Learn to Play Presents: Gamefound Play Through of Tutorial 2 of Thinning Veil Cormac
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- Опубліковано 30 вер 2024
- In this video I will be playing through the second Tutorial mission of the game to give you a better understanding of what this game is all about. As always, don’t forget to smash the like button and subscribe if you haven’t yet!
Game type: Cooperative campaign game
Run time: 60-120 mins sessions.
Number of players: 1-2 Players
Creator/ Designer: Paul Rose
Artist: Maxim Kostin, Henning Ludvigsen
Publisher: Triskelion Games Ltd
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Looks amazing! Cant wait to back
Thanks, Slaitaar! We are looking forward to announcing a launch date.
Thank you for this. I like the story, but I do find the dice rolling to still be too much. You roll the dice when you go into a room. You roll the dice to explore. You roll the dice to open chests. You roll the dice to fight. You roll the dice to defend. To use your potion, you roll more dice.
Can you tell us if the game changes, and that's just for the tutorial missions or is that what we can expect the whole of the game?
Don't most dungeon crawlers have dice rolling as ways of doing things? All those things? How else would you resolve it? You also forget the dice allocation, where you roll once and that determines what actions you can take, which is a unique way of doing it and forcing you to think about what to do next and not just a pass/fail. Like what would you do if you rolled all attacks and couldnt search open a chest or no attacks and are facing an enemy. I love that it is not just I have XYZ to do in a turn, but that it will change each time as to what i can do, though with a bit of a safety net as you can bank some of your rolls so you are guaranteed that action next turn. But if dice rolling annoys you this much, perhaps a card game would suit you better? Not trolling, genuinely asking as I have yet to see a dungeon crawler without dice rolling to do everything
@Winddancer110 legit question. Most dungeon crawlers have set actions you can take. For example, your character can move two places without rolling dice or perform a set number of minor actions.
The dice rolling would be to see if you pass a hit check or many now do auto hit if you can attack.
Many do not require dice rolling when you enter a room to determine if there is something in the room. A few do, but they also have set abilities that don't require dice roll.
Am I opposed to rolling dice? No, I am not. I like the dice determining action. But then, if I watched correctly, to use those actions, there was more dice rolling for a great majority of those actions.
Hence, my question is to see if the character develops or gets abilities that help manipulate the dice rolls. Because rolling all explore and no combat when you have a room full of enemies will feel real bad, real quick. Or rolling mostly attacks when you need to explore to find that critical item to complete the mission will also feel bad.
@@raortiz73 You have asked a great question here and Winddancer110 has made some equally great points. Thanks to you both in regards to areas of the design you enjoy, and allow us to pitch in here with a response.
Raoriz73, you wrote 'For example, your character can move two places without rolling dice or perform a set number of minor actions.' This is absolutely the case in the game too. You may well have up to six actions you can spend moving, in any given Hero Phase. You can interact often with the dungeon at the cost of 1 interact action, and sometimes at the cost of any action. There are dungeons where opening and closing doors is an action and requires no test. It is not like the early renditions of Zombicide where you need to break open every door, unless the door is locked or barred. Breaking open or picking the lock on such a door requires passing a test. That moves to the next thing we can address.
'The dice rolling would be to see if you pass a hit check or many now do auto hit if you can attack.' Absolutely the case in this game, there are even some auto-hit effects on burst weapons and spells. Preferring to compare Cormac with a tabletop rpg, we can see in this game you must roll dice to attack, with a damage modifier based on weapon if you land a hit. You must also roll dice when performing tests, like getting into a locked chest. Or searching a zone for treasure. This is like a break test or a pick lock test or a perception test. Some Hero types are better at this than others ( we'll get to that). You will also be called on to test against your attributes, and traps, and this is like a Will / Reflex / Fortitude save as per a game like D&D or Pathfinder and countless others TTRPG experiences. The number of dice rolled in such tests depends on the value of the attribute at the time of testing. The attributes go up and down based on damage sustained, some enemies target those specifically. Some will allow you to distrubute damage between named attributes however you see fit and others allow you to allocate damage to attributes however you wish. You can also spend attributes to augment attacks and to bring into action other effects, based on the choices you make when purchasing skill cards. This element of resource management is important to succeeding in the game.
This leads to this great question and point you made, Raoriz73:
'Hence, my question is to see if the character develops or gets abilities that help manipulate the dice rolls. Because rolling all explore and no combat when you have a room full of enemies will feel real bad, real quick. Or rolling mostly attacks when you need to explore to find that critical item to complete the mission will also feel bad.'
One of the elements of play you do not see here is that a Hero like Cormac, or Grainne, if she is unlocked during the campaign (Cormac's daughter) have a set of 12 dedicated and unique skills. Their attributes are not symmetrical, but their skill cards are all different. They will also be compatible with the Thinning Veil (if you are aware of that). Skills cost either 5 souls or 10 to purchase. Purchase may be made in game, during the Hero Phase. Some Skills are passive and require no cost to use, their effect is always there to be drawn on and to augment dice results or increase your options. Others require actions to use or are keyed to results when you roll, by type. So for example an attack might get extra damage if you roll an interact in addition to combat results when fighting. That's a weak example if the concern is about not having enough combats or interacts (we'll get to that).
