Ispher said:

I would seriously reconsider number 2. The drinking of potions mid-turn is one of the things that gives the heroes adaptability. Say you can 'just' reach a monster using up all movement and fatigue. As you round a corner, you get hit by a pit or crushing block. Now you're a sitting duck for the monsters. In your scenario, you will keep being a sitting duck. Otherwise, you'd have the ability to either blow a fatigue potion and reach your destination or gulp down an invisibility potion and let the critters do their worst. In any case, the hero adapts to the new situation, with what he's got available.

Limiting the potions that way, just hampers the heroes quite a bit on every sort of potion. If you want to hit the fatigue potion, and I can understand that, I'd much rather go for what Shnar suggested, and have it work more like a healing potion. Recovering 4 or 5 fatigue. I believe you take away some of the fun aspect of being a hero, when hampering the adaptability.

The idea of limiting fatigue gain through potions is interesting. We'll give it a thought. I'm all for Ispher's suggested modifications also. In the end, I think all of this just needs to be thoroughly tested.

I've been pondering something else about surges for the Overlord. The gain of 1 threat token for 2 surges is useful, but can be a bit weak depending on the circumstances. Why not add the rule that the Overlord can spend two surges to add 1 extra damage in combat ? It is not overpowered and makes the Overlord have to think between trading extra long term power against immediate advantage. I would also permit the use of 2 threats to gain 1 extra black die in combat or 1 extra movement anytime.

edderkoppen said:

Well that's exactly what the wants!

I say let him have it... You just have to calculate with a possible hit, weigh the odds of whether he's got such a card in hand, and either go for it or not.

What you shouldn't forget is that he wants to play with semi-randomized treachery. That's a huge disadvantage. He cannot go for the deadly combos so many heroes complain about. It has to be compensated in a similar spectacular way.

However, a 3-point Fatigue potion without any mid-turn restriction would also be a simple and elegant way of solving the "Fatigue fantastic" problem (I don't like the "Fatigue abuse" expression as it is not really an abuse, since it complies with the rules). Hey, Mordrog wouldn't mind - at least not at the beginning of the game!

Patmox said:

I can understand the reasoning behind having the same use of threat in dungeons than in encounters (even though it would make a few cards that enhance monster movement like Charge or cards that add dice like Doom! redundant). I am, however, lukewarm on that because it could happen that in many situations, the interest of the OL would be to just ditch his cards, maybe even his whole hand, to add threat for a couple of deadly attacks. If the cards just keep getting discarded, it would make the game a little boring. In dungeons, the OL can't use his threat for anything other than his cards because that way he has to play his cards, which make the battles various and entertaining.

The two surges for 1 extra damage however is... pure greed (which is of course fitting for an OL! ) With how threat is used in encounters (2 threat for 1 additional dice level or 1 movement), having two surges would then give you either 1 more damage or one extra threat. Since you can add a dice for two extra threat and an extra dice adds on average half a damage, you would quadruple the effect of your surges! Thus it would always be more efficient for you to add one damage rather than take a threat (except when you don't pierce the armor or in the very rare cases you are missing one threat to play a key card), and you would mostly stop taking threat with surges.

It is maybe not overpowered in itself, but it would be overpowered compared to the other way of using the surges that it would compete with, which would kill any kind of dilemma that is supposed to exist between competing choices.

Ispher said:

There are 24 fatigue tokens in the original DJitD, and none in any of the expansions.

If you keep these as a limit then things stay manageable. One hero can still have 7-9+ fatigue, which can allow real 'runs', but correspondingly, the other characters are reduced to an average 4-5 instead. If every hero has around 6 then they can do a very good cleanup of a dungeon but the 'runs' are slightly limited.

Doesnt most of this stem from the choice of heroes?

Ispher mentioned in his original post being paired up with Nanok, Tahlia, and Carthos. 4 strong heroes. Perfect balance of power, 2 ulitmate fighters, ultimate mage, and decent rogue. Great. Nice draw. With 4 of the best heroes in the deck, shouldn't those heroes have a cakewalk?

How many ppl play w a random draw? What if you draw 3 wizard-types and a rogue? What if you draw 2 melee and 2 rogues?

Then the treasure is not so bountiful. With the original party, no matter what treasure you find it will be used optimally by someone. But with 2 melee and 2 rogues, every wizard item you find is worthless until you ultimately take a crummy rogue and turn him into a psuedo-wizard. And finding bows and swords to give your guys will be a slower process.

