It's been our experience that dungeons which are pretty challenging for the players turn to cakewalks once that first gold chest is opened. The sheer firepowers and defensive capabilities that pop out of it turn a hard fight to a one-shot kill on the boss.

I've also heard people say that RtL starts off hard and ends off easy for the players. How much of this is due to the gold treasures?

Gold treasures are simply ridiculous, regardless of which flavor of descent you play. In RTL, the problem is compounded by the heroes' skills, which they get to choose through the course of the campaign. By gold level, the combination of crazy treasure, and optimized skill sets makes things very hard for the OL.

I haven't played RtL, but I've heard the same things, and it's my impression that gold treasures are a significant factor. Though the +6 max fatigue and hand-picked combos of 4-5 skills are probably pretty important, too.

I think I did a pretty good job in The Enduring Evil of making the gold treasures interesting and powerful without letting them break the game. I even made a quest where the heroes start with gold treasures to flaunt the fact that this doesn't automatically make the monsters push-overs. Though I'm biased, obviously.

SamVimes said:

Even more important than the skills combos are the combination of Gold treasures with upgraded dice.

It is this that turns even diamond monsters into frequent one shot kills. Having, effectively, 10 black dice with a gold weapon vastly magnifies it's utilities. It is rare to fail to have 5+ surges and with gold weapons that is really nasty.
Skills tend to give extra attacks or make the attacks more useful - only a few add raw damage/surges to an attack.

Of course, come to think of it...they made custom stats specifically for high-end RtL that don't need to be compatible with anything else ever printed. And they already knew what gold items exist, and they presumably knew what the power dice cap was going to be fairly early on. Can anyone think of any reason they couldn't have simply bumped up gold (or at least diamond) monster stats to levels sufficient to withstand a Frost Axe with 5 gold dice, assuming they wanted to?

I think there is something to be said for the feeling of power that the heroes get when wielding gold weapons. These are the best of the best, and they have leveled their characters. They deserve to feel powerful.

That should actually be fairly easy in RtL. Monsters and equipment are upgraded incrementally and not specifically in unison, so you probably fight some monsters with silver weapons, and then fight the same monsters with gold weapons, which should show off just how awesome gold weapons are, even if the monsters are subsequently upgraded and become good enough to fight you even with gold weapons.

Plus, IMO, gold weapons ought to do more than just damage. They should have special effects, so that the heroes feel like they're doing new things, not just doing the same things with bigger numbers. Then again, I guess that's not something that RtL can fix.

And of course, that idea is in competition with another important consideration, which is that the heroes should do interesting stuff before gold level, since they spend most of the game not at gold...

Antistone said:

I agree with this comment. Maybe FFG could create a "small expansion" with treasure cards that give players more tactical options without giving them too much extra damage when they roll a lot of Gold dice... It could be called something like "Campaign Treasure Madness" or some such.

Antistone said:

I looked over the treasures in TEE and the gold ones look better overall (though there are still some 1-for-1 or better (like the Frost Axe and Morph) that could be terrifying when rolling gold dice.

I'm confused by the lower tiered stuff though. There are some really scary looking and/or versatile copper ones that feel like they're too much (though I admittedly haven't studied the monster stats or even read the rules ). But the Indescribable looks really wonky at 1 surge for +1 damage or +1 range, and things like the Spell Sling and Dream Blade look like they've got way too many benefits on them for supposedly weak items.

Antistone said:

Presumably they just didn't think of it? Perhaps their playtesters were really tactical overlords and less tactical players? It's also possible that they never really fully tested the set by running through multiple campaigns, but rather tested it all piece-by-piece and so never saw the true devestating power of being able to pick and choose between multiple skills and gold treasures as the game progresses.

James McMurray said:

The monsters in EE are substantially harder to kill, especially the higher-tier ones. The treasures are definitely not balanced if you tried to use them without the other alterations. Enduring Evil doesn't use gold dice, either. But surge efficiency is supposed to increase gradually with treasure level, partly so that power dice (which have a high surge:damage ratio) don't become meaningless compared to the weapon's inherent dice, and partly so that you can fit in more powerful effects as surge options that would be impossible to use if you balanced them against a swords 2 surges for +1 damage.

I did lots and lots of math to try and balance the weapons against monster defenses (see my Endurance Calculator for a general idea). The versatility and special options are balanced a little more by intuition (except as they directly impact damage output), but keep in mind that the Spell Sling and Dream Blade suffer an increased miss chance due to rolling multiple dice with X results.

And as I said earlier in the thread, I do want the heroes to have interesting stuff to play with for the whole game, not just for the last room.

James McMurray said:

They've got special rules for starting at silver or gold level, and as I recall they're actually more favorable to the heroes putting together killer combos, because they don't give the overlord a chance to raze any cities before the heroes can train there.

