Let me start out by saying when I was going for a retirement goal this is the one that made the most sense for the Soothsinger that I was playing previously. It also looked, from the symbol, like it could have been a more combat focused character. It was disappointing when I opened it up and found out that it was yet another support character as I’ve played the Tinkerer, Soothsinger, and now Sawbones who have all been more support focused characters.

But before we get into my build for the character and how they actually play, let’s talk about what they are built for. The Sawbones refers to the fact that they would have been a field medic prior to becoming an adventurer. They have a lot of healing cards, but if you think about it, a lot of medical practices could also be to cause a fair amount of damage. There’s a lot of focus on healing on the cards then with some damage on them, or cards that do large amounts of damage. This character also hands out a lot of tokens as well, so they are heavy on wounds but also immobilizing, stun, poison, or even muddle.

I think the standard build for this character would focus on healing. There are nice ways to boost that, and there are quite a number of cards that give you XP for handing out healing. They also have an interesting concept that allows you to keep your fellow adventurers alive and that is by handing out med packs. These are cards that go into your allies hands and don’t count against their total card count. So a character with fewer cards you could theoretically help keep alive. These cards also have some solid healing on them which is nice as well. The downside is that you have to be next to the other players when you are doing this. Being a Sawbones, though, means that you aren’t too soft a character and you can soak some damage. However, your healing works better on others.

Now, I wanted to play this as more of a combat build, however, when i started with that, I found out it didn’t work as well. There was some possibility for it, because you have some nice damage cards, but your best damage cards are the ones that end up getting put to the trash instead of the discard pile. But when I was able to do 14 damage on the first turn (out of 45) to a Drake, that was awesome. However, if you make it too combat focused, you aren’t going to be an extremely effective character as you limit yourself in what you can really do on a turn. I’ve actually gone fairly item heavy in hopes of being able to support more damage that way. Having a base 3 attack versus a base 2 attack thus far is the best thing that I’ve come up with for that.

The biggest thing that makes this character solid is the ability to move around the battlefield. With the deck that I’ve put together, I can most more than the base two on a good number of the cards. I have a several move four cards and a move five as well. This is a piece that I do like quite well, because the Soothsinger had a few cards that would allow it move around the battlefield, but only two or maybe three that I had in the deck. The Sawbones, thematically, makes sense to have that ability and it comes through on the cards. This, however, does come at the cost of speed from the cards, I have a couple of fast cards, but after playing the Soothsinger who was basically always first to go, the Sawbones will sometimes go after the enemies which is a bit of a weird feeling.

This character was a bit of a disappointment for me when I started playing it, because, like I said, I wanted someone who was more combat focused. That said, I’ve come to enjoy it at this point, though I do hope my next character (and I’ll probably make it be) will be more combat focused. It’s a solid balance of combat and healing, and with a few powers, one that burns a card but I can just kill a regular or elite monster or now another one that will allow me to kill a regular monster as long as they have two negative effects on them, that’s going to make me much more viable in combat. It’s interesting to see how you can use characters who seem to be more focused on healing for good amounts of damage and I hope as I continue to level up the Sawbones that I’ll be able to play them with more of a combat focus.

Complexity: Medium
Combat: Medium
Support: Medium/High

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Beast Tyrant

This was a interesting character to watch played and seemed like an interesting character to play. The main focus is this bear companion/summons that you have with you. It acts on it’s own turn as a summons but also then can be given commands on your turn, so in some ways you are controlling two characters. Mainly, though, you are swapping out at least one of your actions to give commands to the bear instead, because they can do more damage than you.

One thing this meant for the character was that they didn’t end up moving around all that much. When you can have the bear, who has a lot of hit points, tanking for the party, you don’t have to move much in combats where you wanted to kill everything. That helped with the other characters being played, the Soothsinger and Elementalist who weren’t able to be tanks. However, it, at times, made it hard on missions because our goal would be the make it to a certain point and instead of being able to just have the bear attack and not move, the Beast Tyrant had to do the moving and that cut down on our combat, and the Beast Tyrant didn’t move in large chunks and sometimes would have to be aided in their moving, which they could do for themselves, or the Soothsinger could help them with.

However, the bears damage and ability to tank really make this an interesting and strong character. It is also nice that, since the bear is going on your turn, you could have them heal from the cards being added to the modifier deck. Now, the bear, like any summons couldn’t open doors so the Elementalist or Soothsinger often had to be up front with the bear, or near the front, but with the Elementalist needing to be around for damage, that generally worked out just fine. It is also harder to get loot or treasures, because summons can’t pick up those things, and even though the bear was around all the time unlike a normal summons, they followed the same rules.

