From: woods@colossal.Eng.Sun.COM (Don Woods)
Newsgroups: rec.games.board
Subject: Re: Wizards [was Re: Classic Games]
Date: 19 Nov 1992 03:17:29 GMT
Organization: Sun Microsystems
Distribution: all
NNTP-Posting-Host: colossal

Jeff Goldsmith writes:
| >If anyone's interested, I can mail them a PostScript file that produces a
| >modified version of the reference sheet
| 
| Please do post it.  

So far I've gotten about 10 requests for copies; not enough to warrant
posting a large file to the whole net.  I'll put you on the list for an
emailed copy.  (I'm still collecting names for a while before I mail it.)

| I have a group that plays this game once in awhile, and we've had to 
| tweak the rules, too.  Our problem is not that someone can get screwed
| early, but that it is trivially easy to win the game with the rules as
| published.

We actually don't mind if we win most of our games; it's sort of like
FRP (fantasy role-playing) for some of us: we want to win in the end but
have it be a struggle.  And we do each try to be the actual "winner", i.e.
the one who reaches fifth rank.  (Aside: Another poster mentioned Arkham
Horror as being another cooperative game.  That's true to some extent, but
I've found that the victory condition does lead to competition at the end,
and the rules are such that a single player trying to delay the game in
order to take the lead, can often cause EVERYONE to lose.  That's not as
big a problem in Wizards.)

Anyway, under our rules, we usually win, but we usually lose quite a few
lands along the way.

| The major changes we added are:
| 	1) Demons can stack.  You can use a spell against only the
| 	   first demon in a stack; after that you roll dice.

Wow.  And you later describe "demon surfing" in the Dragon's Lair.  I see
how that can happen.  But since each time you lose you generate another
demon marker, don't you sometimes reach a state where a single turn can
result in demons accumulating faster than they can be killed?

| 	2) After the second fortnight, fortnights are only 9 days
| 	   long.  This doesn't affect the Lair Time, though.  The
| 	   9th day is usually run by the bad guys, of course.

We've gone further than that:  After the second fortnight, islands sink every
SEVEN days.  But the bad guys don't "steal a day" from the players; evil
strikes at midnight between one day and the next.  (That way you don't get
screwed when, for example, you find a Unicorn on day 13 (which only stays
around for one day, thus isn't around except on the day when you wouldn't get
to do anything with it).)

With islands sinking every seven days, it was definitely hard for the players
to win, even though we've added a few things to make low-rank characters more
capable of getting things done.  We ended up saying that when evil is thwarted
it staves off evil for a fortnight, not just a week.

| 	3) The number of completed tasks needed for a thwart is
| 	   3 times the number of players.

We've considered tweaking this too, but since we don't mind if we always
succeed in the end we're content to leave it at 10.  The two-player game is
pretty challenging, but we can USUALLY win in the end!

| 	4) Druids can walk onto the sacred circle.  They still have
| 	   to roll for Ruktal, but they don't have to get onto the
| 	   circle.  Before this rule, no one ever played a druid
| 	   without complaining.

Yep, we added a rule like this too.  At 1st rank (and thereafter), Druids
get a spell that lets them transport from anywhere on the Sacred Circle
tile into a random stone of the circle.  So they're 5/6 instead of 1/6-1/3
to make it into a stone.  But the random element means they don't have a
trivial time of it when trying to get into a specific stone (or trying to
avoid encountering a demon in a stone on their way in).

| The rule that we are going to adjust next is the table for player-
| player encounters.  Currently, they are too good, causing players
| to want to hang around each other.  Changing the Unicorn to "transport
| to the dragon's lair" will probably take care of that.

We don't have that problem very much.  If you just hang around other players,
you tend not to get tasks done, and evil runs rampant.  Plus since we do pay
attention to who eventually "wins", players won't want to hang around if they
might be forced to give up tasks to other players.  We did adjust the player-
player encounters a bit, though; you'll see it on the reference sheet when I
mail it out.
--
--	-- Don Woods.				[*** Generic Disclaimer ***]
--				    ...!sun!woods.eng -or- Woods@Eng.Sun.com