After a resurgent interest in Descent in my group of friends, one of them is pushing for us to begin a Road to Legend campaign.

I'm amiable, but I'm wondering if we should pick up Tomb of Ice to use with it. Our current plan is to play with Well + Altar + Road to Legend.

For those of you who are playing RtL campaigns WITH Tomb of Ice included, or if you added it after having played without, how do you feel about it?

Kell said:

I think it is probably critical to the balance now.

Feats compensate for the loss of Telekinesis and Bear Tattoo (Grapple). The OL losing poltergeist and 1 of the 2 crushing blows is negligible by comparison.

Playing with neither Feats, nor Telekinesis would be very very hard on the heroes. Especially in Lt fights with lots of Treachery.

It depends on the balance of power in your group. If the heroes have read the Art of Blitz article and are usually winning vs the OL, then you don't need this expansion. If you play by the make the most experienced player the OL varient, and the OL is crushing the heroes before the end of copper, then by all means use feats as well as all the top notch heroes in ToI. If your sides are balanced, then then you might try ToI, but house rule feats to weaken them (one varient that looked interesting was letting the OL draw a card every time a feat was used).

Badend said:

Quite right.
We know all about Art of Blitz, but still find the game very well balanced overall. That is with Feats, and without Telekinesis/Bear Tattoo, basically RAW.
Not every group will have the same dynamic going.

Before ToI we found that the heroes were a little too powerful once they had Telekinesis with fatigue upgrades. It made too many dungeon levels into a speed-through bore-athon, and all too often Lt encounters were over on the first turn, before the OL even got a turn. Our heroes still lost most campaigns, but usually through errors or untimely 'Lost' encounters etc, rather than through the OL actually achieving anything. Frustrating for both sides.

Removing Telekinesis in particular, and Bear Tattoo to boot, makes things much more interesting, and the compensation of giving them Feats is fun, if not particularly necessary, in dungeons, but stunningly critical in Lt encounters.

The draw-a-card feat variant was ours. We trialled several variants, trying to get feats into the game without overpowering the heroes before Telekinesis was removed. It was ok, but had flaws. In particular it meant only certain feast ever got played and in general it meant that feats were underutilised.

Corbon said:

I hate being the "I agree" guy. Someone who can not add to a topic really shouldn't just comment saying they agree with what someone else said. But man Corbon hit this one on the head and I really can't say much more than....

I REALLY agree with corbon on this one.

I just wish FFG would add in a new movement restriction mechanic to the game with grapple being out. I wold like to see it added to the base rules so both sides could use it.