Last session, the heroes and I came across two component restriction questions.

Have there been any official rulings on what game components are restricted by the number supplied?

Specifically, are the number of potion tokens (in vanilla Descent) available for purchase limited by the number of potion tokens?

Secondly, when upgrading a creature in a newly revealed area to a master with Brilliant Commander, are you limited by the number of red models that come with the game? i.e., if an area contained a regular and a master demon, would it be illegal to upgrade the regular to a second master demon? I know the rules specifically mention the allowance from 'despawning' monsters in order to respawn them with a spawn card, but this situation seems unclear, since Brilliant Commander isn't spawning anything, rather upgrading. Even more unclear when the printed scenarios themselves have numerous caveats for using standard monsters as masters because not enough were included in the game.

So, has Fantasy Flight commented on these?

Thanks all.

squaresville said:

In both cases, unless an exception is noted, you are limited by whatever came with the game.

squaresville said:

I believe it has been stated that this was because the scenarios were designed before the number of figures was finalized. I don't think any official quests made since the original publication go above the limits.

Okay, excellent.

Thanks, fellows!

I seem to recall a ruling that if the number of monsters to be placed according to the quest exceeds the limits there, the OL may use other models to represent the monsters. Has somebody a better memory than me and is able to locate it?

As for a drastic example, look at quest 5 from WoD. The heroes can quickly open several doors leading into rooms with a lot of monsters of the same type (mostly skellies and sorcerers). If the OL was not allowed to use replacement figures, he would instantly lose 2/3 or more of his map monsters.

As for the tokens, somewhere else had been stated that everything except wound tokens are limited to what came in the box.

The ruling you refer to, is the one that allows the OL to remove models already on the board, in order to place the needed models.

Speaking of which, there's a need for 3 Master Hellhounds in the Dragons Lair (3?) dungeon in RTL and we seemed to only be able to find two.

No, that´s the ruling regarding "despawning" already present monsters if the OL plays a spawned card.

There was something regarding quest setup.

Found the following in the FAQ:

In some cases the Quest Guide calls for more monsters than are included in the game. For these quests, use other monster figures or tokens to represent the extra monsters as necessary. These instances are detailed on the errata sheet available on FFG’s website.

Now since I never saw any errata sheets on the FFG page, I think we can safely ignore the last clause.

The errata sheet ships with older version of the base game and the newer one has the errata sheet built into the quest manual. But the errata sheet does exist, it is specific to things like the two master manticores in quest 1 of JitD etc. I believe it is a valid hero tactic (especially in OL Keeps in RtL) to run through and open doors as fast as possible to limit the number of monsters in play.

Then what about the spider queens final lair for example?

There are just too many impossible spawns that cannot happen, even if they're drawn on the map, since there are not enough figures.

I for one am goind to keep to the rule that if they are printed on the map, then they spawn as normal, even if I need to use something else to represent it.

From the front cover of the JitD quest guide:

Revealing New Areas

...

4. The overlord places the monster figures for the area as shown on the quest map. Note that these monsters are not spawning--they were already lurking in the corridor or room, but the heroes are only now spotting them. This means that monsters can be placed in the heroes' line of sight when the overlord is setting up a new area.

Important: Remember that the overlord is limited by the available monster figures when placing monsters. If an area calls for figures that are not available, the overlord cannot place those figures unless he first removes figures of the same type from another area of the board. If the overlord can place some, but not all, of the figures of one type in an area, he may choose which of those figures to place in the new area.

(My printing of the quest guide includes special notes in quests 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, and 9 saying that specific figures should be substituted to get around figure limits. This only occurs when the monsters that exceed the limits are all within a single room, or when all of them are named and critical to the quest. As I noted earlier in the thread, I believe FFG has stated that this was because these quests were designed before the figure limits were finalized.)

So as a rule-of-thumb, I recommend ignoring figure limits if there are more monsters than figures in a single area, or if all of the figures are named. Or if the quest specifically tells you to, of course. But not otherwise.

Antistone said:

Yea, that looks pretty clear cut, although I could understand using house rules to use other figures as substitutes for models you don't have enough of, if all players agree.

NoNamium said:

Not true. You'll note that the Keep levels all use doors which are "new area" type doors, rather than the ones in normal RtL dungeons, as denoted by their triangular end caps.

The heroes only get one area revealed at a time, like normal Descent, so the only way spawns are impossible is if they run through and open doors avoiding monsters, which is a valid tactic.

The worst keep for this is the Titans, which uses Ogres and Giants repeatedly, with doors that are really difficult to block.

Ok, the ruling seems to be pretty clear.

However, this ruling was made in a time when the vast quests from WoD or other expansions were not known yet.

I repeat my example from WoD Quest 5 - if the heros open all doors in the corridor the OL loses at least 2/3 of his map monsters. I heavily doubt that this was the intention of the quest or that this would be considered "clever hero play". It would simply ruin the quest.

Parathion said:

That's a bit of an exaggeration even if the heroes manage to open all of areas 1-5 without killing anything at all. The OL would lose exactly 2/3 of the normal skeletons (12 of 18) and master sorcerers (4 of 6), but only a couple master skeletons and none of the ferrox, spiders, or regular sorcerers, unless I've missed something. If you'll forgive the pedantry, losing 18 of 38 is a lot less than "at least 2/3".

And I think that's unreasonably optimistic for the heroes. Since areas 4 and 5 are inaccessible without a very determined Acrobatic sprinter or actually killing some stuff, I suspect you'd only end up losing about 6-10 monsters in a typical play where heroes are trying to exploit this rule. And that requires them to expose themselves to substantially more monsters (and spawn possibilities) than they would otherwise have to fight at one time, plus it costs running time, so it's not entirely free for the heroes, either.

So, while I haven't played that quest, it is far from obvious to me that it would be "simply ruined." This quest reviewer seems to think it's reasonably hard even when heroes exploit the figure limits.

I'll admit it's a bit strange, and that the quest designer may not have been thinking about the figure limits, but I bet you could find plenty of official quests that are more broken than this one, in one way or another.