Ok, so my friends and I don't seem to enjoy the combat rules very much (the dice are too random), so I came up with a couple of ideas to alleviate this.  Constructive criticism is desired and welcomed.

Idea 1.

Everybody (hunters and Dracula) roll two dice in combat and choose the better one.  Lord Godalming rolls three dice and chooses the best one.

Idea 2.

Before rolling your die, add your combat card's initiative as a bonus to your roll.  Dogs only gives a +1 instead of the normal +4 for this option.

Yo McRae. I was never really satisfied mysself with the combats, but the game is not fully about that, and it is an easy game ; I guess an expansion could get that reworked...

Yet, I don't really understand why we would throw two dice and choose one ? I don't reject your ideas, I reject the fact that you seem to have thought about it and yet you give us your ideas without explanation ! Come on ! Me waiting for more details ! :)

Here are my thoughts on these possibilities:

I haven't crunched the numbers, but it seems like the first will have a few major effects.  First, Trap/Advance Planning will become a whole lot better.  Similarly, bitten hunters, minions in Eastern Europe, etc. will become significantly stronger.  Why?  Low rolls become much less frequent and therefore the difference between rolls becomes a lot less.  Also, this is a major nerf to Godalming since the third die helps out a lot less than the second die does (although in this case, he would never roll a 1).

As for the second situation, this would certainly drastically change combat.  I might change it so that the initiative gap narrows slightly - for example, if the hunter plays a 5 and Dracula plays a 2, it would be nigh impossible to overcome that difference.  Is this desirable?  Maybe, maybe not.  I feel like (although have not looked through the cards) it basically removes a few of the possible cards.  Also, you would need to rework how ties get resolved, but that's only a minor issue.

I like the second much more than the first, but I would be happier if there were some kind of scaling (so that, for instance, a difference of one actually results in no difference of rolls, a difference of 3 results in a shift of 1, etc.)

for several consecutive plays we unwittingly used options 2, without the "dog" combat value modification, and were actualy rather satsified with combat gameplay. Only later when we realised that the combat values were only used to break ties did we realised how luck-oriented combat was in this game - much to our displeasure. So we still use the combat initiative as bonuses to dice rolls AS WELL AS tie breakers in case of ties after dice rolls, and it works out rather well.

Haven't considered the "dogs" bit, but it seems balanced enough.

Thank you for this ideas. We'll try it during our games because I also think the battle rules ain’t thought through very well. Rolling 4 all the time and losing in the end made me mad the last time we played.

Try using d4 instead of d6 in combat. Ties will be more common, which means the selection of the combat cards with high initiative value will be more important. Also, the +1 modifiers in combat will mean much more.

Nagypapi said:

Won't that boost Dogs quite a bit though?

What about dividing by 2 (rounded up) the die result AFTER applying any modifiers? That way the +1 bonus won't be THAT decisive....

roll 3 dice and take the average from all? :P