Hi again.

I tried to search the forum, but couldn't get the search feature to work (it doesn't do anything when I click it...), so I hope I'm not out of line asking here.

The Quest Guide says that in Campaign Play (where players keep using the same characters) everything is reset to the start values except for possibly extra money or training tokens depending on how many quests the character has survived.

But most quests give you extra Conquest Tokens once the main objective is completed.

What am I missing here?

Why would you receive Quest Tokens only to lose them for the next quest where the amount of starting tokens is given in the text?

Do the Conquest Tokens carry over between games? Or do the heroes have to fight their way out of the dungeon in order to actually win, and that's why they receive extra tokens?

Thanks for any insight into this!

No, conquest points never carry over between games.

There are two reasons why you get conquest "after the final blow":

1) Sometimes the heroes could die because of their own final blow (because of an explosion, for example). They will maybe lose their last conquest while slaying that final villain. So those final conquest points prevent you from losing the game because one hero has sacrificed himself. (If he has blown up the whole party, it's another question...)

2) The second reason: You can play Descent for highscores. You can try to play the same quests multiple times in order to get higher and higher highscores of conquest.

I don't know anyone playing it this way, but the manual suggests to do so. For myself, I think Descent isn't the right game for a high-score-play-style. But maybe there's someone out there who loves it playing the same quest again and again in order to raise his own scale of conquest - so why not?

(And of course, those final conquest points are some kind of gratification for all what the heroes have done. Whatever they will do with it...)

Ah, that makes good sense!

Thanks so much for your fast answer! We've been wondering about this for a while now...

I don't know if anyone does it, but I could picture Descent tourneys at a convention where groups squared off against each other with the highest points total winning. Those bonus conquest at the end could mean the difference if you got your butt kicked a lot and still beat the quest.

There is a popular variant which allows heroes to go into negative conquest during play as long as they are back in positive by the end of the game.

If you play that way the bonus conquest at the end could be vital!

These are all good points, but the way I see it Descent is not necessarily a game that is based purely on skill.

Example: I had one game where I pretty much wiped the floor with the other guy, and yesterday another player wiped me out royally with still 16 Conquest Tokens left (BEFORE adding the 4 given by finishing the quest!).

This second player had amazing luck in picking up the most useful cards as treasures and also had great dice luck - he did 12 wounds damage multiple times in a row and also had 5 range automatically on Quest 1 from the quest book - he shot and killed the two manticores before they even had a chance to attack!

Both players were very good strategists, but the first one didn't have good luck with the cards he drew (in fact, I was very lenient with him and let him live a few times when I could have finished the game).

So personally, I would never play it as a tournament for points since too much depends on blind luck (oh, and blind luck rarely is on my side, that's probably the REAL reason, hehe).

Giving conquest for finishing the quest doesn't help with competing high scores at all; everyone who finishes the quest gets exactly the same bonus, and everyone who fails the quest already definitionally has less conquest than anyone who won, so it will never change your rankings. Ever. Unless you think that scores on different quests should somehow be comparable to each other, and that's wildly unrealistic.

It does potentially help differentiate scoring if the heroes in a single party are competing with each other to get conquest tokens, and I believe this is an officially FFG-suggested variant, even though it is a really, thoroughly, incredibly bad idea. But that's arguably the best theory about why they're there.

Having them there for the negative conquest variant might be handy, but it's unlikely that was their intent, given that variant is not an official one and was developed after the game was published. Plus, counting that as a win in the negative conquest variant is really the same as just letting the heroes start with more conquest; it's not even vaguely equal compared to playing the normal way, and it's a trivially easy handicap to add without special rules.

Yet another possibility is that they wanted to establish the convention that named monsters always grant conquest when slain, and did that for the end bosses just for consistency. Of course, there are very few named monsters in official quests that are not final bosses.

A tournament is possible, you'd just have to remove the majority of the randomness: all parties have the same heros and skills, chests aren't randomized, the treasure decks are in a set order, etc.

Using a fixed random seed makes the results reproducible, not fair. Sure, maybe every group will get the same silver treasure draw the first time they buy one from the shop, but that draw could still be lucky or unlucky compared to the group that spends those 500 coins on an upgrade or 2 copper treasures instead. Some groups will sell treasures they don't like to buy more, and the result of that gamble may be consistent, but there's no guarantee it's representative. Even if two groups both buy a single silver treasure, that exact same card could be lucky for one group and unlucky for another group depending on the choices and die rolls made up to that point.

You could theoretically make the card draws fair if they were the same for everyone AND everyone knew in advance exactly what they were--no one takes a chance on a silver draw because they know exactly what it's going to be before they make the choice. But that's hardly the same game anymore, is it?

It's not like the die rolls are an insigificant source of randomness, either.

Your party's score could also change wildly based on who's playing the overlord. If you use the same overlord for everyone, he gets practice, and he memorizes the fixed card draws, so he probably plays quite a bit better in the later games than in the earlier ones.

You certainly can have a tournament. But you either need everyone to play a ridiculous number of games to get a statistically significant average, or you need to accept the fact that your tournament is largely a crapshoot.

Using a fixed random seed makes the results reproducible, not fair. Sure, maybe every group will get the same silver treasure draw the first time they buy one from the shop, but that draw could still be lucky or unlucky compared to the group that spends those 500 coins on an upgrade or 2 copper treasures instead. Some groups will sell treasures they don't like to buy more, and the result of that gamble may be consistent, but there's no guarantee it's representative. Even if two groups both buy a single silver treasure, that exact same card could be lucky for one group and unlucky for another group depending on the choices and die rolls made up to that point.

Welcome to the world of organized gaming tournaments.

