Gloomhaven / YMMV - TV Tropes

Broken Base: The Personal Quests, although a majority can agree the system brings both good and bad.
- On the positive side, it results in a changing party roster and gives characters a specific thing to work towards, plus a satisfying accomplishment when they get to open a new box or envelope.
- On the negative side, many goals are incredibly specific, meaning that depending on where the players are in the game, the quests will either be completed quickly and easily, or will take dozens of scenarios, including repeating scenarios, in order to accomplish them. The quests do not scale with players, so some that may be completed at a reasonable rate with multiple players may take far longer with smaller groups. Plus the fact that players have no information about the thing they are unlocking until the quest is finished, so a player might spend weeks of real life time waiting to unlock a class only to find out they have no actual interest in playing it.
- The developers have also acknowledged some of the issues with this system as well, and Frosthaven will include some updates to deal with the most common complaints. First, an "inspiration" system that allows smaller parties to complete personal quests faster (while not affecting large groups), and, rather than a static personal quest deck available from the start, adding new quests to the deck as players progress, helping avoid the issue of having a quest that cannot be completed for many scenarios.
Fan Nickname: Because the names of the non-starter classes are considered spoilers, players typically use the symbol on the box to refer to those characters. The Berserker, for instance, is called the Lightning Bolt, whereas the Soothsinger is called the Music Note. Of course some of the less clear icons are a little less helpful, such as the Doomstalker being usually referred to as "angry face," and everyone has basically collectively just agreed to call the Beast Master class Two-Minis (due to it being the only class with two miniatures), rather than trying to decide what to call that symbol. This also lead to the misnaming of the Summoner as the "Concentric Circles" class, despite the symbol having non-concentric circles. Most of the community have just shifted to calling it "circles" at this point though.
That One Rule: The interaction between advantage and rolling modifiers is widely considered an Obvious Rule Patch to limit the number of situations where it's unclear which of the two attack modifiers are drawn is better or worse. While the base rule for advantage is extremely simple,^* and there's a very intuitive way to scale it up for rolling mods,^* the actual rules as written are effectively three different rules depending on whether you drew zero, one, or two rolling mods.^* Additionally it leads to the unpopular behavior of it being possible to miss on an advantaged attack without any curses in your deck. Jaws of the Lion resolves this issue by simply not having rolling mods.
That One Sidequest: Scenario 72, the Oozing Grove. The player is tasked with destroying three trees that constantly spawn Oozes. Oozes being monsters that can spawn copies of themselves (which, themselves spawn more copies) and are quite dangerous in their own right, can makes that scenario very difficult.
- This issue can apply to all quests with oozes really. It's not uncommon to end up fighting 10 oozes (the max amount that can spawn) in any scenario they appear in, and parties without good range and area damage will often find these among the toughest scenarios in the game. Conversely in some situations they will simply not attack and just split until they fill up the space they have (doing damage to themselves in the process) only to be easily cleaned up by the party without ever actually fighting back.

YMMV / Gloomhaven

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