Four Against Darkness playthough #1 (A complete noob stumbling in the dark!)
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- čas přidán 5. 07. 2024
- Four Against Darkness (2016)
www.ganeshagames.net
boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/1...
#boardgame #solo #playthrough
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I expect to have messed all kinds of things up, please help me enjoy this game. :)
I have some thoughts compiled at the end of the video, are they accurate? Baseless?
edit (a few hours later): lol, apparently I had the nerve to post this horrible attempt at playing ON THE VERY DAY of the release of the biggest book for 4AD... Check this out:
preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/p...
YES, THAT'S 400 PAGES. Apparently will be available in print of December 15th (based on a reddit post / treacheries_of_the_tro... ).
0:00:00 Scrapped my usual intro, lets get started!
0:02:16 Creating characters
0:04:44 Creating the Dwarf
0:08:06 Creating the Cleric
0:12:03 Creating the Rogue
0:14:44 Creating the Wizard
0:22:33 Equipment, buying and filling in stats
0:32:30 Playthrough
0:52:43 This was a CORRIDOR and NOT A ROOM, I will realize and fix in exactly one minute...
0:53:43 Playthrough
1:25:26 Thoughts... - Hry
Ah, my favorite solo dungeon crawler. It's been so long that I'd forgotten how opaque the rules are in the beginning. Great video.
Thanks for making 4ad content. The use of dry-erase board, multi-colored dice for the heroes, and your DM screen cut outs/inserts were all nice touches. I believe 2e was intended to be released by now, but Troublesome Towns (a 400 page tome of town adventures) took a lot of the creator's time editing and creating art for it. I would expect an early release in 24 but that is just my guess. 2e is supposed to fix a lot of the organization and flow of the core book and Fiendish Foes plus a starting adventure, I believe, will also be included in the core. As for the Invisible Gremlins and Medusa's, you could customize your own tables and replace them with a different monster. It's as you said in the video, the game is a barebones example of what could be done with the system. Most play the game as "playmasters" where you pool in supplements here and there and then craft your own experience. An alternative way to generate monsters would be to look into the monster card decks on drivethrucards, instead of rolling, you just draw a random monster and you customize your own deck (there's like 5 decks now), including adventure decks (though now you have Kobolds, you could create d12 table by combining both monster tables together- the more books you have, you eventually could create your own d100 monster table because there are now more than 100 monsters in the game for each monster type). The adventurer's guild supplement has some guidance on some overworld content, and the twisted series also helps create some more rpg-esque elements by adding uniqueness to each encounter. My favorite is the Wayfarers & Adventurer's book because of the new options for character creation and I always was also a fan of the level 4 Cthulhu-eque dungeon called Caverns of Chaos. There were some offshoots to the system made, like above gameboard-esque reskins set in both Greek and Norse Mythology. In the past, I have played those where I combined both maps together to create one giant above world to travel in.
When I picked up this book I didn't know very much about it at all - now I know there's way more that I didn't know! There appears to be around 60 other things I could buy to flesh this out any way I wanted it. It's a really cool system and see why people love it. I didn't realize how malleable it was but after looking in to the wide world of supplements to it - there's a lot! Unfortunately for me I'm less prone to the $2-6 impulse buy and would rather a nice collection of these things be assembled. It sounds like soon there may be some work done so I'll keep my eyes open for that. Thank you!
@@sylviawilkinson6874 Its out now. PDFs are on drvthru. paperback and hardbacks are up at lulu and I think both pc and hc will be on Amazon in like 3 days. There are two volumes. Tome 1 has all the rules and Tome 2 has all the tables. I contributed one minor thing to it.
Where is the best place to stay updated on the second edition? Just curious because I just bought the core book yesterday and wondering if I should return it and just wait for second edition. Any advice is greatly appreciated
I'm not qualified to answer but my guess is the Facebook group. I don't have an FB account, but it seems it's pretty active over there.
@@CeePhour awesome. I’ll check it out. Thanks!
This is my first of your videos and I love your energy. Subscribed! Keep up the hard work
Thank you! I appreciate it. Truly.
I'm starting this game next week after company leaves so watching all I can now, rereading the book and hoping for the best. Great video!
1:38:57 Ah, an Arkham Horror The Card Game inside joke. Love it!
YNWA!
@@simontemplar3359 YNWA!
Great video subbed to see more. Thank you for all the time you spent on this.
Thank you! Hopefully I didn't make many mistakes, I'm having a heck of a time navigating these rules. Anything I catch wrong I try to note in the video descriptions or Klingon subtitles, but I'm sure there is plenty I missed, so feel free to drop any wisdom! Spreading the correct information makes everyone better players. :)
I'm reminded of a dungeon we played back in the late 80s. Our party got captured and the DM took all of our equipment. One of the guys lost it. Throwing cheetos at the DM he yelled "You did worse than kill us! You took all our stuff!" Good times 🤣
lol, that's a great story! I only played 2nd Edition. Our first/main DM was out out get us (literally became us vs him). That's how I wound up as DM.
Perfect! Love these dungeon crawl games! Looking forward to see your take on the D100 , 4AD and 2D6 Dungeon! :D
I think maybe I do too :) After spending all kinds of time (and money) trying to find "the perfect board game dungeon crawl", the answer might have been in BOOKS instead of a BOX! I'm really curious to see how 4AD develops for me in the coming days (I now have my hands on some PDF supplements, I think I got lucky and realized early that's going to be key for 4AD), and 2D6 Dungeon should be here in a week or so (it's the one I know the least about).
2d6 Dungeon is my favorite of the 3, but it gets a little TOO easy around level 6. Really looking forward to seeing what Toby does with 2d6 Realms@@CeePhour
I'm excited to get my hands on it. The system looks very promising! There's a great video by Daniel of www.youtube.com/@TheDungeonDive that explores the system, which is pretty much all I know about it going in to it.
