My friends and I play Descent + Altar. We have been doing the standard missions in order, and they cannot seem to beat Quest 4 (the one with the princess you have to cart around). They have attempted it about 5 times now, and never seem to make it past the second or third door opening.

Is there anything I can do to scale down the difficulty for them without simply rolling over as the OL? What I mean is, I don't want to make it easy for them by just not playing cards or not attacking etc.

Thanks.

The best option I can think of without actually changing any of the rules, is doing what you don't seem to want to avoid.

Just tone it down a little bit, don't need to spawn every round. Don't need to always target the weakest, give them a little leeway so they get some momentum... then crush their hopes and bodies.

Some simple options include:

• Start the heroes with more conquest
• Play with more heroes, if you were using less than four. More heroes tends to make things significantly easier for them.
• Let players choose their heroes, rather than picking randomly.
• Let heroes each choose one of their starting skills, instead of getting them all randomly.
• Reduce the amount of treachery the overlord gets (if you're using treachery)
• Reduce the amount of threat the overlord collects per turn
• Remove some of the better cards from the overlord deck (e.g. Beastman War Party)
• Use the reinforcement marker idea from RtL--the overlord can spawn once per area at normal cost, but needs to pay a hefty fee for each spawn card after the first in each area (RtL uses a cost of 15 threat, but that's probably excessive).

Our group does something similar to a suggestion of Antistone: Each player draws their skill cards, then may (if they wish) shuffle one of them back into it's deck of skills and draw another skill of that same type.

Antistone said:

First, thanks all for the replies.

They already play with 4 heroes, and I let them choose whoever they want.

I also do this thing where I let them "collectively" draw skill cards. For example, the 4 heroes they choose draw a total of 5 fighting, 3 subterfuge, and 4 magic skill cards (being arbitrary here). I deal them said number of each, then they get to decide who gets what cards, so long as each hero has his/her listed number of skill cards.

The more conquest seems like a fair enough idea, maybe 10 instead of 5?

Rajamic said:

That's a standard rule, actually, except that the skill being replaced isn't shuffled back in until after the hero draws its replacement (thus eliminating any chance of redrawing the exact same skill).

I wrote an article on game balance and another short one on heroes tactic . You might find something useful in there.

If the heroes take notes and write down what type of monsters are in each area and where, it might help them to built a strategy for the next try. Or buy the Tomb of Ice so they can play with Feats.