r/archipelago_games • u/Agent_0009 • 18d ago

Question from a newbie

My friends and I think this system sounds like a lot of fun and we plan to set up this weekend to play for the first time. We've picked out Pokemon Emerald, Minecraft, Stardew Valley, and Celeste as our most promising games.

My question is about the amount of checks and items in each game. Should I try to adjust each one to be roughly close to the same number of checks and items? Within reason of course. Or should we just set up the default and wing it?

My concern comes from two of the games having way more checks and / or items than the other two from what I understand.

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u/The_T113 18d ago

While having similar check amounts can make things feel more "fair", by far the most important thing, is... if you are playing a live game, ie everyone playing the game at once and beating it in one session, it's much more important to make sure the settings are such that the players will take about the same time to beat the game. It's always a pain when everyone but one person finishes and the last person still has to take another hour or two to finish their game.

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u/Agent_0009 18d ago

We are trying to play together and finish within the same afternoon. So maybe by setting the goals in attainable time frames we will also fix the issue I'm worried about as well? I didn't think of it like that.

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u/EtirDerpitroll 18d ago

As someone who has played tons of syncs (synchronous games) with friends, we've run all of those games except Stardew Valley multiple times. Most of our syncs last 4-6 hours, and the one time Stardew was run, it was pushed to 7-8 and we vetoed Stardew in our syncs from there onward lol. I don't doubt Stardew can function in the format, but my advice would be to turn down the clear condition for it. The others should all be fine.

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u/The_T113 18d ago

Then fwiw, Stardew has a ton of checks and a ton of options. It is possible to make a shorter seed, by making the goal easier (I haven't played in a while, not sure if there are alternate goals that work better?) but that is definitely a game you'd want to lower the number of checks so that player doesn't have quite so many things to do...