Gloomhaven - Tactical Combat in a persistent world!

Wait, so I can use any class I want? I just don’t get any bonuses from retiring a character first?

As long as you’ve unlocked the class, you can make a new character of it whenever. But there are benefits to sticking with the same characters ongoing. (That is to say, levelling etc.)

I phrased my original question wrong.

I was asking how to unlock. I understand retiring unlocks new characters. As do certain quests.

But there are many characters. It’ll take me until Christmas at this rate (scenario a day) to get new people hahaha.

But they absolutely have to be unlocked before use.

I mean, it’s your game, so fundamentally you can do what you want. But you’re meant to unlock the other 11 classes and they’re primarily unlocked through retirement.

Just completed scenario 66 - which was the first one to have some unique mechanics. Hooo boy, it was close. My high initiative Mindthief really really struggled with empty turns due to the mechanics of the scenario.

Was also frustrated because he had 3 bless cards in his hand, and only drew one of them in a very very long scenario. Was also the first one in awhile where he was exhausted. Wasn’t even able to get a perk for either character, although the MT did level up to level 4!

IMO this part of the campaign rules (swapping characters, multiple parties) is very poorly explained / ambiguous, so don’t worry about it. :) It’s like they were burned out on writing the rulebook by the time they got here (I know I would have been).

Yeah makes sense. It’s a big game.

And branching structures are…difficult to keep track off.

I postponed doing anything for or against jekserah and went on one of the unlocked missions. This is the closest to grinding lol.

I’m using a house rule regarding looting. If everything is dead then I assume the characters in game have enough time to investigate everything, and therefore everything is looted and divided up.

So far makes sense.

If during the scenario a character has the chance to loot, and does so, that loot is for that character only.

Also, loot from killing enemies gets divided up.

I would offer a different way of thinking about looting once everything is dead… I would role-play that any loot you don’t get at the end of a mission is loot you haven’t FOUND and remains hidden until you come back.

Letting yourself loot a full scenario is going to drastically change the gameplay - reducing the risk/reward and changing our hand composition and hand size. Certainly your choice, but I think that would grease the wheels a bit too much.

Well I’m applying it per scenario.

For example, I just did scenario 5, kill all the enemies.

The end scenario text mentions reading x on bodies etc. And also mentions having time to throw a stone through a rift.

Logically, if I’ve just killed all the enemies and have time to gather such Intel, then I’ve got time to loot.

There are some scenarios that have survive x rounds. In that case then no I wouldn’t loot all.

The whole loot thing seems a bit contradictory.

If you kill an enemy you get a loot token. So in the heat of battle I cut off this guy’s head then rifled through his pockets (including demons…😀) but I didn’t have time afterwards?

Plus if you don’t do it this way you get very little gold…

At later difficulty levels, if you make an effort, it’s easy to get 20+ gold per scenario. It’s not balanced around getting all the gold without making a special effort. And definitely not balanced around sharing funds. But again, it’s your game. If you have more fun with an excess of gold, you do you.

The gold rewards go up pretty significantly as scenario difficulty increases, and there are lots of other things that provide gold. My MT earned 36g in a scenario last night, my Cragheart earned 21g.

Again, I hear what you’re saying, and it is logical - but I prefer to think of it that my crew didn’t even know the chest was there to loot, or the coins were lost in the heat of battle or fell down a crack in the stone or whatever you would like. Even with that, I haven’t missed a chest on any missions thus far, but it changes the game a lot.

For example, last night the mechanics of the scenario opened a room with a chest that would force me to back-track late in the mission to loot. That left with me some very interesting strategic decisions on how I moved my party forth, how I handled enemies spawning in newly opened rooms, and how I was going to play my quickly dwindling hand.

In the end, I got the treasure, but my decisions barely worked out and I escaped by the skin of my teeth… if I had played with your rules I would have rolled through the end of the scenario without much difficulty.

Logic doesn’t matter- the game is designed in a certain way for a reason. Why don’t all the monsters in a dungeon hear the fighting and rush you en masse? It’s ridiculous that you get to fight them a la carte. The answer is simple: Because you’d die. Every time, you’d die.

Wait, what?

I have this sinking feeling that I owe our party a couple hundred collective gold.

Only enemies placed by the scenario, but yup, you probably do.

Don’t worry, the loot token is placed in the hex the monster died in, you don’t get anything.

Summoned monsters drop no loot at all.

I can handle illogical stuff if it’s consistent, if that makes sense.

My objection/complaint here is that it’s an inconsistent and contradictory approach to the same thing.

That said I’ve only used that house rule for one scenario.

And I had cards left over after killing everything so in theory I could have just kept on tanking the last enemy (was a flame demon doing little damage) whilst looting everything else.

That to me would have been gaming the system.

Like I said I’ve only done 1 scenario this way.

The other 4 I followed the system as in the game.

Anyway, I had a question. Reading the rules it seems that if something is wounded it loses 1 hp per turn forever?

As in not for one round like stunned etc.

If I’ve read that right then that is powerful.

It makes the tinkerer’s flamethrower very useful situationally. As in open a door, let enemies come to you, they bunch up near the door, drop flamethrower and run away.

Out of the enemies faced in scenarios 1-5 only living bones can heal themselves iirc. And only inox shamans can heal others.

Yep, wound keeps doing damage until they are dead or healed and monsters don’t do a ton of healing. That said, generally it’s just a couple turns of chip damage until you kill them directly, because most enemies have way too much health to wait around for wound to do them in, and also you don’t get credit for the kill if they expire of their wounds. (for battle goals/personal quests. they still drop coins.)

I find it most useful against high shield, low HP enemies.

Scenario 5 has flame demons. Shield 3, hp 2!

Alot of enemies are quite slow imho, so I could clump them, wound them and move away.

I’ve been using my brute as a door stopper and inflicting ranged damage but it occurs to me I could try kiting enemies more.

Going back to scenario 5, as it’s the freshest in my memory, you start in a central chamber and I spent quite a bit of mp going to one room and then the next.

So, is kiting viable?

Yeah it adds up to a TON of free money. There are missions where you kill like 20 things and sure as hell don’t have time to loot all the dead snakes or whatever. That’s 60-80+ extra gold, which is a shitload.

Very. Hell it’s pretty much how you’re supposed to handle a lot of the enemies like Living Corpses and the like. They’re slow as hell for a reason: they hit like semis and do terrible things to people who end a turn next to them for the most part.