Played scenario 1 of Dice Throne Adventures again, with a different setup card and my upgrades from the previous attempt, plus an extra 3 salves (which is how the campaign works - win, you move on with any upgrades and the salves you have, lose, you repeat the scenario but you keep any upgrades you got and get 3 more salves over your previous starting amount, at a ten point overall score penalty to the campaign). This time, things went way better. I ultimately cleared the whole Portal Crawl using one salve, ending up with more than I started with to carry into scenario 2, and both the Paladin and the Ninja had more health at the end than they started with.
Which isn’t to say things went perfectly. The Paladin for most of the scenario couldn’t seem to draw ability upgrades. Everyone got a bunch of First Strike enemies which would often guarantee attrition. And loot rolls were often poor. That said, the paladin managed to block the vast majority of incoming damage while healing occasionally, and the Ninja managed to alpha strike or Smoke Bomb damage cancel and then kill with Delayed Poison on more than one occasion. And the Paladin did end up with an Epic and a Legendary loot by the end (plus a couple commons. The Ninja, just commons and rares.) And sometimes I got lucky and the enemies failed their attacks, which didn’t happen almost at all the first session.
Still very entertaining. Looking forward to fighting my first boss, the Fallen Barbarian. That’s closer to a standard Dice Throne duel, but the good guys have a shared health pool and the boss has more health than you do. It also gets to start with possibly quite a few upgrades, randomly dealt and paid for out of a starting pool of upgrade CP. And will automatically either play or sell a card each turn, which will do various (usually bad) stuff, but get the hero a bonus as well, and provide the boss’s roll objective. It also has priority numbers assigned to each ability to guide which to select when it rolls something that could apply to multiple abilities. Looks pretty slick, and also scary. I’m not real excited about it being able to do between 8-15 damage many swings, especially since it goes every hero turn…