I would like to introduce hireable mercenaries to my group. I guess this has probably discussed before, but I cannot find the topics (missing search options). There are some points I am not sure about:

1. Are mercenaries more like heroes or like monsters ? I do not like the idea of one person playing more than one character at a time, so I prefer mercenaries to be more saperate from heroes. The first idea is to treat mercenaries like monsters, i.e. they cannot wear items, cannot run or battle, cannot use runes, open chests and so on. In this way they are mere subordinates to the heroes. Could look like this, slightly different than monster cards.

2. What types of mercs are there? Only three types? They should have clearly defined operation purposes. There is no need for 3 mercs with almost identical stats. At first glance I dedcided against unique mercs, although i like gimmicks, but that would come too close to a hero I guess.

3. Do mercenaries gain experience / improve skills. When mercenaries are like heroes there a lot of possibilities to individualize mercenaries and to upgrade them. But as I said earlier, I think of mercenaries more as little helpers than as equivalent heroes. When treated like monsters, the only way to improve is to make them master [..]. I like this idea because then you are happy if one of your mercs upgrades to master level. The question remains when a merc will level to master? Maybe you can buy a training for him or he may roll a power die whenever he deals the killing blow to a master monster?

4. When to buy mercs, when to pay ? Can you buy mercs whenever you are in town? Do you need to check if there is one available? Do you pay them once or per turn or per week in RTL?

5. How many mercs are allowed to support your group? The main purpose of mercs is to support 2 or 3 player scenarios. But i do not whan a brigade of mercs crawling my dungeon. So either there is an arbitrary limit of mercs per dungeon (or week) or there is a kind of availability check or they simply cost more when more heroes are playing.

6. What happens when a merc dies ? Do the heroes lose conquest token? This would be an easy way to limit the amount of mercs in a dungeon, at least you would care more for them. Are they revivable? If they are treated like monsters I would say no - so they are in a way disposable.

If there are other topics that deal with mercs, pls post the link.

Otherwise I would be grateful for some opinions to points 1 to 6.

Ummm...apart from like one discussion about them which I thought was conceptual, this is actually the first time I've ever seen these or the cards.

These actually look amazing, and I would love to play test these in my RTL campaign. Where did these images come from?

These are only concepts of what I think mercs could look like. The images are grasped from the internet (and have been used without explicit permission by the artists.) They are just to illustrate the game mechanichs I think they fit in - just like monsters, normal and master exemplars.

If the goal is to make playing with 2-3 heroes more viable, then limiting the number of concurrent mercenaries to 4 (or maybe 5) minus the number of heroes is an obvious possibility. That's...fairly close to just playing with more heroes, though.

If we pretend for the sake of discussion that the game actually scales correctly to different numbers of heroes, then the number of mercenaries allowed should probably be proportional to the number of heroes (e.g. each hero can hire 1 mercenary). You could maybe set things up something like this:

• If a hero doesn't have a mercenary, they can buy one in town for X.
• If a mercenary dies, no conquest is lost, and the hero may (but doesn't have to) buy another one.
• If a hero dies, and he doesn't have a mercenary currently but had one in the past, he can revive his last mercenary at no gold cost, but the heroes lose 1 (extra) conquest. (Maybe more.)
• If a hero dies, but his mercenary is still alive, the mercenary keeps working for you as if nothing happened, and there is no conquest penalty (since the overlord didn't bother killing the mercenary).

This means that you can treat a mercenary like a permanent upgrade that lets you do more stuff but increases your conquest value if you both die, or you can treat them as dispensable and replace them when they die, essentially trading gold for conquest. On the other hand, if you're strapped for cash, the overlord can kill a mercenary and then not kill the controlling hero, preventing you from reviving him (probably strategically similar to using dark relics), and so heroes that don't die frequently have a greater incentive to try and protect their henchmen.

Mercenaries probably move after their owners' turns, like familiars, or monsters controlled with the Necromancy ability. This suggests the comparison that if a mercenary is similar in overall power to a normal, small monster, then hiring a mercenary is probably similar in overall power to Necromancy , and thus theoretically worth about a skill (if we pretend that skills are balanced--I've never had Necromancy come up in an actual game yet).

Another point of comparison is the Wishing Ring, which suggests that a conquest token is worth around 300-350 gold (because two of the options you can choose with the ring are to gain 3 conquest or to gain 1000 gold). Of course, we KNOW this is bogus, because it doesn't scale--larger parties get more gold but the same amount of conquest, so any mechanism that lets the party effectively buy conquest is going to have scaling problems.

Another thing to keep in mind is that if mercenaries don't gain equipment or level up in some fashion, they're going to be strongest in the early game (when they can actually kill things) and very weak in the late game (when they probably have trouble even penetrating armor).

I have to say, I'm not really enamored of this idea. Sounds like you've got all sorts of scaling problems, both with number of players and the progression through a single game, and they're going to slow the game down by having more pieces that you move around and attack with every turn.

Scaling can be overcome by two mechanics: In single dungeon games, mercs can level to master mercs. of course you do not have 4 equipment levels (normal, copper, silver, gold items) but only two, but being realistic my party either has normal/copper items or silver items before they lose the game, which makes up 2 qeuip levels as well Second, in RTL games mercs upgrade to silver, gold and diamond level as the game proceeds.

So I absolutely see no problem of scaling that cannot be solved by very simple solutions.

I tend to make mercs worth one conquest token in general with the logic that 2 hero games can use 'cheap' support (in terms of conquest token costs) what might help to keep their heads above the water while 4 hero games won't use mercs that much because they 'steal' conquest tokens (because they die more easily of increased monster power) that are better invested in heroes.

I only play descent with the advanced campaign settings, and I can see mercs being more handy durring an advanced campaign vs a normal game of Descent.

The mercs would obviously have bronze silver gold and master bronze silver gold stats and attributes[Possibly Diamond?] (Thought I don't know when they would scale or how/why) but I do know that to not throw off balance, they should probably only be purchasable if the heros are BEHIND in conquest to the overlord. Which in my book is a very welcome change, because I know that most everyone hates to be a part of a game where the heroes rage quit