Gloomhaven - Tactical Combat in a persistent world!

Well, the big problem with RAW handling of rolling modifiers is that they actually make it possible to miss with advantage, since if you draw a miss and a rolling modifier you combine them to null effect. But I also think it’s an unintuitive and weird rule and the two stack approach doesn’t appear to present major balance issues.

Oops, @ShivaX we were doing this wrong.

Sure, I also found it a bit counter-intuitive. However, it was never the intention of the designer to make it impossible to miss. There’s some interesting discussion in this thread on BGG Rolling modifier disadvantage when having advantage? | Gloomhaven, with some good examples of the weird results.

Isaac weights in, stating that:

If you are drawing until two non-rolling cards come up, and then adding all the rolling cards together, that is far too powerful. You could create caveats and special rules to make it less powerful, but at the end of the day, I wanted a simple rule set. Yes, the rule set lessens the power of advantage when you add rolling modifiers. I recognize that, but it also lessens the power of disadvantage, as well, so I don’t consider it a significant problem.

He’s not talking about two separate stacks of which you resolve one, there, he’s talking about if you kept drawing until you had two non rolling cards and then added all rolling modifiers drawn to the chosen card.

Ah, right! I drew a rolling reading comprehension failure. Some of the later posts deal with the two stacks, so I conflated the entire discussion.

But drawing two complete stacks and taking the best will escalate Advantage beyond the intention of the rules.

I just don’t think it makes all that much difference to balance , both because the same logic applies to disadvantage, and because I have never had an attack boosted by more than a couple points from rolling modifiers, and status modifiers are routinely irrelevant. But it does make rolling modifiers something you can safely take without introducing unintended negative consequences.

Okay, hold on, I’m losing the thread here.

This is how we dealt with Advantage/Disadvantage with rolling cards.

Say I have one or the other (doesn’t matter yet). I draw the following.

+1 rolling
+muddle rolling
-2

I then proceed to draw another “attack” roll because I have to pick the worst (or best) of them.

+1 rolling
+1 rolling
miss

If I have advantage I will pick the first “set” but if I have disadvantage I’ll be forced to pick the second set.

Is that not right?

That is how I’ve played it…

RAW, no.

I don’t actually know what RAW is… so I don’t completely understand this reply, I have to admit. It sounds like I’m doing it wrong - how is it supposed to go?

Rules as Written. I honestly don’t quite know how it’s supposed to play out in your example because I have always played the (incorrect) way you describe. It’s the intuitive way that it should work and I have never encountered a reason to switch other than technically the rules say to do it this other weird way that makes rolling modifiers and advantage both worse. Once I learned what the real rule was I presented it to my group and we were all like “yeah, naaah.”

Okay, cool, I think I will keep playing it like we have been. Honestly it’s more fun, leads to more interesting situations, and to me isn’t what I would call like “work” or fiddly or anything. It’s going to come up more and more often as my Mind Thief has a ton of rolling cards in his deck, as well as ways to give himself advantage on rolls, as well.

Yeah. I am sure Isaac has reasons for the actual rule that he wrote and I don’t blame people for wanting to stick to the exact rules - I typically prefer to. But in this case I feel the inadvertent house rule we both ended up with (and sooooooo many other people, too) makes more sense.

I might be missing something. It might be that I’m not sure what you mean by a rolling modifier.

The way we’ve been playing it is that for every target of your attack you have advantage on, we draw two modifier cards (instead of the normal one) and pick the best one. Then for the next target, we draw two new ones, and so on. For targets we have disadvantage on, we do the same but choose the worst.

Is that not right?

A rolling modifier causes you to draw another modifier card and so on until you hit one that is not rolling, then you add them all together for the final result. In advantage, if one of the two cards you draw is a rolling modifier, the actual rule says you add those two cards together and stop. If both are rolling I forget exactly how it works. The intuitive approach is to treat each of the first two cards as a “stack” and continue drawing on each stack that does not currently end in a non rolling card until it does, then pick one of the two stacks.

@malkav11 explained them well, but to clarify a bit, they are not cards you start with and thus may be why you didn’t recognize them. They do talk about them in the rules, but here is an example:

image

See the little u-shaped arrow on the right? That indicates it’s a rolling card, and so you will draw another card and add it’s effects to this one. If you draw another rolling card, you actually keep going until you stop drawing them, then combine all the effects. In this case, the attack will deal poison and whatever else is drawn next.

Gotcha – Yeah, we haven’t run into those yet because we are but little nooblets. Thank you both for the clarification!

@Scotch_Lufkin I see @malkav11 cleared most up. I don’t remember the exact text on Disadvantage, but rolling modifiers are disregarded.

The basic idea is that the you draw two cards and use the best/worst one, not resolve two attacks and use the best/worst.

Yeah, I find it very fascinating too. Maybe we have discovered a shibboleth for identifying if someone comes from an RPG/stack-based game background?

To me the problem is you have a clearer picture of what’s best and worst if you play out all cards twice and pick the “pile” that is worst (or best).

For instance, if I draw -1 and Muddle (rolling) which one is better? Or worse, if I had disadvantage?

But if I draw -1 and then Muddle rolling into a Miss I clearly know which one I should be picking based on the spirit of the rules (and the situation on the board - that’s a very important factor, too).

If I had simply stopped at the Muddle I wouldn’t really for sure know what to pick, to me it’s just easier to have a complete picture first, so I think I’ll keep playing it that way.

LOL yeah, this is probably true.