Smaller groups are easier to challenge, but mean less Doom for the GM, too.
I found that Conan runs quite well with only two players. The “action economy” is much better if you have shorter rounds than in a group of five or six players.
4 Likes
So only being two players, the odds of powercreep are less and gameplay should go smoother?
When we play a new system/campaign we try to stay there for a year at least, so starting something where that would be impossible, would be counterproductive.
3 Likes
I also feel like this game really encourages and intends for players to roll your characters randomly during creation (which I am all for!) . It is way too easy to make a broken character otherwise.
2 Likes
While I agree that things in the game always need to make some sense in the fiction, the only excuse you need for summoning reinforcements is, “You guys gave me the Doom points.” 
I think you should use Doom to seperate characters. And when you do it, enforce player separation as well. If Conan and Bêlit are seperated by a collapsed wall, don’t allow those two players to communicate tactics with each other.
Using Doom to Seize Initiative is highly effective when you can use that first attack to disarm a character or break their guard. The player now has to use some of all of their first turn to get a weapon ready or regain guard.
You could shake up the objectives so that “kill all the bad guys” is not the best tactic. Maybe they have to guard a temple and prevent it getting damaged. Maybe the BBG’s guards are all mind-controlled townsfolk (including some friends and relatives of the PCs) so their objective is defeat the BBG while killing the least amount of minions.
Make the players choose between attacking and doing something else. For example, a fight in a burning building. The player can choose to attack or to fight the fire, not both. If they don’t fight the fire then next turn it gets worse and hurts them more. If they fight the fire then that’s one bad guy still alive to hit them.
Make sure the combat scenes challenge lots of different skill tests, not just the “combat” ones. If a player has made their character a combat monster then they are almost certainlty weak in several other areas.
Or just give them an escort quest. evil_grin
3 Likes
Have a mixture of mobs and individually acting minions. It allows you to focus on one vulnerable PC with some impact (from the mob) and to pepper PCs with lots of individual attacks to ramp up the Doom you get from repeat parries. Use that Doom to target unarmoured locations from an armour sacrifice. You need to make sure the player understands that armour sacrifice is a desperation move and not a standard tactic for dominating.
I don’t have the issues you describe with my players to be honest. I think it is therefore the manner in which you are having your NPCs engage and the nature of your Doom spends that is doing it.
Also, have more enemies with heavy ranged weapons - they are pretty devastating and cannot be parried without shields… your players will soon stop running in feeling invulnerable… 
Also spears… lots of spears. It was the most common combat weapon in that style of ‘time period’ and minions with spears and shields together can be very, very effective. Reach 3 and attacking as a mob means real problems for sword wielding PCs…
1 Like
TWO casters!?
Well the party should be fragging themselves periodically with spell backfires. Remember that all fails on a Sorcery check are Complications, and multiple complications on a spell is BAD…
1 Like
I am just beginning to play the game, have been asking a few questions about the gameplay myself. One issue, with Doom and Momentum spend, I have an agreement with my players. They use Momentum when they are active, I use Doom when the NPCs are active. So when I am attacking, the players simply roll reactions with no Momentum boosts, they can use Fortune. When they are attacking, I don’t use Doom, except to pay for a parry or dodge, not to add dice.
That makes things dicier, though I don’t use the wound death spiral, for each wound I increase the complication range and reduce their focus rather than upping the difficulty. So a PC with one wound who has a 3 focus on their broadsword would now gain a complication on a 19-20 and only gets rwo successes on a roll of 2. I think that reflects things becoming more dangerous and reduced competence without simply collapsing to defeat.
Do you really think Conan is too deadly for the PCs?
I have run Conan games since the beta-test phase and continue to do so.
The PCs are very hard to kill, there is a downward spiral, if you - by not that great a chance - manage to actually put some Wounds on them. But even then they can ignore the Wound effects for a Fortune point.
Conan PCs are very competent and hard to kill.
But that is, of course, only the case as long as they may generate Doom or use Momentum to get more dice for the Parry. If you were to allow the core rules for defense to be applied, you would not need to circumvent all the damage and Harm rules entirely.
And what about characters with only Expertise 1 and Focus 1 getting 2 Wounds? How do you apply “negative Focus”? That is very weird. I’m quite astonished that this ruling works for your group, as it has more consequences than merely “softening up” the damage system.
2 Likes
In the numerous combats with players and test combats I did running solo that I ran the PCs have had an easy time most of the time. About 80% if I had to put a number on it. This was done mostly with group of 2 or 3 PCs. The PCs were able to win easily and enemies were not fighting stupidly. The only times things got dicey was when dealing with Nemesis characters that could summon reinforcements at the end of an adventure if the group was small.