You could theoretically make the card draws fair if they were the same for everyone AND everyone knew in advance exactly what they wereno one takes a chance on a silver draw because they know exactly what it's going to be before they make the choice. But that's hardly the same game anymore, is it?

Definitely not, and I'm certainly not suggesting that's what should be done.

Antistone said:

That hasn't stopped millions of board game tournaments in the past. Why would Descent be any different?

Every tournament that doesn't involve a pure strategy game (such as chess or checkers) involves luck. Yes, people's choices will change things, but that's kinda the point of a tournament. Do you risk a draw, or go for the statistical knowledge of what an extra die gives you?

There's no such thing as a tournament at a gaming convention that ignores luck.

The overlord factor can also be lessened, by having strict rules on what happens when, tactics for specific rooms, and roaming judges.

Antistone said:

Given the popularity of tournaments involving card games where the majority of people show up with cookie-cutter decks, I think it's fair to say there's a market for that sort of thing. It's cool if it ain't your thing. But I'd hazard a guess that there are plenty of people who'd show up to play.

If you want to have a tournament featuring a game with high luck dependence, that's fine. But I don't see the point of removing randomness when it doesn't actually change the amount of luck involved, especially if you claim you're OK with the luck dependence.

I'm neither for nor against Descent tournaments, I just don't see the advantage to giving everyone the same deck shuffle.

Antistone said:

+1

semmel said:

I think the real reason CTs are awarded at the end of a vanilla quest is that CTs are intended to portray the party's progress towards completion of the quest (every time they lose CTs it's because of a set back in their efforts, every time they gain CTs is because they've made some milestone, either tangible or morale-related.) With that thematic aspect in mind, killing the boss and/or completing the ultimate objective of a given quest is unquestionably a milestone in the progress of the quest (winning = a good thing .) That's why you get CTs at the end of a quest. I think most of the mechanical reasons listed above are more coincidence than any intended functionality on FFG's part. They do provide the vague suggestion of using CTs to "keep score" but they don't really say how or why one would do this. Like others who've posted before me, I have yet to meet a group of people who actually do track scores via CTs in any way.

If somebody was playing a timed game, for whatever reason, then the conquest tokens for defeating a boss may come into play for the achievement of high scores.

Sorry, I mean in reference to the fact that some games may end before the heros can finish them even though they are soundly defeating the Overlord. So, if they can finish then they get the extra conquest....if they run out of time then they don't get the reward for finishing even though they didn't really lose to the overlord.

Would be an option for either a group of friends that don't want to save games between game-nights or for a tourny where you can't let the games go forever.

I think the first theory still makes the most sense - the tokens are there so heroes can apply suicide tactics, e.g. using Blast etc., and still win the game even if they lose a life. I guess they want to avoid a stale mate situation where both sides lose.

It's not really possible for both sides to lose: either the heroes end with zero or fewer conquest, or they don't.

And the conquest rewards for killing bosses don't exactly make the situation impossible, anyway: you can still kill the boss and end in negative conquest even with the reward.

YellowPebble said:

You could, but you'd have to go far out of your way to do it because you'd have to kill the boss and at least two heroes simultaneously.

joshuapavon said:

That creates a very substantial possibility that the heroes will at some point be better off ending the game early than in finishing it. The heroes are realistically going to lose more conquest than they gain in certain areas of the questsome quests even specifically start the heroes with a huge chunk of conquest and expect them to gradually lose it throughout the dungeon.

If the heroes haven't completed all the quest goals, the overlord hasn't had a fair chance to remove their conquest, and I don't think there's any reason to believe their score will be comparable to a group that actually finished, with or without a completion bonus. Especially considering that the group that tries to finish may actually end up losing, even if they were playing better up to the point where the other group stopped.

That's where only playing with friends who won't try to break the system comes in.

Antistone, that last comment seems like it changed the subject from "Conquest Tokens at the End" to "The Problem with Time Limits."

My basic point was if there was a time limit, for any reason whatsoever, then at least the heroes that finished the quest would get a reward as compared to those that did not finish.

James McMurray said:

Or simultaneously kill the boss and one 4CT hero with one or more Curse tokens on him.

However, KW´s answer for the original question can be found in the oooold Descent wiki:

1.2 Q: "I noticed that when the Quest Goal is met the Heroes get 4 Conquest Tokens. I am wondering what is the purpose of these?"
A: You can play a quest again and try to beat your last score if you like. (If you track how many Conquest Tokens you have at the end of a quest, you can complete the quest multiple times, trying to maximize the number of Conquest Tokens at completion.)

James McMurray said:

Having a tournament with people who won't try to break the system sounds self-defeating to me. "Yeah, so we're all competing to try and get the highest score...but don't actually do anything to try and get a higher score, OK?"

The fundamental principle of game balance is that if a game only works correctly when players aren't trying to achieve the stated goals, that game is broken.

joshuapavon said:

And my point was that the conquest at the end doesn't actually solve any of the time limit problems, so suggesting that's the reason it exists doesn't make much sense. It they were trying to solve the problems with time limits, and that's all that they came up with, that's pretty pathetic.

It does help a tiny bit, granted, but if they don't have anything resembling a complete solution, that probably means they weren't trying to solve that problem in the first place.

Parathion said:

Oh, good, the goal that the mechanic doesn't accomplish was actually suggested by the designer. I feel so much better now.

Excuse me while I beat my head against a wall.

Antistone, do you do anything on this forum besides correct people, argue, and talk about your better version of Descent?

You can't let anything slide, ever. And, you seem to have a compulsion to let people know exactly HOW right or wrong they might be on a sliding scale, without actually using numbered ratings.

Antistone said:

I agree completely, but I'm not sure why you bothered quoting me and acting like you were refuting something I said, sine I never once said that you should have tourneys only with your friends.