Hi,

I do have two questions and can't find answers anywhere. Maybe somebody will help me here.

1.) It is regarding Blast. When there are also status effects in place like stun, poison, etc. is this affecting all character in blast area or just the one who was targeted for attack?

2.) How much should overlord say regarding encounter and objects in there. In case that there are some special items (? tokens) should he say at beginning of scenario what it is or not? I don't wanna know what will happen if heroes pickup something, what test they should do and so on. I just want to know if he should mention if heroes can interact with object or not. Something like "those are rocks buried in the ground, but you are too week to dig them out" or "there is hidden leaver somewhere" or at least "those doors are locked". You know, some indicator which way should heroes goes, because there is a lot of unclear missions where we just running from place to place totally blind and just trying to figure out what should be our mission and we are spending actions just to hear from overlord that we can't do nothing with that object.

Thank you

1) Yes, Blast attacks affect all figures the same for conditions.

2) Everything in the scenario is public knowledge and should be open to the players. They can even read the book, there is no secrets.

The only exception is when using the Shadows of Nerekhall campaign, where several quests use secret "influence" tokens. Even then, the players are allowed to know what the different effects could be, they just don't know which token is going to trigger. Sometimes (usually) the Overlord gets to choose, sometimes it's random.

Are you sure that everything should be told? It is written somewhere? Because I think it will take a lot of fun away and make overlord life terribly dificult. When heroes knows all winning conditions they can focus on that from beginning.

Anyway thank you for the blast info.

If players were not told what the objectives and other rules were, and if the overlord is even semi competent, the players would never win a single quest. I believe it states at the beginning of the quest guide that all of it is public and should be known by all players prior to attempting a quest.

Descent is not a dungeon crawler type board game.

All information in the quest guide is public knowledge and should not be hidden from the heroes at any time. Doing so would unbalance the game in favor of the OL.

You can find the information about this on the quest guide. I don't have the guide at the moment but I'll post the rule later when I will be back at home.

One of the biggest hurdles I had in playing Descent was overcoming my D&D mentality that I, as the GM (OL), was to throw miscellaneous monsters in the way of the heroes create an exciting story for them and they can all sit around the table afterwards noming Doritos and celebrating their magnificence at dungeoneering.

No, ten thousand times no!

This is Descent, where everything is out in the open and everyone knows the score. The fun and excitement come, not from delving into the unknown, but from coming face-to-face with the brutality and vicious cunning of the diabolical OL. He or she has so many wicked tricks to throw down to stop the heroes onslaught.

You want unknown and hidden aspects to the game? Let encounter #1 go 10-12 rounds so that the OL's deck balloons nice and plump and wait to see what happens in encounter #2...

Just on my solo play throughs alone ( and this is with me knowing everything) It's a challenge in itself for the heroes to accomplish goals. The rules need to be layed out so everyone knows the score.

As promised, you will find the information in regards with the public information on page 2 of The Shadow Rune quest guide. It reads as follows:

These quests are all written with the assumption that all players know all the rules and victory conditions - in short, unless noted, none of the information is secret.

You can try to leave some information hidden but make sure to warn your opponents of the potential unbalance it could bring to the game.

To keep some level of unknown in the game, you can try not reading the effect of the first encounter on the second encounter. This is as far as I would go on that account.

Thank you all for reply.