Playing fair

Recently in my home Gloomhaven group we have been cheating.  Apparently our particular variety of cheating is common, because our new house rule is that people who have reached level 9, which is the maximum level, can just retire whenever they want to.  Normally you have to finish your life goal in order to do this but we were having problems with the level 9 characters in the group.

Notably there was one scenario recently where we busted into the final room and Wendy and I blew the place up.  She did 35 AOE damage, killing four of the eight monsters, and then I did 31 single target damage, killing one more monster and nearly finishing off the boss.  This wasn't an example of rolling a bunch of critical hits, or even going full nova.  It was just the kind of rounds we have, given the level 9 cards we have access to.  Our two companions looked at their cards and seemed dejected, because their turns were something like 'Move in and hit for 5 damage'.

Move in and hit for 5 is a fine turn.  It is pretty much what you do in Gloomhaven once you level up a bit.  But it isn't nearly as broken as the stuff high level characters with access to a lot of gear can manage, and playing the two groups together ends up being crappy for the people being carried.  Cards like this are the problem:

This card is nuts.  It can be reasonably modeled as hitting 3 targets for 4 damage each, which would be super on its own, but it has the added advantage of being able to pierce shields on the splash targets.  The thing that really makes it silly though is that using any add target effect allows you to hit a whole new set of targets, instead of just a single additional target as it would with most AOEs.  I have seen this card, not a loss card mind you, deliver 20 single target damage to a priority target and also more than 50 damage in AOE to the things around it.  Wendy has been absolutely ruining whole rooms with this thing, and using stamina potions to bring it back to use it over and over again.

I don't do crazy AOE like this.  I have an entirely different sort of brokenness, where I deliver unreasonable single target damage.  18 single target damage is a pretty normal round for me, one which I will do many times during a scenario.  I can use a crazy combination of items to ramp that up to ~45 damage in a round, usually healing myself for about 6 in the process.  Bosses just melt when I do this, and our two characters complement each other perfectly since one of us can do the nova turn no matter whether our challenge is a single target or a mass of dorks.

Gloomhaven is absurd at level 9.  Not all classes get the broken stuff of course - the Brute, my first class, has particularly sad level 9 cards that would be solid at level 4, but are a joke compared to the real stuff.  But enough classes have nutty things they can do at max level that the game gets too easy.  The scaling is off, basically, because level 1 monsters are reasonable at level 1, but level 9 characters are supposed to be fighting level 5 monsters by the book but that is a cakewalk.

This is why we houseruled it so that a level 9 character can just retire.  Play a few sessions, use your broken abilities, then start again with something reasonable.

It does mean that people don't necessarily have to finish their personal quests, and can ignore them if they want to.  Retiring at level 9 isn't so far away.  However, I think this is a feature.  Lots of the personal quests are boring and effectively just require you to stand around waiting till a particular scenario comes up until you can stop playing.  That isn't something you work towards, or think about.  It is just a random thing that happens.  Roleplaying your quest, like hunting down particular monsters or upgrading your character in a particular way, these can be fun.  But if you are done with your character, got max level, and want to move on?  Just do it, I say.

So now I have retired and am starting afresh at level 5 with a Spellweaver.  My turns sometimes involve hitting an enemy for 1 damage, and the rest of the group shakes their heads, wishing for my old character who would consider doing 8 damage a wasted round.  But the challenges are much more challenging this way, and trying new things is fun.  Maybe I will actually do my quest on this character, maybe not, but in any case a consistent way to retire on schedule is definitely the way I want to play.

It is fun to *get* powerful, but it turns out that it isn't that much fun to *be* powerful.  So let's do more of the former and less of the latter, says I.