Like I’ve said before, the Beast Tyrant is about tanking with the bear, so they weren’t very support focused. However, they did have a trick or two up their sleeves. The most important one being a one time use card that allows you to swap positions of two figures on the board. This allowed us to short cut a scenario that would have been difficult to run with our shorter distance moving characters, we were able to place someone within a turn of the goal. But beyond that, I don’t think there were any heavy support cards. That card also made it easier for the Beast Tyrant to get out when they were moving slowly through the make it to “Point B” missions.

Overall, this seemed like an interesting character to play, especially for me who has been primarily a support class character with first the Tinkerer, then Soothsinger, and now the Bonesaw (which I’ll write about after I’ve played a couple more times). It seems like the Beast Tyrant is a step up in complexity from your standard tank characters with the picking your actions and your hand that could focus more on yourself or on the bear but the bear always seems like the better option to go.

Complexity: Medium
Combat: High
Support: Low

Does controlling a bear sound cool to you? Do you normally play a tank type character or does this seem to combat focused?

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Soothsinger

The Soothsinger is an interesting character, I picked my original retirement objective because of the symbol that was for the soothsinger. It is musical notes, so in most other systems it probably would be considered a bard. In Dungeons and Dragons, a bard is a capable fighter because of their spells, and while I likely could make the Soothsinger into a capable fighter by my card selection, it really shines as a support character.

The main focus of the Soothsinger is a mechanic known as “songs”. These are cards that you put in play and leave in play until you switch the song you are playing. It’s a bonus for your allies most often, though can be a negative to the enemies depending on how you want to play it. I’m only a level four character so I haven’t unlocked the most powerful songs, but there are a lot of interesting cards. Normally I’ve found that I don’t switch the song that I’m playing all that often, because depending on the creatures, certain cards are better than others. For example, in the last combat, we were dealing with a fair amount of poison. Normally I have a card that adds additional damage to an attack out, but because players were getting poisoned each round, I instead I used a song that allowed them to heal 1 point at the start of each round and would remove the poison for them. This kept the damage down because otherwise we might have had characters get exhausted in the scenario. There are other songs that wound opponents when they are attacked, give extra speed or range, and give opponents disadvantage. There are songs that can be swapped in any time really that will help out your allies, and you don’t need to be in the middle of the fray.

Another big thing about the Soothsinger is that they are very fast. They would probably rival the Scoundrel in terms of speed, and that is key. While our Soothsinger and Scoundrel never were in the party together, having the Soothsinger go so quickly means that I can adjust the battlefield for the other players. I have cards that strengthen allies, stun all enemies in a certain range, or even cards that allow my allies to either move or attack. This going out of order allowed us to complete a task one turn earlier than we would be able to otherwise. While that might not have changed the outcome of the scenario, it was very useful. I also hand out a lot of blessings for my allies and curses for my enemies. This means that my allies can deal out a whole lot more damage. And the biggest help I’ve found in these support cards that I can play has been a card that allows me to strengthen my allies. The combination of blessings and strengthen, which gives you advantage, means that you are basically always modifying your damage higher.

Now, having flipped through the cards, it is possible to play a much more aggressive Soothsinger than I am. You’d still use songs, as they give you XP at the start of each round, but you could have a limited number of them and instead focus on your own attacks. There are a number of area affect attack cards that I could slot into my deck without losing much speed, but I would drop a lot of my support ability. However, playing support isn’t for everyone, and it might be that it won’t be for me the whole time I play the Soothsinger. The songs are always going to be a strong component in your deck, but adding in that damage and attacking ability could be fun as well. However, the Soothsinger has low health and not that many cards, so being more in the fray is dangerous. Right now, I think I have two attack cards that do damage in a way different the normal damage you can do no a card. One allows me to do basically a normal attack but then curse the monster and bless an adjacent ally. And I don’t remember what the other one does exactly, because in three scenarios, I’ve used it once. It does a base 1 damage, but I believe that it stuns as well.

The Soothsinger is a very fun character to play. I feel like it is not extremely complex, however. Once you have figured out the right song for a scenario, that song is generally the one that you’re always playing, so you’re trying to piece together cards other wise since the top half of your cards aren’t useful anymore. This, I guess, does add some challenge to the character, though it isn’t all that complex. You just need to figure out the balance of support cards and songs so that you always have something available to do.

Complexity: Low
Combat: Low
Support: High

Would you want to play a character that is support heavy? When you play other games, have you played a bard of cleric that is focused only on aiding others?

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