And if you're creating special new mechanics to increase hero damage at high campaign levels, and special new mechanics to increase monster stats at high campaign levels, and you "just didn't think of" doing some math to check whether they were balanced against each other, you really have no business being a game designer. They could conceivably have gotten the numbers wrong if they're lazy or they suck at math (and playtesting), and they may legitimately want the monsters to die much more easily at gold level, but if it didn't even occur to them to check, they're astonishingly incompetent.

It doesn't take incompetence to miss something. It can also happen because of tight schedules, multiple projects, or any of the many other things we armchair quarterbacks never have to worry about when we critique others' works.

James McMurray said:

If that were some minor detail that only comes up in a particular special case, sure. When we know that someone at some point definitely wrote up some custom stats specifically for gold-level RtL, if they didn't think about the one and only thing that those stats should have been based on, that's rather less excusable.

As I said, they may have considered it but gotten it wrong, due to any number of constraints including the things you listed. But if they didn't even think about it, they flat-out didn't do the job they were hired for.

Anybody got any house rules to level the playing field, beyond completely rewriting the game? Maybe just adding an extra 25-50% health and/or armor to the gold and diamond level opponents would do it? I haven't seen the overlord lairs yet, so I don't know if this would help them out any. Since all monsters and cards go away when the overlord's avatar appears, it seems pretty hard to give him any chance at surviving more than one round. 4 characters all focused on the same target are going to easily output over a hundred damage.

James McMurray said:

We'll be playing our next campaign with the following "rules for seasoned adventurers":

1. Chop 10 points off each monster level upgrade (25/30/30 becomes 15/20/20). The OL has more CP to upgrade his avatar this way (or do other stuff), and can hit the heroes harder earlier.

2. Fatigue potions restore 3 Fatigue.

3. Level bosses' bonus HP scale with the campaign level (à la Sea of Blood).

4. Skills of razed cities cannot be obtained for the rest of the campaign by any means.

5. Heroes get a CP only for dungeons they actually enter.

6. Heroes who already won a campaign become Legendary and are retired, which means we (probably, as our current campaign isn't finished yet) won't get to play with Nanok and Tahlia (and Ispher) anymore.

We do however play with semi-randomized Treachery (couldn't convince my group to give it up) , so I don't think it is as bad as it looks. If you play with the official rules for Treachery however, it might be a little harsh... Although I can't really know since we haven't tried.

Ispher, what are your "semi-randomized" Treachery rules you were mentioning?

And Antistone, do you have a rules set in mind for RtL that reflect TEE? Thought about trying it, just printing the cards is a chore at the moment with my competitive schedule, so I'm going to leave it till I'm back to normal in Nov/Dec and we finish our first RtL campaign, the players would revolt if I wanted to go back to vanilla Descent considering we're enjoying a run of the game now.

Sorry, I have no plans for making an extended campaign based on Enduring Evil. Someone else is welcome to try; the monster stats are already calibrated to specific treasure levels, and I can provide my giant spreadsheets of balance information upon request. But 80 hours is way too long for me to want to invest in a single play of a competitive board game, no matter how many sessions it's divided into.

There is a problem in flat out buffing the Gold and Diamond level monsters in response to optimized gold diced gold geared heroes. This would make it near impossible for non-optimized heroes in the silver campaign to hurt these monsters, at all. (Heck, my boyfriend groans in pain when I put down my gold gargoyles during our just-turned-silver campaign.)

During our first campaign it was close all the way into the Avatar-battle, with some hairy near-plot-wins and near-Tamalir-razes averted by throwing in the kitchen sink from the heroes. We do however play quite "casually", without optimizing every single possible aspect (Landrec did have Quick casting, but not Spiritwalker, noone had Acrobat, there was no Boggs the rat), so the heroes are of course going to be less powerful.

I don't think the game was intentionally "imbalanced" or "not playtested", it might just have ended up compromising between casual and powergaming playstyles. Where do you tune the balance? For the casual crowd or for the strategic crowd? You either make it balanced for the strategic crowd, making it impossible for anyone not playing with THE cookie cutter group, or you tune it for the casual crowd, making cookie cutter groups so mighty that the OL cries in his keep.

(During Vanilla descent the gold treasures definately are silly, though. The lack of boss-scaling in the original quests makes it quite hard on the poor Overlord. I had a Mad Carthos with his shiny new Curse of Rot get a lucky roll and one-shot the Dragon boss of A Last Wish *cry*)

Jorosyn said:

+1

Kard said:

Until now, our OL drew Treachery cards equal to twice the number of Treachery points he had and chose among them (when he had only 1 point, he drew two cards from those that cost 1 point and chose one; when he had two points, he included the cards that cost two points and drew four cards from which he chose up to two, and so on). Number of cards drawn among which he could choose = his Treachery points x 2.

Starting with the next session, he will use a slightly less restrictive system of choosing among a number of cards equal to his Treachery points + 3 (although when he reaches 3 Treachery points, it becomes the same as the system above, as 3x2 = 3+3).