Some potions and scrolls are offensive, defensive, or otherwise can help mitigate a round where you are short of combat actions. They cost an interact action to cast, in the case of scrolls, or any action to drink, in the case of potions. What you have seen in playthroughs is probably a randomised strength in the potency of a potion, like a potion of healing. In this way they are exactly like potions in TTRPGs where instead of being set to 2 Health restored, or 4, they allow a result ranging typically from 2 to 7.
Some of the skills have 'cooldowns' most of which are set, some are variable. This is another thing to manage, as you will want the most powerful skills available at crucial moments and your ability to predict those is important, or to plan for them.
Souls can be spent to reroll dice results in a test or attack (not the individual dice but the entire test or attack). They also fuel some items, imbuing them with greater potency.
So we'll get to the concern about certain results not being available on a given round, or for many, proving frustrating.
@Winddancer110 wrote: '. I love that it is not just I have XYZ to do in a turn, but that it will change each time as to what i can do, though with a bit of a safety net as you can bank some of your rolls so you are guaranteed that action next turn. '
We are glad you like this. This decision making is a vital part of play. Do you exhaust all your combats now or spend them to move, or bank some for the next game round? Likewise interacts. Do you push your luck or play for certainties? You can bank up to 4 actions, minus the amount of Corruption you have sustained. So if your Corruption is 1, you can only bank 3 actions. If you would take more Corruption but have 4 already, you instead suffer the Corrupted consequence, which is scenario specific. This is important to the design like the Fate Rolls. The Fate Rolls are different in each scenario. If this was a card draw, for example, you'd need a lot of decks and add a predictable nature to the way rooms are stacked, and there is a way around this, using cards to force shuffles rather than exhausting decks before reshuffling and resetting, but its a lot of busywork when a quick roll on a table is easier, and more cost effective, and you are not managing a card deck/s. It also saves on cost and the weight of the game.
Now when you roll your actions you will find there are six dice, with two combats, two interacts, one class and one enemy result on each dice. This allows you to assess probability in regards to rolls where you generate unfavourable results, or not enough combat or interacts, in addition to the ways you can mitigate a bad roll. You can go 'Full Defensive' meaning you only grant one enemy activation when clearing your enemy actions. The rest of your actions become your damage reduction, against all kinds of damage (not just direct attacks but also not only to Health, but all attributes). You can also, when rolling 4 actions of 1 type, discard a dice, and reroll your generated actions for the round. You can likewise spend a soul to do this (but holding a soul back for this might prove too great a test, the temptation being to upgrade your Hero).
While Cormac's deck, in particular, does make him reliant on combats to attack in melee, his skill cards grant him many abilities in game and many interesting choices giving him great agency as you develop him. In Veil, there are Hero types who can get most damage from class or interact actions. You can see a spread of these abilities on the company website.
Now defence does not require a dice roll, your defence the total of armour and protective charms and effects from spells cast, wards placed down, and so on. It is subtracted from incoming damage from attacks. If the defence outweighs the number of successes in the attack, then the attack is a miss. Conditions do not effect you unless you took a wound, so you won't get Bleed in an attack which missed, nor indeed Poison.
To summarise, yes it is the case dice are used a lot in this particular game, but no more so than in a TTRPG or like game. It is true that behaviour decks could have been utilised instead of behavioural rolls to help cut down on dice rolling, but these randomised attacks work similarly to what your GMing is doing behind the screen in a TTRPG, choosing which attacks a monster uses or following recommendations from battle tactics entries in modules. Some enemy scrolls define a singular, reliable, constant behaviour. But the best enemies in the game can really surprise you, and do the thing you least want at the time you least want them to do it. This is part of the fun and tension. The game can be quite lethal but the balance is there, with the right choices.
@triskeliongames9270 thank you for taking the time to answer and to answer in depth. You have addressed my concerns about the dice roles. I am happy to read that the characters will have ways to mitigate dice roll.
While I would prefer less dice rolling in general, I do like the tension rolling the dice at the beginning of a round to determine your available actions that turn. If it is , like you say, also able to be manipulated by character's abilities and skills, that's fine.
@@raortiz73 Thank you for taking the time to watch the videos and respond to them! Your question is very valid and others may wonder the same thing. We all have a mileage that varies with dice, and that is well understood. Cormac is slightly different than the Thinning Veil in some respects. In the Thinning Veil, there are 2 formats of play. 1 is like this you see in Cormac, which we have been calling our Dungeon Crawl mode, and 2 is the Adventure mode, with pre-set maps. These utilise a token system and a spawn deck with spawn gates. That design does not utilise Fate Rolls.
Some scenarios in the format used in Cormac and in DC (Dungeon Crawl) mode scenarios in Veil do not use Fate Rolls when entering Event tiles. This is because, most often, additional randomised details might conflict with narrative content for the given tile, or tip the balance askew in an undesireable way. The Event tile narrative will always let you know if you do or do not make Fate Rolls. Obviously this is mentioned because it does cut down some of the dice rolling.
In a few Veil scenarios, an event tile or trigger round can open a spawn gate on your dungeon level, even in a DC mode game. This will introduce the spawn deck and that includes its own triggers and foul magics. A bad thing! Usually a sign you need to get off the level fast!