@@CeePhour When I started to play D100, I was very much liking it, even though there were a lot going on, it felt easy enough to follow the tables and such. A lot of people say this was more complex than 4AD, but to be honest, I had trouble getting into 4AD rules. It was just a slog to get through the rulebook. If I pick it up again, I will certainly use some of those help sheets!!!
2D6 is more immersive I feel, at least for D100. There are plenty of rules that basically tell you "just wing it" or "roleplay it", cant remember the actual word for it though, but you will understand. Its neat, its simple, I love the dungeon creation and the combat is much more fun than D100... but I do feel the character progression is lacking slightly. I do love the incremental approach of D100.
I love the D100 Dungeon rules and their organization. The rules are crystal clear and easy to find. Everything feels... unambiguous and methodical. My brain really likes that. :)
The 4AD rules are certainly fun, but the book (at least the first one, I don't have others yet) would benefit greatly from a having a good editor to clean it up and standardize terms. When "brute force" the only way I can describe how to learn a set of rules, it's usually hard for me to love it, and even harder remember how to play if I step away for a few weeks.
Perhaps I'm looking at it wrong. I'm wondering if that loose design is what people love about it. They just "make something up" as they go. Instead of a rigid rules manual or a video game vs something more akin to the Dungeon master's Guide. Something is wrong in my brain where I "need permission" to do that.
Nice video, I'm enjoying the playthrough so far.
52:32 Looks like you rolled to see what's in the room, but given what you said earlier in the video (that 1x width are corridors), wouldn't you roll on the "corridor" side instead?
Ohp. Nevermind. I just had to watch further. You discovered your error eventually. :)
Great job showcasing the game. Bad luck on the early boss.
It seems you should have the option to flee the medusa before making the gaze attack since it says "before battle".
Would be interested to see how fleeing works in this game, and maybe that would have been a better option for your party (at least for the lone rogue at the end).
I'd love to get a copy of that character sheet...
I just submitted it to BGG, when it gets approved it should show up there. My username is the same over there, so it should be quick to find.
If you don't have a BGG account I can host it elsewhere.
Your comment motivated me to finally add the healing potion icon I never got around to! 😀Remember barbarians, just go ahead and put a little ✖over that. 😝
@@CeePhourAwesome. That monster tracker (at about 41:08) looks great too. Much better than the scrap paper I am using. Ha ha
Well it's been four days and I don't see it up there so who knows what happened over at BGG.
edit: it took 6 days but it was approved. boardgamegeek.com/filepage/272433/4ad-character-sheet
@@jcraigwilliams70 The monster sheet I grabbed from BGG, boardgamegeek.com/filepage/164130/4ad-comprehensive-playsheets-grids-characters-enco
I feel as if the game needs some 2-12 or even 111-666 tables. That would create a more random result set for multiple adventures. But that would require the game to be a 3d6 game.
Agreed. There's a lot of supplements out there that probably address this, to what extent I don't know. The "Twisted Minions" book adds a bit of a spin to the regular enemies (I have a video of it if you wanted to see how it works).
This was fun. For some reason, 4AD playthroughs aren't as engaging for me as 2D6 Dungeon playthroughs. I watched all of this one, though.
Around 1:06:00, I think you forgot to collect room treasure (even though the rats didn't have any of their own).
Omg yes! I love this game, but it's taken me 3 YEARS to just accept sloppy rules. I'm only 11 minutes into your video and have already exclaimed "OMG YES" a dozen times every time you point out clumsy wording! It drove me NUTS when I started, I was asking the Facebook group CONSTANTLY for clarifications! The interchangeable terms for adventure, game, session, etc sometimes in the same sentence, kept confusing me. The supplements have gotten better, but these original rules are just so full of little inconsistencies and confusing term changes and ommissions. I am SO glad I'm not the only one bothered by it!
You may or may not have seen it, but Andrea once commented that using multiple terms for the same thing arose out of a concern over too much repetition. I can understand that, but it did, unfortunately, lead to confusion for many.
@@jcraigwilliams70 Agreed, in writing fiction, or anything narrative, you want to avoid being repetitive and tiring. But game rules are a form of technical writing. You HAVE to use the same term for the same concept/thing each time in order to maintain consistency and avoid confusion. But maybe that's just me :)
@LiamW42 no, you are correct. I don't think English is Andrea's first language though, which probably contributed as well.
No Lie, man the book isn't exactly well organized and the process as it is presented is not always clear.
I have spent a lot of time thinking about this over the last few weeks. A revised version of the core book is overdue (imo), but what a mess that's going to cause because the 60 or so supplements written after it kept the same poor choice of wording for things (boss/weird, for example). It's made me resist buying more of the physical books for now. Although I still wish physical+PDF came together, but for this game they don't seem to (I tend to use DriveThruRPG). :\
That said, I must admit if you can get through the poor organization the game is quite fun (a LOT more than I first thought). You just have to be really OK with winging some things :)
If you don't mind a little friendly advice - I'd slow the speed of your vocal delivery. To me it sounds like you had 10 cups of coffee or maybe a couple lines of coke before starting your presentation. The content is good and I appreciate your effort - just relax a bit. You've got all the time in the world - plus you can edit!
$0.02 delivered ...
This is a nice comment with constructive criticism, even if I disagree with your opinion. I actually appreciate his speed and delivery method. Instead, I get annoyed with presenters who have unnecessary delays. I appreciate the talking through his thoughts, and keeping the decision making to a minimum (or perhaps he's edited them out). Nevertheless, I found it enjoyable the way it is. Just my opposing $0.02. :)