[Vanilla JITD only]

Yesterday the Heroes broke into my homely Dungeon again, but this time they brought company!

With all force i managed to smash them, down in adventure 3, where they failed between the Nagas and the Guard room afterwards for the altogether third time. [Nasty deathtrap that is]

Yet, it was a very hard fight, and i earned the usual 5 threads [as with 4 heroes +1 for the aditional player] and we raised the health of each monster by 1 point, as its the usual health improvement with more players. [still they killed almost everythign with just 1 blow]

So, "with one hero more to slaughter, and monsters still not being tough enough, and the overlord not gaining much more threat, how did they loose?" is the question that comes in mind.

And sadly the answer is easy.. even with 5 heroes AND Boggs they left me spaces to spawn my skeletal patrols sorcerercircles, Razorwings and beastmen. which they could have easily avoided [sporting 1 archer 2 mages and Boggs to cover the far away corners.][i must admit that the stone-Nagas helped, claiming them to be "still a stonepile that blocks line of sight for spawning purposes" until they are awakened]

As Overlord i now fear them more then ever, as they aren't the dumb barbarian-kind of heroes, but the brooding ones that won't give up, and reflect every error until they find a solution to finally beat that quest to move on to the next.

So now the "out of character" question: how to solve that impossible threat of them hindering me to ever spawn anything with that number of players? [i have given up hopeing for any monster to survive them entering a room with 2 melee and 6 rangeattacks.]

More threat? More Handcards? Limited vision-range for them to hinder me from spawning? More than 1 spawncard per round, so i can spawn he ones i collect while unable to place at least 1 monster? Or just 4 ore Health to all so the ogres have a chance to survive a single blow, and i can actually use 1/3 of the room-monsters they encounter?

Figures do not block LoS for spawning, be it stone figures or activated ones - so you gave yourself a huge advantage.

The scaling rules don't work. Games with 2 heroes and 4 heroes are well known to play wildly differently, with 2 heroes being virtually unplayable in most quests. Shockingly, when you extend the same non-functional scaling rules to an even wider range of numbers of heroes, they continue to not function. Their LOS coverage is probably not your biggest problem, though quest 3 is hardly the toughest quest in the book and I've had newbies come close to finishing it with a party of 3, so if you're still beating them so far, you might want to just let them figure out what they're doing before you change the rules on them.

Unfortunately, there's no way to make the game scale "correctly" without a major overhaul. I've got a rebalanced version of Descent, entitled The Enduring Evil, which scales quite well for 2 to 5 heroes, but it involves not just new monster stats, but entirely new cards and quests. And I need to finish up testing so I can finally release the darn thing...

Barring that, there are lots of rules that you can change to make things harder for the heroes, but nothing that makes playing with lots of heroes balance in the same way as playing with fewer heroes. Giving the overlord more cards, adding more monsters, giving the heroes less equipment...I don't think there's any principled reason that one option is clearly the right way to do things.

I would recommend against allowing more than one spawn card per turn. Many people use variant rules to reduce the amount of spawning the overlord can do, even with 4 heroes (such as the reinforcement marker). Just because there's a limit of once per turn doesn't mean that you're supposed to spawn every turn, and it certainly doesn't mean that spawning nothing for 3 turns and then playing 4 spawn cards at once would be fair. If you want to get more monsters into play, I'd look at something more along the lines of Hordes of the Things.

@Parathion: The quest makes them to be " just harmless stone figures standing in the hallways with bells in front of them" .

Basicly one could place just 4 stone-blocks there building squares. Thats why i found it quite apropiate to rule them as such.

I am however aware that "Monsters" do not block line of sight for spawning. yet till they are active they ain't no monsters.

@Antistone: What use would "Hords of Monsters" have? They opened each room with up to 9 attacks being just clear overkill to the original inhabitants.

If there were two more of those " i got no hitpoints" tthings wouldn't matter. Or am i understanding somethign very wrong with the hordes?

-As with "spawning more monsters if possible" i thought of playing up to two cards, not 4 at once, that i admit would be quite overpowering.

-Less equipment makes the start of the Dungeon still quite unentertaining.

-Drawing more cards was vetoed by my Heroes strongly, as i gain conquest when drawing the last overlordcard, which would bring them to their doom faster without their interaction.

The main problem with too many heroes still seems to me the existence of those additional pairs of eyes.

And of course i won't change the rules before they have beaten the current once and figured out why 5 of those dungeondevastating brutes give me a lot harder time than just 3.

Sinso said:

Not sure why you feel the start of the dungeon requires special consideration here, but if you do, it doesn't seem hard to reduce the contents of chests without reducing starting equipment...no idea what you're driving at here.

Sinso said:

Um...the rule that was specifically designed to increase the overlord's chances of winning was vetoed because it helps him win? Given that they have more actions and fight fewer spawns and can therefore finish the quest more quickly, they feel it would be unfair if you reduced their time limit?

If you really somehow consider this a problem, it's trivial to compensate by reducing the penalty for cycling the deck or by taking away conquest every X turns regardless of when the deck actually cycles, but it sounds to me like you're complaining that the rule does exactly what you asked for.

Sinso said:

Well, if you really feel that to be the case, then I think the obvious first step would be removing Boggs the Rat from the skill deck. Letting the heroes have the special ability to excel at blocking spawning is obviously a bad idea if you honestly feel they can already block spawning so well that it's breaking the game.

Sinso said:

Well, you still have to place monster figures according to the quest guide. That makes them monsters , whatever common sense ruling one might logically want to apply.

If I want to be nitpicky, then I have to point out that KW clarified that figures never block LoS for spawning purposes, so even if the quest guide considers them to be stone figures , the rule still holds. ;-)

The LoS thing I've been thinking about too...

The only thing I can think of:

Each player gets a number, 1-5. If you have a D10, so much the better. Roll it. If not, roll a standard six sided die, reroll sixes, and whatever number comes up doesn't get to contribute line of sight for the OL's turn. That way, there's an element of randomness which requires players to double-up to ensure LOS, thus reducing the coverage of LOS in the party.

In larger dungeons you could impliment a sight range of, say, 8 squares. Gust of wind still has a use at that point.

You could houserule that unexplored doors are legitimate spawn points (similar to reinforcements in RtL expansion. They begin on the other side of the unexplored door, as if they were adjascent to said door, and get to function normally, including opening normal doors. If this makes them cannon fodder and nothing more, then they spawn on the explored side of the door). Late-game this won't matter so much when all the doors are open, but it might be a killer early game. Be careful with that one.