I would like to hear from the community how you would deal with the two following situations. In both cases you can assume we're in the middle of a campaign and arrive to the next session with the intention to play the next quest on the agenda.

1- One player cannot make it to the session. We play with one less hero. What do we do with his character next time he's playing with us? +1XP per quest he missed?

2- We started the campaign with 2 or 3 heroes, but we had a joiner in the middle of it. Do we set up that hero with 1XP per quest he missed so he/she can start at similar skills level than the rest of the group?

Any ideas as for the situation when you have to stop a session after encounter 1 of a quest? I would assume it's possible to add one hero between encounters but I would keep the current settings/results of encounter 1. Not sure if that would favorize the heroes or the OL in some of the quests.

Thanks by advance.

Always play with four heroes, no matter how many people there are. The game works best that way anyhow.

If someone leaves, control his hero communally until he returns.
If someone joins, give him one of the current communally controlled heroes.
As long as you don't need a 5th hero, you're golden.

All heroes continue to receive rewards normally for a four hero game throughout.

He's got a pretty interesting way of resolving the potential issue.

I normally play the game 2-Player or 3-Player though, on rare occassion 4-Player.

(Y) Steve-O

Always play with four heroes, no matter how many people there are. The game works best that way anyhow.

If someone leaves, control his hero communally until he returns.

If someone joins, give him one of the current communally controlled heroes.

As long as you don't need a 5th hero, you're golden.

All heroes continue to receive rewards normally for a four hero game throughout.

This all over!

Adding to this quality advice:

The game is definitely at its most balanced at 4 heroes, a 3 hero game gets the overlord decimated, a 2 player game gets the heroes decimated.

Also the if you drop down to 3 heroes in a 4 hero game there will be less search tokens on the map, this will further disrupt the game balance in future games to come because of the lack of loot.

Somewhat a little off topic: The only problem with 4 hero games is that i find they take a lot longer to play out versus a 2 or 3 hero game (there is exponentially less thinking involved in these games thus turns go much faster).

From the experience that I have (not much), I find it takes an average of 90 minutes per encounter. Which seems, really long.

From the experience that I have (not much), I find it takes an average of 90 minutes per encounter. Which seems, really long.

As you get familiar with the game it begins to go a bit faster. Usually around 1h per encounter for us, give or take. We could probably go faster than that but we don't want to rush the experience.

So that's about 2h per quest, given most quests have 2 encounters. That's still a big improvement over first edition, where the shortest quests tended to take around 3-4h.

That's great advice, thanks.

I am running two campaigns in parallel currently as the OL, with 3 resp. 4 heroes (different groups of people), and the question just came up naturally, since people have other duties so we can never garantee a full attendence to the sessions. In one of the groups especially I never know how many we are until we start and even then people might even join the group later on during the evening, which is a problem for that kind of game. This is not a game club where people are redirected to other games and can join/leave whenever they want, we only run one game and it's only us in a living room. This kind of required flexibility is something I look for when I pick games normally, but as for Descent I warned people that if they wanted to play a campaign then they had to be there otherwise it just wouldn't work. Anyhow

The only potential issue with your solution (aside from the fact it does take longer, which is something I noticed too with 4 players, and I'm not sure you can shrink this time that much with experience only because of decisions to be discussed and taken which you cannot cut), is that my players want their hero for themselves so letting somebody else pilot them is something they are a bit reluctant doing.

actually most of our games endure around 3-4 hours easily

The only potential issue with your solution is that my players want their hero for themselves so letting somebody else pilot them is something they are a bit reluctant doing.

I've recently started a campaign as the Overlord, and this has become an issue. After the introduction, a player with a busy schedule elected to let the other heroes control his character for an evening. However, after a few more quests, he has changed his mind on that issue- I'm playing against a party of all newcomers, and I'm glad they're invested in the game. (But they take forever to make decisions.)

That being said, as game mechanics go, it's probably the best option. I was part of a campaign that had 3-4 heroes depending on the evening. As I recall, the fourth (a knight) only gained experience for the quests he played. I like Steve-o's solution better.

Playing with 4 heroes and having players play multiple heroes when a player doesn't show, or doing it from the start and letting newcomers take over a hero is the best way to do it, it's the only way that properly balances loot and monster numbers with experience over the course of the entire campaign, and it's the most balanced anyway.

If a player wants a hero to himself, then he should show up more reliably. Dem's the breaks.

I agree with several others who have already posted. If you have heroes who leave, you should definitely have the remaining heroes play for the missing ones; if you try to add or remove heroes during a campaign, it will really mess up the gameplay. I also would say to use 4 heroes; not only is the game at its best with 4, it is also the best for purposes of adding and subtracting heroes. With my group, we always play with four heroes (very often with only one person operating all of them).

Remember, the number of heroes and the number of players don't have to affect each other. The people playing as heroes are a team that operates from 2 to 4 heroes, not necessarily individuals. If you get high in numbers (like 6 or 7 people) you can just put more people on the hero team and even add another person to the overlord side. So, just play a 4 hero campaign and then add and subtract as necessary.

Hope this helps.

If you have heroes leave your game they should be punished severely! Maybe torture when they return?

Another option is that when someone doesn't show up and really doesn't want to have someone else play their character, to start up another campaign for the remainder of the players, possibly letting one of them try their hand at Overlord.