Hey folks, was looking at Favor across the missions and did some counting and I’m curious what people think.
Among the special missions, there are 2 that count for All favors. The following numbers are without counting those.
There are 12 for Mystic, and 12 for Glory, 13 if you count the mission to break into the Fort. 9 for Knowledge, and 9 for Holy.
There are a total of 18 missions for Mercy, by far the most, and a grand whopping 5 missions for Wilds.
This is especially dire for Wilds, as that is distributed across the different routes, meaning even with the All Favor missions, there are only 5 Favor missions on two of the three routes to Skydagger, and 3 on the third. Without random generated or GM given favor, the players would need to miss none of them to get a second Chosen ability at Talgon.
I suppose my only question is if people think that was in any way intentional or was just the side-effect of generating interesting missions for specials and then assigning Favor to them afterwards? Would be curious to hear what people’s experience is whether those numbers are noticeable in game. Do people who write on forums just not pick Wilds for the Horned One?
I noticed the same thing when I began my Band of Blades campaign and considered it to be one of the few serious problems with the game-play. I wrote about it here: https://community.bladesinthedark.com/t/the-skydagger-keep-debrief/1168
I had initially built my Horned One’s Chosen as a “Wild” favor, but quickly realized it wouldn’t work when I read ahead. I gave her the Anointed ability so that she could benefit from Wild, Mystic and Holy missions.
It is worth noting that there are a few special missions that benefit all Favors, and there’s a decent chance that your randomly generated missions will have additional favors, especially the religious missions. That said, the lack of Wild missions was clearly an oversight because it can lead to circumstances where you can do a whole campaign without having a chance of advancing once and I cannot imagine that’s what the designers had in mind.
This is 100% the case ^_~ I think I actually had it on my list to go back through and double check counts on those but it got lost on the lists somewhere in the nighmare crunch at the end of getting the book out. So blame me on this one. :)
Errata wouldn’t help. It’s not a rule issue. Just a quirk of how mission favor got labeled.
As Udanchik showed with his game (3 upgrades on horned one) it’s also not exactly a serious problem, just requires a different build, or RP and focus on acquiring missions of a specific type. Trust me when I say we did a ton of playtesting (I was in one group that did a Wild run, and I’ve seen at least 3 others that made it to Skydagger with very high scores). It’s not quite as dire as you seem to think it is.
Remember that all the tables are roll-or-pick. If as a GM you’ve picked Wild and are inspired by it, you can set the favor on any 5-roll mission, and of course Religious missions etc. The 1 in 6 times you get a special mission and Wild isn’t around isn’t actually that wildly off in terms of balance or advancement if you run the numbers.
