One of my New Year Resolutions was to become a contributor to the Defiance Project (i.e. Forum) instead of the lurker that I have been for the last year, so I thought I would start with some ideas on the loot deck. In short, I found the deck to be quite underwhelming relative to another dungeon crawler that I play. Given that 7 of the 16 Loot cards in Defiance (~43%) are "Med or Repair Kit", the odds of drawing more than 1 of these during an Interact Action is quite high. Additionally, there are 3 "Ammunition" cards do nothing more than add switches (less than useful until you can roll a fistful of dice). Thus, I rarely got too excited about drawing loot, unless I got a grenade! For my own Defiance scenarios, I decided to run a 12 card deck (removing 2 MedKits, 1 Medjector, and 1 Repair Kit) and spiced up the Ammunition cards by removing the switches and changing some effects (see attached image below). I'm not sure what effect these changes will have on the difficulty of the final 3 scenarios (especially the lack of switches for the ammo), as I have yet to travel through the wormhole. AlI can say is that a certain Defiance Character is now taking a lot more interest in the Loot specialty track than ever before.
Additionally, I'm going to replace the 4 cards I removed with some new ones (with Trisha's Salvager Specialty, the smaller deck just doesn't seem to be large enough). I have yet to play test them though, so consider them a work in progress.
Sounds good. I must totally agree with you that the base loot deck is boring as heck as you hardly draw any "good stuff". I'm inclined to use these in my next campaign too.
Great initiative! And welcome to this little club of 3.5 people that try to make Defiance a game it deserves to be. I completely agree that Loot in the base game is just not working. During our campaign playthrough, we almost never searched containters. Loot cards containing IntelPacks are neat, I like that! Regarding the ammunition changes: The action economy of the game is that a Character gets somewhere around 8-12 Actions during a mission (depending on the number of rounds, but let's say 4-6 is the average). Spending 1 of those precious Actions to gain 1 additional hit symbol (or even worse, canceling 1 block symbol) in another attack doesn't work at all. It is better to simply perform an additional attack instead. Judging by your work on mission 1, you play a lot of Gloomhaven? So imagine spending an entire action/card in Gloomhaven to add 1 damage to your next attack. Action economy in these two games are not that much different, although it seems that in Defiance actions are even more precious (less rounds > less actions per mission).
I'm currently doing a massive overhaul of the game, haven't even thought about the Loot deck, but here are my thoughts on regular ammunition cards (that can be bough as an equipment): These goes along with changes to Burning and Poisoned. Both states have to be more punishing, since as is they are meh and do not justify the expenses (IntelPack cost to acquire the cards, symbol cost to activate switches, backpack slot cost to use the ammunition). Maybe this will help / inspire / give some ideas to try.
Thanks for the feedback d_b. The action economy concept is a neat way to look at things. Perhaps it would make more sense to modify some of the Interact rules for containers. Rule Addition: You may perform the interact action on a container or corpse as a free action, then gain 2 Aggro. Rule Change: Cards that are not assigned to any equipment slot during the interact action stay with the container or corpse. These cards may be acquired later using an additional interact action. Your idea for ammo packs as purchasable equipment is interesting. I may have to explore this further. “Meh” is a great word for the Burning state. With a 33% chance that each burning token does zero damage, it can be a real disappointment. I’ve added a rule to beef it up slightly. Rule Change: Any unit that receives at least one burning token during an attack action loses one.
