Return of the son of the temple

A strange inversion has happened.  Several posts back, the temple system entailed each player rolling dice against each temple card until they passed a card-specified threshold, and the idea was to do this in as few rolls as possible so as to reap the benefits of position; thus, it felt like there was an element of jockeying for place.  (This led, conceptually, to the 'running time' track, which players unanimously have liked).  The map system at that time still involved individual isolated challenges.


Now, the map phase is trending towards group encounters but the temple system is back to feeling somewhat solitaire-ish:  you roll dice as before, but now dice are bad and the number you roll determines how much harm you suffer.  So you want to roll less to accumulate less harm in the aggregate, but our rolls have little impact on each other.


While I think there's room in the world for a game that shifts gears, I think that to go from a tense interplayer experience to a solitaire feel is a shift in the wrong direction.  It feels a bit like a skiing race -- everyone runs the course and we see who did the best.  There's no jostling in skiing.  What we want is more of a roller derby:  there's a goal, but there's also jostling as we all try to achieve that goal.

This might be achieved simply by allocating the dice in a different way.  Instead of "roll four, less one for each symbol you hold that matches the current temple card", it could be "player with the most symbols rolls nothing and each other player rolls dice based on how many fewer they have than the player with the most". 

There are two possible issues.  The first is that this makes the temple difficulty entirely relative.  If everyone is poorly prepared for the temple, it's functionally no different than if everyone is extremely well prepared for the temple, because you're only rolling dice relative to what other players have.  There's no sense in which the enemy or the temple itself are going to grind you into dust if you're all unprepared.  This needs thought; it may be a problem.

The second is that even though the rolls are relative, we're still not exactly jockeying or jostling -- we're just seeing who is best prepared and letting things play out accordingly.  This one, at least, I think I see how to address.  I may have mentioned previously that at each temple card, you get to place a cube on an equipment card of your choice to double its effect.  This rewards knowledge, since you presumably will double a card that matches the temple card's peril if you know what it's going to be.


But!  Add to this a twist that you have (say) four cubes for this purpose, but every time you use one it is discarded.  And, any cubes still in your possession count as green cubes in the hubris challenge, which are what you need to acquire the white dice that you'll roll to purge hubris.

This may add some jostling in the temple, because even though you may know what peril a temple card contains, and even though you can see what peril symbols your opponents possess, you don't know whether THEY know that the next card is "fear", and you don't know whether they're willing to spend a cube to double an equipment card.

Moreover there are some equipment cards that are 'parasitic' of other players' peril symbols, and others that can cause whammy effects on other players on certain temple cards.  So these combine d with the cube allocating may give enough interactivity that the vibe of the external phase is preserved.

If I have knowledge of the next temple card and have the symbol for it, why not just pay several cubes on the right symbol to really hit the other players?  I think the rules should allow this but also impose the restriction that the most anyone can be forced to roll is the number of temple dice, which is probably four or five.  So there's not much upside to dropping several cubes on a single card unless you REALLY want to win that particular card.

The next question becomes what the temple dice do to you when you have to roll them.  I still like the idea that you either generate noise or fall into a trap, but that equipment cards help with the latter.  Not sure what noise does, but maybe it's something simple like, the player with the highest number of symbols places a marker on a track -- that is the 'tolerable noise level' for the current card.  Anyone with more noise than this after rolling takes damage, and the player with the most noise (regardless of the threshold) takes damage as well.  Noise is cumulative but maybe you can also spend a cube to reduce your noise (as opposed to using it to double equipment cards).  This is still a bit fiddly but I like the theming of temple dice representing you speeding through the temple in a risky way, which might result in you tripping on a trip wire or alerting the Nazis to your presence.  In other words, there are two kinds of dangers in the temple and they function differently and the dice results allow you to be at risk for both of them, but in an asymmetric way.  But maybe making them more symmetric is worth it if it makes the game easier to learn/play.