Well I had fun.
In case anyone is wondering, the game was actually made less lethal since you were getting more choices than average with some of those encounters. Plus in the original game, if ONE person dies, then everyone loses automatically.
Most of you did way better than expected. G1 did the best having managed to at least reach a final boss. Even extremely divided by that point, they almost escaped. A little more group unity would have worked in their favor, in fact I knew I was going to have to be a little more active in trying to divide them.
The first major opportunity was trying to get them to kill off the Tanner (or leaving her) by emphasizing what an unpredictable element she was. The blood chalice seemed to be a pretty good way to do that, though nobody jumped at that idea unfortunately.
Then the guard showed up and given what a moralfag Mizal’s character was playing, I figured it might be better to focus on Thara and Cricket and encourage them to kill the guard for extra life especially since Thara’s character was almost dead.
That worked out pretty well since Mizal started toying with the idea of leaving the group. Just in time too since they encountered the Witcher, who was going to make their party even stronger. (Or so we ALL thought) I of course encouraged that she should follow her RPG desires and that it would be no problem for me to run the Hunter separately. G1 was pretty strong, splitting them up was definitely the way to go.
Happily the dice took care of the Witcher pretty quickly and bad card draw fucked up the Hunter. As soon as she lost that ability to use the axe, Mizal was pretty much a walking dead man at that point.
The rest of G1 was still pretty tough though, I sort of thought they still might make it, but then Cricket hilariously started backstabbing everyone at the end by abandoning Thara completely and not even giving Briar a potion to assist her in the final battle (Might not have mattered, but still.)
G2 and G3 I was less concerned about. After Berka killed himself, I figured G2 wasn’t long for the game, but some good rolls and card draws helped them out very well. G3 kept muddling back and forth through mediocrity though I’d say after losing Corgi and Ninja getting saddled with the curse that made him fight all the time probably was the beginning of the end for them.
Going back to G2, I didn’t expect them to get the Spirit twice (Let alone so quickly) and given Mizal’s character had met a spirit in her recent encounter, I figured it would be a good opportunity storywise to unite them. This also ended up tying into a story idea I suddenly got with the Fletcher a little later.
When Mizal took over as the Tailor, she probably made the opposite mistake she did as the Hunter. I checked the rest of the deck she would have had to go through alone and it was vastly easier than joining G2 (which still had more encounters due to them back tracking) She didn’t even have any major combat encounters, they were all skill tests and in one case, it was just item draw.
Not sure if she would have defeated whatever boss she might have picked up, but I believe she probably would have at least reached it.
G1 was dead at this point and I was going to have a gloating epilogue specifically for Cricket since she’d behaved so delightfully treacherously. But then looking at the Fletcher’s card and the Spirit, and I thought “They look a bit similar, and G1 never interacted at all with the other groups, this will work if it happens.”
So when Mizal joined G2, I figured it would be perfect to have the Spirit actually be the long dead Fletcher still “helping” others, but not actually doing so in the long run. Bad card draws and dice rolls worked out in this regard.