect a minimum of 15 games using exactly the same 4 characters each time to complete the campaign.  There is a catch up mechanic that will get everyone up to level 4 in 6 additional games.  Currently there is no way to reach level 5, unless it’s in the secret envelope, so I’d expected the first expansion to pick up at level 4.