Hey all,

I'm thinking about introducing Descent to my Friday-Night Pathfinder group as a full-blown RPG, similar to Pathfinder or D&D, and using the Campaigns as a "module" or "adventure path" like Paizo has recently been publishing. Has anyone developed or published a conversion for such a thing?

To be clear, I'd intend for combat to still work as written for Descent 2. The rules as written for Descent would pretty much not change as to combat, travelling, rumors, shop, Overlord deck, etc. But I guess I'm looking for something to streamline it all into a full-out RPG.

Any ideas? Have you seen anything like this?

It would also be nice if my players could design custom Heroes, like in D&D, but I'm not aware of any character generation rules for Descent 2.

Thanks in advance.

P.S. - Naysayers need not respond. I'm aware of how unorthodox this might seem, and all the reasons why this wouldn't work, and to just play Pathfinder instead. That advice is not what I'm looking for or interested in.

Im not entirely sure what you are looking for?

If your using the whole of the game rules for pretty much everything as intended i can only really see RPG interactions between quests "right we go to town, DM set scene and we role play out where we want to go next based on information that we have learnt from the quest fluff"

Ive seen people asking for ways to convert the game to be RPG but that involves changing game mechanics quite heavily to make it fit.

I don't quite understand what you ask for, but here are some things that may interest you

I would say based on just the material it could work pretty well: The maptiles have a very distinct theme to them (cabin, cemetery, bridge, cave, river, waterfall etc.) and a consistent artstyle that creates a believable world with a good atmosphere.

As far as I understood your question, you look for kind of RPG-like quests and while there is a quest-vault with user-generated content I don't know of anything thelike. However I see no need for that, because the maptiles are easily put together the way that fits your RPG-story.

However as Descent is not made for such a purpose I think you can pretty much forget the specific monster characteristics and the items, maybe even the dice and most rules. You could use the monster and hero abilities for inspiration, but you would have to finetune all the numbers to fit your RPG and the specific situations, because everything in Descent is balanced for an assymetrical tactical objective driven miniature game, with no room for detours because of character traits or improvised alteration of your skills.

One way you can play this game out of the box kind of like an RPG is to interpret the actions (along with their outcomes that are dictated by dicerolls) in reference to your characters and imagine how all the uncalculatable things (such as dicerolls that mark heroic victories or dawnfalls) make sense within the uinverse. This isn't much a play however, but more a kind of storytelling expirience.

I suppose I'm looking for a conversion for out-of-combat social interactions, investigations, gathering information. For example, testing Diplomacy might easily be done by rolling Awareness (social awareness?).

I think the reason my question is so vague, is because I'm not even sure what an RPG conversion would look like. My attraction to the Descent rules is its simplicity. The rules are precise, concise and intuitive. No need for a library of rule books, like Pathfinder. Because of that, Descent might not readily lend itself to a full RPG conversion... but if it would, I'm just wondering what that would look like, and if anyone has found or developed anything.

I can't imagine what that would look like. I suppose you might be able to RP decisions on quest choices during campaign phases, but the very nature of the game makes it difficult to put anything down to rolls of the dice, since that would inherently penalize or advantage someone.

I suppose I'm looking for a conversion for out-of-combat social interactions, investigations, gathering information. For example, testing Diplomacy might easily be done by rolling Awareness (social awareness?).

You still did not expand on the most important part: Do you try to play one of Descent's campaigns as an RPG or do you have an RPG campaign you want to play using Descent material?

I don't think you could play a regular campaign (using the Box sets) that way, but perhaps you could use the various quests and adapt them to your RPG.

As for the out of combat scenarios, you could easily use the Descent attribute test in lieu of skills, matching the attribute to the RPG attribute (Might = Strength and Constitution, Wisdom = Wisdom, Knowledge =Inteligence, Awareness= Charisma and Dexterity)

The major issue I foresee is with maintaining the campaign phases, since that palys a large part in maintaining the balance from quest to quest and act to act. Should you allow the players to go to a shop and buy any item in the shop deck because "I went to an armourer, he should only have armour in his shop" or "I visited the local archmage, he should only be selling Rune stones"

And I don't know what will happen with the "I go to the temple and buy a bagfull of healing potions".

I have been thinking to use Descent system as a light RPG to play

with my wife + kids.

One possibility would be to use the simplified D&D 4e skill list with descent.

(The skills would have values from 0 to 7.)

Skills in Descent system (strength is not a skill, I guess)

* General knowledge -> distribute points (your choice) to the other knowledge skills
* Endurance
* Perception

Physical Skills
* Acrobatics
* Athletics
* Stealth
* Thievery

Communication Skills
* Bluff
* Diplomacy
* Insight
* Intimidate

Knowledge Skills
* Arcana
* History
* Religion
* Dungeoneering
* Nature
* Streetwise

The starting values for skills would depend on archetype and hero class

and could be improved during campaign.

It would be nice to create a campaign where the players would have to

explore, use their skills and brainpower to find out hidden information

to be able to win the game. The overlord would have to behave more like

a DM and the OL cards could auto-trigger for example when a hero steps

on a certain spot on the map. The monsters could have predefined strategy

that the DM plays out. Boss monsters could have weapons, which could be

looted by the players if they win, etc.

I have played D&D (3.5 at the time) using Descent pieces and quests as the basis of the campaign. That went very well, but we were in fact using D&D's rules, not Descent's.

It should be easy enough to use the Attributes as a metric for non-combat rolls, as has already been suggested here. The main sticking point I'd foresee is character progression. The class powers and items in Descent are designed to last the length of one campaign - if you wanted to run longer, you'd have to either make up new stuff - which would be a lot of work - or reboot after each campaign - which amounts to just playing Descent as-is, with a flair for storytelling thrown in.

And, of course, building custom heroes. Once upon a time, for first edition Descent, a forumite named Antistone made a chart for building your own heroes by basically breaking apart all the powers and stats of the existing heroes to determine rough points values and then extrapolating new powers from there. You could look that up and try to build something similar in D2E to get started. I'm not aware of anyone who has done it already, though.

Best of luck with this, let us know how it works out!