TL:DR
1) How many times does Strife Player roll a Target Number throughout the course of a Battle?
2) If an opponent is Epic, do the Heroes mark a tick of Pathos at the beginning of all 3 phases of the Battle?
3) How should players and the Strife Player go about reconciling their Domain choice during the Clash and the Threat Defend in particular?
4) Is there a Hero who is best in Threat Defend and a different Hero who is best in Threat Seize?
Wall of text elaborating my concerns below. I don’t expect anyone to read it unless they want to because it is indeed a WALL OF TEXT haha
Hi John! I’m new to Agon and playing as the Strife Player and I’m struggling to understand some particulars about the Battle and I was hoping you’d be able to clarify.
Let’s take Kryos Island and a Battle with Thesekyra as an example.
How many different times does the Strife Player set a Target Number throughout the Battle? Is it 4 times? 1 for Clash, 1 for Threat Defend, 1 for Threat Seize, and 1 for Finale?
How does the Strife Player even properly gather dice during the Clash phase if it is the Hero Players that choose their Domain? For example, if one Hero is using Craft & Reason to sabotage the cannons on the ship while another Hero is using Blood & Valor to charge through Thesekyra’s Crew then it sounds reasonable to have the Battle Hardened Crew trait as well as the Swift Shooting Epithet apply to the charging Blood & Valor Hero, but not the sabotaging Craft & Reason Hero so how should the Strife Player go about that situation?
Speaking of Battle Hardened Crew (which is Epic), would the Heroes spend a total of 3 Pathos for all on the contests in the Battle? 1 for Clash, 1 for Threat, and 1 for Finale? That seems steep to me, but the rulebook doesn’t seem to clarify this unless I missed something. It says to follow the normal contest rules, which suggests to me that the Heroes would indeed need to Spend another Pathos at the start of each round in the Battle.
And finally, during the Defend portion of Threat it sounds again like the Hero Players are choosing their Domain based on what they are defending against and the actions they are taking, but then they get to choose to stop a threat as they narrate. So what would the Strife Player roll if Thesekyra threatens killing the Heroes’ crew with her arrows and destroying the Heroes’ ship with the Pillar of Storms? And what if a Hero rolls Craft & Reason to sail their ship out of harms way and a different hero rolls Arts & Oration to convince the crew to rally beneath the deck to save them, but the Craft & Reason Hero Suffers while the Arts & Oration Hero Prevails, but it’s more important to the Hero Players that they save their ship rather than the crew? How would the Hero Player narrate saving the ship through Arts & Oration? Do they just get creative? Is that part of the fun? What if they feel a sense of writer’s block due to some mismatch with their Domain choice and what they were expecting to happen?
Is there a Hero who is best in the Threat Defend and a different hero who is best in the Threat Seize?
So yes, clearly I’m struggling to fully comprehend the Battle mechanics.
Thank you!