I need to add in an extra two adventurers to my Descent games. Any ideas on how I can redress the balance?
I was thinking of adding an extra 50% of the monsters to the dungeon or taking an extra card.

Has anyone done this and if so, what were the results?

Well, the current game simply adds health to creatures for "balance". If you take the 2 player creatures as a starting point, 3 player creatures have +1 health, 4 player creatures have +2 health and 5 player creatures have +3 health. There doesn't seem to be any other variance between 2/3/4/5 player creatures. Following that logic, 6 players would be +4 health and 7 players would be +5 health.

However, I don't think that would quite work. I think you'd want to at least start adding armor, if not more health. Try something like 6 players = +5 health, +1 armor and 7 players = +8 health and +2 armor...

-shnar

Be advised that by adding two more people to the game, the OL's job is going to be a LOT harder, especially for spawning monsters. 6 heroes are pretty much going to be able to cover just about every piece of LOS in the immediate area without any problems.

Could you just get 2 different games going instead?

If I had to try balancing for 7 total players...I might try...

1. I start with Gust of Wind, which is permanently in play.

2. I start with 1 Trapmaster and 1 Hordes of the Things.

3. Monsters are at +5 health and +1 armor from 5-player status

Other things you could try if you have expansions would be increased treachery, or starting with DOOM and whichever card it is that gives +1 speed to your monsters.

Feel free to balance until you like it. That's what the designers did!

3-player monsters are NOT +1 health compared to 2-player monsters. They're exactly the same. Because you're theoretically supposed to use 2 heroes with 2 players and still use 2 heroes with 3 players, so they don't need to change.

But they do add +1 health for each player after that, which...doesn't work. Not even close. Not even for the official range that it's supposed to work for (2-4 heroes). Forum-goers consistently recommend playing with only 3-4 heroes for the base game and only with exactly 4 heroes for the expansions because the official scaling just doesn't cut it.

I made an elaborate homebrew mod called The Enduring Evil that is designed to address the scaling issues, and adds support for up to 5 heroes (6 players). If you doubled the difference between the 4-hero monster stats and the 5-hero monster stats to play with 6 heroes, you should be reasonably OK--better than any simple attempt to patch the base game rules, at least. But it requires you to print a bunch of new cards, so you may or may not consider that worth it. It'll also take longer to play, but that's the inevitable peril of scaling things up.

If you're sure you just want a quick patch on the normal game, though, it's hard to recommend anything. You don't really want to add 50% more monsters, because the heroes still have the same amount of conquest (and besides, you run into odd numbers of monsters all the time). Though you could do worse things.

Some people recommend drawing one less card for two heroes and one extra card for four heroes (for the base game), which would suggest you could be drawing a total of 5 cards a turn for 6 heroes, but I wouldn't lay odds that was balanced, and even if it is, it will probably change the game's tactics substantially compared to normal play. But drawing a single extra card a turn, while powerful, is certainly not powerful enough to make up for 2 extra heroes all by itself.

It's easy to whip up some arbitrary set of changes to make things generically harder for the heroes; add X health and Y armor to all monsters, start with power cards A and B in play, collect an extra Q threat and T cards per turn, give the heroes less treasure, etc. But there's no simple way to predict whether any such combination will be balanced or not, so you'd have to go basically by trial and error.

The "2 different games" suggestion honestly sounds like a good option. I guess that would require that you have two copies of the game if everyone wants to play Descent, though.

Hmmm I think I have a lot of play testing to do.

There's some great ideas in there which I will certainly give a go.

I'll let you all know how I get on.

Thanks

Daddyrumba

Oh, just had another thought for a possible balancer:

All Fatigue costs are doubled.