Smaller groups had to keep dealing with minions and getting injured slowly and could just deal with the main bad guy. In a larger group the encounter started with mire minions, but afterwards all the players didn’t have to worry about fighting them and could shift focus onto the bad guy.
Also, if you have an ally NPC in the player’s group they use and generate moment not doom. This helped when I ran beyond the Thunder River and in other games in which the players got an NPC ally that could aid in combat. That ally NPC use and generate momentum was something that was mentioned in one of the ModCon videos if your wondering where that came from.
One other thing is to make sure your characters are built decently and made to be useful. The Quick Start and Extra Charters for the Quick Start are good to let your players look at so they can see how a good character looks like. Trying to put to little focus on specific attributes and skills and going for as wide a range as possible may be a problem. As you want a good TN and Focus for some of your combat skills.
1 Like
Well, it might be a feature of only having two PCs but in at least half the time they struggle to generate significant momentum and take wounds.
Obviously, I do not put focus below 0.
Players have not been concerned because this is better than increasing the difficulty of stuff for every wound.
A lot of times failure to generate Momentum is due to players not remembering or not using Talents etc. An occasional run of bad luck can happen, sure, but it’s really rare to have characters stall out.
1 Like
If you have copies of your PCs characters before a game I also recommend you use them to run by your self sample combats of the fights you expect when you run your game. You can easily tell if they pc or opponents they are facing are going to need to be adjusted. I usually do this a few days before running a game and I often know how my PCs will respond in a fight.
You also want to make sure that the PCs know what the effect of s of Talents they have are and of weapon qualities they posses. That players do not use talents and forget to that was mention in the post before mine is something that I have seen happen. More so when you are running the game for new players.
I recommend doing a cut and paste from the PDF version, or retyping if you don’t have a PDF version and just have a physical one, of the the each PCs talent description and of the special effects and other important info for each weapon on to an individual cheat sheet if you can’t put that on each player’s character sheet. This helps with the problem of players not remerging to using talents and helps keep rule book flipping down in combat. Maybe even making talent an weapon qualities refence cards could be an option.
Also make sure you give each player or have available where they can be easily seen any cheat sheets for momentum, fortune spends. Players often forget that they can spend fortune or momentum on certain things.
Stress before the game begins that fortune points do replenish and explain how often they replenish. Players are sometimes scared to spend them because they are afraid that they won’t have any during adventure, and may not realize that they may have an opportunity to get one or more back during an adventure and not have to wait for the adventure to be over fully before regaining them as they may have some time to heal, etc. in parts of the game.
2 Likes
For future readers of this thread I have a few house rules that helped me set a better tone for the game in a four person group.
- I run momentum combat spends RAW (even though RAI has been clarified) so that spends from the combat list can only be made if the roll has generated momentum.
- I used shadows of the past with an ability cap of 10 (instead of 12) and maximum of 2 in one skill (rather than 3 in any)
- Fortune is given at the start of a story or story arc, not at the start of each session.
- Enemies have a non doom momentum pool as well.
I have a few other house rules but they are less about making the game more difficult and more thematics (like steely glare having a display requirement)
It does make for a grittier style of play, but it is what the group wanted as a whole. Players play real dirty and exploit every opportunity when they don’t know they are going to be sitting on a massive pool of momentum, and it ends up encouraging very different characters via exp spends as a result.
That is not rules as written.
1 Like
Most of the combat spends aren’t immediate which by reading of the description on page means there needs to be a successful test before the spending (which makes sense really) but my understanding is that once you’ve made a successful test you can spend what you generate as well as from the pool.
1 Like
Yes. That is rules as written. - Even on a test with no Momentum, you can still spend Momentum from the Group Momentum Pool. That is, what the Group Momentum Pool is for in the first place.
The term ‘Death Spiral’ is so overused it has almost become a negative meme.
If you are playing Conan without the full impact of increased difficulty from Wounds and Traumas you are missing something. The PCs are pretty powerful using the standard build rules, and that is with them having to deal with the increased difficulties involved.
I was one of the original playtesters, and have run this game a lot, including at Cons, and can say with absolute certainty that a game with reduced impact from Wounds and Trauma is going to be a cakewalk for PCs.
PC’s do NOT as you claim ‘simply collapse to defeat’, they have various ways of avoiding Wounds (and to a lesser extent Trauma) and can for the price of but 1 Fortune Point ignore them for an entire scene.
Conan is not D&D, although your houserule does indeed make it a little more so.
As for you throwing out the interplay of Momentum and Doom, I am not sure you understand how you have basically created the very problem you are complaining about.
Trust me on this - that interplay is KEY to the game. If you don’t want it - then use another rule system, because you just broke a core mechanic for no reason and then tried to correct for the damage that you yourself did to the rule system’s game balance. Better yet - just go back to the RAW and play it as intended - you will find it works well without any tinkering.
6 Likes