Balancing out the fantasy base set with Pathfinder, Conan and Legends

[Atlus]

Originally Posted by Miss_Musket

Ahh! Makes sense! To be fair, I think maybe the people who were complaining about the monsters being too weak were playing Epic Munchkin - we just play to level 10. I would like to keep the expansions together as opposed to separating them into custom decks, but it would be an interesting experiment at some point.

My group (as we are all very new) still plays a very friendly game, and don't tend to backstab each other until level 8 and above! If we had more expansions, I could totally imagine us all accumulating way too much treasure before we start to turn on each other - I might have to stress now to the group that we can all be a little more munchkinly!

Lastly, I had heard recently that you can put items straight onto the table with the view of tapping them (AKA putting them into the backpack). We had no idea!! I've just been telling people you can only put us usable items down, and tap them if they become unusable later on! I can imagine this would make trading for race specific items way easier (we've really not be trading at all). On one hand, you wouldn't want to equip people with too much, but it would make it more interesting when lots of races and classes start getting involved.

I'm getting ahead of myself - I haven't even got any of the expansions yet!

Epic Munchkin actually has monsters that are nigh impossible to beat if you get an unlucky draw of two high level monsters or strong monsters with keywords on them. I have to agree with Mister Ed on Super Munchkins being a bit one sided late game, I'd even included Impossible, Fu, and Zombies (depending on if you own the expansions or not).

Normally my group will bide there time until they know that they can take down the person who's fighting but if they can't they usually be passive until people get too high compared to others, get a strong item advantage, or just are in the winning game fight and I've been playing with groups for about five or six years now.

You can put items down onto the table that you cannot use which you could put sideways to show they are backpack items. This is what I do. HOWEVER big items have specific rulings that you may only have one out at a time unless effects dictate otherwise. Any excess big items must stay in the hand or the one out must be sold, traded, or discarded to get the other one out. I personally keep items useless to me on the table and one-shots in my hand in order to give people an idea of trading leverage while still keeping my instantaneous combat strength unknown because any card on the table can be read aloud while cards in the hand are on your discretion. This is more of a veteran player thing from what I've seen because many people will throw lesser items at you if they know you have to waste a lot more to cover it or cut deals with other players to throw in a small amount of cards each to overpower you.

As for my opinion on the sets (as an owner of all fantasy, conan, pathfinder, and legends cards out to this date barring some promos). It is much easier to mix fantasy and legends core because they have the same races so monsters and items still correspond very well. Conan is the next best since it offers classes that also fit the set BUT they have different races that are just bad compared to the fantasy races (at least I think so). I use a homebrew rule allowing to have one conan and one fantasy race just because all of conans races sound like nationalities and not races so much. While Pathfinder is the hardest to mix the cores for because I feel like Pathfinder has stronger classes and more unforgiving bad stuff while adding in a new character changing card known as factions.

If you choose to get all of the expansions for fantasy then adding pathfinder would be unwise without homebrew rulings because the set would be way too diluted to use but the other two aren't affected badly.

I mix the sets all of these sets together and I use three major homebrew rulings:
1. When the game starts:
everyone draws one card from a list of fantasy races at random and one class from all available (fantasy and pf), that way everyone has one unique race and class to start with and effects can be used. The remaining classes and races are discarded (from the pile used, it should only have one of each race and class in it). I even use one blank card in each of the piles just to add some fun to it.
At level 4 they draw from a faction or Conan race side deck and at level 6 they draw from the other deck.
At 8 they draw from a race/class enhancer deck.
This promotes leveling faster to get the cards they want or at least better chances to find what they want.

2. Conan races do not fill up the normal race slot but count as a race in every other possible way.

3. Pathfinder classes have a secondary class typng
Theif = Alchemist
Cleric = Witch
Wizard = Necromancer
Bard = Summoner
This only counts towards monster effects and not items restrictions. What this does for the game is that it makes the pf classes have weaknesses and strengths against fantasy monsters and it gives some of the fantasy classes some strengths and weaknesses with pathfinder monsters. If it's not in place then if you get one of the four pf classes you never need to worry about being weakened by 90% of all monsters you fight which seems unbalanced.

Anyway, I wish you the best of luck in playing and feel free to pm me for any more in-depth questions or ask another fellow player here on the forums!