If you do a truly random draw for heroes, it is VERY challenging. To anyone who thinks the heroes win easily, are you playing with your favorite heroes? Try playing with a hero set that has one good hero, two mediocre ones, and one sucky one.

If you want to "ensure a random party" then do this - divide up the hero cards into 4 stacks, based on what you consider great, good, ok, and poor. Each stack should be about equal. Shuffle, and draw one card from each stack. Use those as your heroes. See how it goes having only one golden child in your party, and the rest that can hardly do damage - plus in all likelihood, NOT an ideal 2-1-1 warrior-mage-rogue mix.

Do you get killed? Does this mean it's tainted for the OL if the party is composed of average heroes, but tainted toward the heroes if they choose good heroes? If that's the case, then the balance is somewhere around getting a party that is good - but not too good - good enough to barely survive the early years w/o growing so exponentially fast that they dominate later.

If u pick the best heroes in an ideal combination, of course you should win.

-mike

Ispher said:

I kind of like the idea of Fatigue only restoring 3 points (RTL only). The hero already has another option to restore ALL fatigue- Rest Order.

poobaloo said:

I have not read through the entire thread so forgive me if I am repeating anything.

I fail to see how the treasure would not be bountiful. I get that having one set of treasure you could not use would be technically worse than if you could use it but practically I see very little difference. Most treasures in RTL are bought not drawn. Additionally may treasures should be sold for dice upgrades as they are your true damage adders. Having a set of treasure that you draw that "can't" be used seems to be of very little consequence to me.

I would think drawing one hero per player and forcing them to play that hero would be very beneficial to the OL. But I fail to see how seperating the heroes into piles would increase the likelyhood of an unbalanced party. Unless of course you are saying most if not all the melee guys are good and most if not all wizards suck. I mean of course if the piles are not reasonably balanced between melee, ranged, and magic type heroes.

I think melee guys are good because they can use axes at the start of the campaign. This makes them mostly independent from equipment. Of course making sure you got grapple was the big reason to pick 2 melee guys. Something that doesn't work anymore. Taunt may become the next best thing but I am not sure yet.

Armor is the next big hitter. Having only one ring of armor would hit a low armor hero group but that has more to do with the hero armor value and much less to do with the type of hero. Of course the special armor changes this up quite a bit but if you don't have that expainsion I can see the point. If you are saying forcing the use of low armor heroes is good for the OL I guess I agree.

I would say health is the next big thing. Avoiding the use of 8 health heroes is a great idea when picking a party. Something I think would be worth having an "unbalanced" party for but I am not sure.

I am wondering if you are suggesting that you can know who is going to win the game after the party has picked it's heroes?

I would rank heroes not by type but instead by armor, health > 8, # of dice in one area. In that order most of the time. Maybe that ends up with most of the melee guys being good.

Oboewan said:

I may float this idea. Seems perfect. Simple, and doesn't require a list of rules. Has little effect in copper, a moderate effect in silver, and significant in gold. It would also change the potion distribution, since fatigue potions aren't the lifeblood of Descent then.

poobaloo said:

2 very strong, one average, one mediocre (sadly, that's me).

poobaloo said:

The two best heroes certainly helped, indeed. Mad Carthos just kept dying: the OL built a 40-point advance swatting him again and again like a fly. I also died quite a lot. We are only having a cakewalk since the Fool's Rapids. The main reason (besides the Rapids)? Randomized treachery. But the game still is fun, albeit I wouldn't mind a little more challenging rules for our next campaign.

poobaloo said:

Completely random? In RTL, nobody?

Since the rules say, "Each hero player draws three hero sheets at random and chooses one of them to play for the duration of the advanced campaign", I guess most people do it this way. We did. That's how I ended up with Ispher.

poobaloo said:

With the current rules, that's almost impossible, since each gets to choose between 3 randomly drawn heroes while seeing what the others want to choose.

poobaloo said:

And also a lot less fun. You find a lot of stuff you can't use. Some heroes get to keep shop gear for ages. Weeee.

There are better ways to make it more challenging that are not less fun.

poobaloo said:

The official rules are set so that a party is almost certain to hit a mix with at least one of each hero class because this way, the players can fully enjoy the experience of Road to Legend. It is simply more fun this way.

When more challenging starts meaning less fun, it stops making sense.