by joboyogi
When I first started out with the campaign mode, lots of people said "don't do it!" but never gave a great explanation why. I tried it out and learned a few things.The campaign mode ramps up too quickly and that causes the fun to peter out. What is still a lot of fun is all the whacky roaming monsters and figuring out how best to defeat the mobs. By the 4th campaign mode game, you could pretty much solo every map with 1 character at a 4X setting.
I looked at a lot of the fixes and what it really seems to come down to is just not getting overpowered by running the campaign mode microXP rules. The solution will have to prevent you from getting bored with overpowered characters.
Even if you were to double or triple the HP of the mobs, you're still going to plow through them and you'll never care about the treasure you pick up. The solution should make it so you care about treasure until the end of the map.
So after getting a second opinion with a friend of mine that was excited to play the game (we continued my campaign mode game as he didn't mind being overpowered on the first map we played as it was well-paced to give him a chance to understand the rules - this may in fact be the situation the game was designed for), we both decided we wanted to play more of the game so we could keep fighting the incredible variation of monsters. The solution was to start each map with fresh characters.
All the house ruling stuff I originally saw attempted to fix the idea of carrying over treasure. I think it's best to just scrap the whole concept with new characters and starter equipment, then you can get excited about the treasure you pick up. The game seems to get better the more you learn what to expect in the treasure decks from working the transmute system.
The other thing I thought of was to just ditch the whole XP system, but it does give people something to do on other people's turns and let's you make some decisions which is satisfying. If you want to play a quick game, I don't think this is a bad idea for experienced players that just want to fight a spider or try out a new character. Leaving the paperwork in the box doesn't lose that much. If you're going to play solo or with 1 other person, this will definitely speed up the game and you won't get overpowered. If you're playing with a couple of people, then there's more downtime between decisions and the value of this system increases so everyone has something game-related to fiddle with.
Why the initial resistance to not try the campaign mode? FOMO. I wanted to give it a shot and you may as well, but know you can grow and evolve how you play the game. I don't think you have to complicate the world with a bunch of extra house rules because there really is no store that connects the missions. You want there to be one, you desperately want there to be one, but it isn't there and the quicker the game is understood for what it is instead of what it isn't, it stays fun.
I'm going to finish playing all of the missions from scratch and the community ones, never using microXP again, then use the minis and tiles to play some D&D.