Aug 30th, 2025 Saturday Cloudy
Early last year, two friends invited me and my husband to join them on a campaign of Frosthaven.
This is a dungeons & dragon style game, with six starting classes to choose from (more unlocked by completing quests and/or triggering specific events), long-term character building (nine levels, 500 points), and deep story-telling. The entire campaign expands eighty to over one hundred scenarios, requiring at least two years of weekly commitment.
Unlike the traditional D&D, the challenges, special rules, rewards, and other components are all laid out in the chapter books, so all players can be on the same page (literally and figuratively) without someone having to be the dungeon master.
Another difference is the lack of dice. All the skill checks and battle results are determined by a modifier deck, unique to each player and can be improved over time. If you decides to punch the wolf with your fist (base +2), you flip a card from your own deck to determine the damage you deal. Since you should know your own deck fairly well, you have a good estimate for the range of outcomes.
Even though this modification seems to give people more control than tossing a d20, there is still randomness. If the deck has -1, 0, +1, +2, a 2x, and a miss, you do not know which one is currently sitting on top, hence affecting the effectiveness of your assault. This makes the experience sometimes frustrating (your well-planned mega strike ended up not hitting the target), and sometimes exhilarating.
I am on my third character, an orchid infuser fittingly named Crystal. Having just leveled up, I finally collected enough ability cards to attempt a mastery goal, though the mission yesterday looked particularly hard, and we were close to losing at multiple points. After my two buddies and my husband all became exhausted (in other words, “died”), I was singularly in charge of protecting the two escorts and fighting all remaining monsters. A bad draw could ruin our progress of the whole evening.
So I pulled out the strongest attack and hoped for the best. Miraculously, I got two 2x cards, killing the two unharmed sun demons in one single round, thus turned the table. We finally won after nearly five hours!
That was lucky, wasn’t it?
Some people dislike games because of this component of luck, since they cannot influence but have to bear the consequence. There are bad days that look like odds are not favoring them, and they complain “it’s not fair!” and leave the room. They cannot wait to go back to their life, where they feel more like their own master.
Yet isn’t luck part of life too?
For example, you applied for a job that you were only minimally qualified, thinking it does not hurt to try. Unknown to you was the hiring manager’s dire situation: a weak labor market brought a small pool of candidates, and the top ones somehow all withdrew their applications, and you seemed capable of handling the work. As a result, you received the job offer – while your own competence certainly contributed, luck was probably the major factor here.
On the contrary, you may have been one of the two finalists for a job that checked every box for you, and the committee was all impressed with your qualification and performance. However, overnight an order from the C-suite halted the recruiting procedure, and eventually cancelled the position altogether. Unfortunately, there was nothing you could do, and they did not even explain the reason.
In fact, I believe luck plays a role in just about every corner, since our power is so limited compared to the billions of push-and-pulls of the universe. Only that in board games, how luck works and the probability distribution of possibilities are explicit. I knew that at that critical moment last night, there were two 2x (and a miss) out of the remaining fifteen cards, but no one would be able to tell whether they happened to be the next two that I flipped open.
To continue living life is like staying in the game. As long as you do not quit, both good and bad things may happen. It could be uneventful for a while, or it could shift to a wild ride all of a sudden.
Are you up for it?