by Kirenx
sigmazero13 wrote:
In Runewars, the primary luck factors are on the Fate card draws - mostly during battles and quests, but occasionally for diplomacy. Season cards can also have some of it, but once you know what to potentially expect, you can plan for it better. With the fate cards, in battle it usually tends to balance itself out just like dice would. For quests and diplomacy, it largely comes around knowing what's left in the deck and choosing the best times to act. (For instance, if you need a Gold result to win a quest, and all 4 golds are in the discard pile, don't do the quest).
At the risk of getting into a big debate over this, this simply isn't true unless the rules have been significantly changed since the edition I played. The entire end game mechanic was to collect X runes at which point the game would end. The runes could be gained from several different sources, one being quests. Quests were random as were the rewards and it was possible to gain quests close to a player's starting region that would be impossible for other players to prevent completion of. If the rewards were runes, it was thus possible to win the game without anyone having any ability to prevent it. This, along with other forms of gaining runes that could randomly come about meant that there was an element of uncontrollable luck in the game. Certainly you could argue as to the scale of this luck in determining victories over a large quantity of games, but it is still there. This is what ultimately convinced me to sell my copy of Runewars, as it was simply too long for a game that could end by the draw of a card.
Eclipse certainly had some unbalanced tech, the one use missiles come to mind. Yet these gave an advantage in play, rather than straight out ending the game.