Our group at the store, first time I played with them. Play that if your hero is knocked out turn the card over and follow all normal rules. But if your knocked out again then you are out of the encounter for good.

At first I didn't like this, but it actually makes the game feel a little more real, because you don't want to risk doing things when you are injured really bad. Also, makes healing character more useful and forces people to protect then allies.

With this new rule that have another special rule called sacrifice. Which basically says if an attack Ko'ed a character and another character was adjacent he could take half of the attack and gain his full stamina of tokens.

What does everyone else think of this?

It devalues are large chunk of the overlord cards. Why would I choose a card to slow a hero down when I could possibly remove him from the map permanently by killing him? The game would turn into a slugfest for the overlord.

True. But there are a lot of encounters where slowing heroes down are a big part of the game.

It was interesting since it made us choose whether to leave people behind to hold off monsters since now they could be removed from the game.

not sure how I feel about it. I will be playing next week at the store again. They all seem to like it.

Well see

While this maybe makes sense thematically, I really think you need to modify more to make this a balanced change. So far you are nerfing the hero side pretty hard (your buff is very weak) while leaving the OL untouched, which won't lead to a desireable outcome imo.

The reason why this works in Imperial Assault, is because of 2 things:

1.) When you rest, you don't just recover fatigue, but you heal yourself if your stamina is higher than your fatigue, for the remaining amount. This makes it possible to heal up very fast. It may cost actions, but you can effectivly heal nearly all your HP in one turn just by being alive.

2.) The dark side doesn't move and attack with every unit at once. This means you won't suffer high amounts of damage in one turn, because everyone is ganging up on one. The matter of fact that only one "monster" is activated before the next hero is activated, provides more moderate amounts of damage instead of the big chunks in Descent. So your hero group can react if they see that one hero is being focused, maybe trade some actions so he can move away, or simply prepare a trap if the dark side continues to focus on this one character.

Additionally there are a few things I don't get about this method:

-)You turn around the hero sheet. Does this mean you can't use your heroic feat anymore when you were knocked out once?

-) Do you come back with full live and no fatigue instantly or do you have to stand up?

All in all I find the K.O mechanic not that extremely unthematic.

After all your characters are mighty heroes and everyone knows that heroes can't die. Maybe they get knocked out, but that just means they have to take a little bit of time, before they come back.

I agree with DAMaz. This is a large rule change, and heavily favors the OL. Descent 2E is an action economy, and introducing a rule that equates to "kill heroes to reduce round actions for the duration of the encounter" becomes far and away the best strategy for the OL to ever employ. Stun is a powerful condition because it removes just 1 action. Knocking a hero down already gets the OL a card (or threat,) and steals between 1 and 2 actions from the heroes (1 to revive, 2 to stand up.) On top of that, because heroes don't fully recover on a stand up, they're more vulnerable to fall again.

Currently, the asymmetrical balance works like this: the OL has more total actions per round than the heroes, but the hero characters are individually more powerful than any single monster. The OL can usually reinforce monsters at full health every turn at no action cost, whereas downed heroes only get to partially recover, at at an action or full turn cost, depending. That's how this game works.

Descent 1E had the limited revival mechanic- Descent 2E made the deliberate change to the stand up rules to get away from the consequences of that type of rule.

I hate this rule, we tried it once. It forces heroes to play super safe and careful to an insane degree and forces combat focused character choices. This rule favors the overlord so ridiculously heavily it's not even funny.

It actually indirectly increases the value of non-kill overlord cards indirectly because the heroes have to compensate for the new rules by abandoning mobility based character builds in favor of "he can't kill me" builds. The overlord should be able to blitz everything no problem with this rule in place, because death is GG.

Well I get all your points. But with the only store in my area playing with the rule about being defeated and out of the game. I'm going to have to adapt. As for healing when resting, I forgot they did have a rule like that, But I think if you rest you get your full stamina of health back. Is that from Assault? I never heard of that before. But now that you mentioned it I do remember that now.

Also, they gave you a chance to recover a search item when you killed an enemy monster. 3 or 4 shields on a black die for a large monster and 4 shields for a small monster. That way it would force the overlord not to let his guys just get slaughtered as the heroes could build up a good amount of gold.

It was interesting to play, I need to get all the rules down that they use. I sent them an email, so I can be ready next time.

Ok. Went to the store last night.

Here are their house rules.

1) Characters take 2 symbol tokens: These represent two lives in effect

2) When you are knocked out your must use one of your tokens, if both token are used you are defeated after being knocked out a 3rd time

3) Healing: If you rest in addition to normal rules, you roll 1 red die and gain that much health back. If you roll a surge on the die you gain nothing.

4) Monster killing: Every time you kill a monster you gain back 1 stamina for free. If you kill a large (4 squares or more based) creature you gain back 2 stamina. They call it adrenalin

Those are the rules they use. I have now played with them twice, It makes killing monsters very interesting, because with that earned stamina sometimes you can use an class ability card. And also makes large monsters more of a target then small.

It's very different I must say, but I'm getting used to them.

Well at least it sounds somehow reasonable, although I still think it highly favors the OL, especially in any quest, where you have limited time.

Gaining 1 or even 2 fatigue for spending 1 action is a very bad trade, especially if you need to rest (recover all your fatigue) often to heal yourself back up.

Needless to say I still think this is a very bad change and completely alters the feel of the game and throws off the balance of most regular quests. It would be a different story if they made custom quests and custom campaign, but still I guess I would like the dynamic less, as everyone is less likly to do very unexpected things that involve a little risk, hence making the game more predictable and thus more boring for imo.

I don't begrudge anyone their right to play their games however suits their fancy - but I honestly don't get why you'd spend the money on a game like Descent and then use it to play what is essentially a totally different game.

IF you regain stamina for every monster you kill, does that mean you regain multiple stamina if you kill multiples in the same round?

Who gets the stamina if it's a familiar that does the kill? What happens if two heroes combine skills to do a kill?

To illustrate, last game our group played, the Geomancer's stone was placed in the middle of a group of 7 monsters. The Geomancer used Earthen Anguish to target his stone for destruction, cuasing it to blast all surrounding enemies. Since the Geomancer had an elixir token on him, the Apothecary activated Secret Formula, giving the Geomancer an extra green die on his roll. The Geomancer killed 5 monsters, but only because of Secret Formula.

Who gets the 5 fatigue for killing 5 monsters?

Good point. I don't know I will ask tomorrow when I get there. I know you gain no stamina for killing with familiars though.

Good point. I don't know I will ask tomorrow when I get there. I know you gain no stamina for killing with familiars though.

Then i would question why. The familiar is part of that characters suite of skills. It is as much "him" as the apothecary's potions, the tracker's traps, etc.

IF a character, let's say a Spirit Speaker, can get credit for killing a bounch of kobolds using Tempest (a 2 xp skill), why would the necromancer not get any credit for using the reanimate (0 xp skill) to kill even just one?

I think the others have said it right, the changes your gaming store's group makes to the game makes the game slanted in the OL's favour and actually penalizes several classes and characters: The squishy characters who will be knocked out faster than less squishy ones, the classes that use familiars, they all get gimped.

Even their "healing" rule has a exception that could lose the players an action for no benefit, since yous tated that rolling a surge on the red die means no healing is gained.