Hello everybody

My first question revolves around my desire to play RtL with my Friends and thus we have a small problem, we are six people and as we all know RtL is "balanced" for four players.

Has someone here encountered the same problem and has came up wth a good idea to get that under one hat, or maybe the people here in this wonderful forum have got some tips on how I can get this done without the Overlord becoming too powerful or the heros overpowered?

I would be thankful for every hint.

And no, we will not cut down on 5 players total

Thanks in advance

Yours sincerely, Underlord

We're facing this same issue and we're thinking that if we add a 5th hero, that wrecks havoc with the OL's spawning ability, as well as adds more hero rewards (assuming you roll an extra die for the various rewards, encounters/treasurechests/+100coinsfortreasure/etc). Haven't come up with a good idea for a 6th player yet :/

-shnar

Hihi, good to see I am not the only one lost on this Topic.

As I went through a couple of ideas myself I guess I would do it like this.

1: Add 25% Monsters, so if the Map has 6 for 4 Players add +1 and so on, or, add 20% on life.

2: Keep the 4 powerdice when rolling treasure, but add one that only gives money

3: No extras with the upgraeds, so if the trainingmarkers run out, the heros cannot train that kind anymore

4: double the HP of bosses in the dungeons and add +2 Armour on Silver and +3-4 in Gold

5: Avatarboost ist +1 or 2 when it comes to HP upgrade on final level

Would that be good or would it just bring unbalance towards the overlord, I have all addons and we will use feats as it was described in this forum

There's not really a systematic way to predict what will make things balanced or not.

Probably the only major advantage to the heroes from having more of them is extra actions; ideally, you would set things up so that it takes the heroes proportionately more actions to accomplish anything, and so you'd cancel out the advantage while still keeping the gameplay basically the same. That's the holy grail of player scaling. Let's break it down:

Killing Monsters: You want five heroes to take as much time to kill monsters as 4 heroes would in the normal game. But you can't just bump monster health up by 25%, because while that means it'll take 25% more damage to kill them, that's not the same as taking 25% more attacks ; heroes often overkill monsters, so boosting monster health will sometimes not make any difference, and will sometimes double the number of attacks required to kill them (from 1 to 2). Ideally, you'd make it so that it increased the required attacks from 1 to 2 exactly 25% of the time, but there's no guarantee that a 25% boost (or even any fixed boost) will be anywhere close to that. Simply adding 25% more monsters would work, except that boosts the overlord's damage output, which means he can gain conquest about 25% faster, which isn't the goal--plus, the number of monsters is small enough that round-off error would be an issue.

Moving Through the Dungeon: Each of the heroes moves independently; for them to all reach an area, the scaling is automatic. However...

Grabbing Treasure: Only one hero needs to reach a glyph, chest, etc. in order to activate it. Making it so that it requires 1.25 heroes to touch it isn't terribly practical. I glossed over this for Enduring Evil and I think it works OK, but Road to Legend is all about blitzing, which makes this much more important.

Healing: Suppose all heroes spend their turns healing up. You don't want the 5-hero party to heal the same amount per hero , because damage and conquest don't scale up; you want them to heal the same amount total . That means that the per-hero healing needs to be reduced by 20%.

Defensive Actions: Dodging, invisibility potions, running behind a corner, etc. If the monsters can attack whoever they want, this works pretty much the same at any game size; if the heroes can force the monsters to attack a given target, and heap defensive bonuses on that hero, the larger party gets an advantage.

Losing Actions: If a hero loses an actiondue to being stunned, or having his movement thrown off by a trap, or being webbed when he really needs to move, etc.that affects the smaller party more (proportionately) than the larger one. Theoretically, the overlord would need to throw out 25% more action denial. Of course, the details are more complicated.

Those aren't the only things to consider when scaling, and some of those are more important than others, but I think it makes it pretty clear that no simple change is going to make the game scale "like it's supposed to." You might be able to find a simple change that makes things balanced overall (even if the heroes get advantages in some areas and disadvantages in others), but I don't see any good way to find such a solution other than by lots of playtesting. And playtesting RtL is a pain because the game is just really long.

The other thing your missing is how 5 heroes can cover LOS a lot better (especially if they had Boggs the Rat), making spawning extremely difficult for the OL. I'm considering modifying the Dungeon Leader to be the spawner, meaning all monsters spawn next to the dungeon leader, regardless of LOS, and until the leader is killed, spawns can keep happening...

-shnar

My friends and i just orded rtl as well and will need to try to balance for 5 heroes. Thanks for the suggestions I will post back if we can get them to work out.

Underlord said:

Just play D&D....

That's definitely an option. 4th edition D&D can be played almost exactly like a more rules-heavy version of Descent, and was designed with 5 PCs in mind.

edroz said:

edroz said:

Well said... while I personally find Descent to be more fun for my playstyle than DnD4th ed (I just don't got the Role-Play bug no more), the dungeons in 4th ed did fulfil my dungeon crawl needs for a time. Descent and RTL especially have very delicate balance issues to begin with and I just can't see how adding a 5th hero would even be remotely fun for the OL player, nor (I suspect) for the hero players.

Just my opinion but if it works for you and you're willing to put in the time, go for it.

Here's my 2 cents worth of suggestions for upscaling for 5 heroes.

I chose to upgrade the OL options and powers instead of downgrading hero options. Why?

Well, the heroes just got a boost of (at least) 25%, why shouldn't the OL get such a boost, too?

You could use any or all of these suggestions:

1) allow the OL to draw 1 additional card per turn, plus increase his hand size maximum to 10 (without any avatar upgrades).

2) allow the OL to pre-place additional monsters in total reinforcement cost equal to the total number of treasure items (not shop items) owned by the heroes (master monsters equal 1.5 times the reinforcement cost, rounding up). If a dungeon level restricts monsters choices, you may only place the monsters stated on the dungeon card. Dito for encounters. BTW: this tweak resolves many problems of standard higher level RTL campaigns, if you count copper items as worth 1 item, silver as 2, and gold items as worth 3 reinforcement cost).

3) the OL requires only 12 threat to flip the reinforcement marker (and maybe even only 10 and 6 at silver and gold campaign level!)

4) all spawn cards cost 1 less threat to play

5) all spawn cards spawning more than 2 monsters spawn 2 additional normal monsters of the same type

6) all spawn cards generating only 2 or 1 monster(s) spawn 1 additional normal monster of the same type.

7) allow one spawn card to be played disregarding LoS once per dungeon level. Spawn all these monsters as far away as possible from the heroes.

8) all master monsters life, armor and speed is upgraded by 20%, rounding up

9) upgrade all dungeon leaders' and lieutenants' life and armor by 20%, rounding UP. Also give all of them a Speed+1/+2/+3 bonus.

Again, these are merely suggestions and you don't have to use all of them at once.

I personally would go for rules 1, 2, 3, 7, and 9, if the OL has 10 XP or more greater than the heroes at the start of a game week, and all rules if he has 10 or more XP fewer than the heroes at the start of a game week.

We are currently playing the campaign with 5 heroes instead of 4. Here is what we have came up with so far, and we are all willing to tweak in game. I am really trying to avoid boosting monster stats, because sitting around with a calculator every roll of the dice is going to kill the game IMO. (we boost the stats in vanilla, making for a headache of a game that lasts around 11hrs. We haven't even got into expansion dungeons yet)

Heroes only collect 400 coins from treasure piles instead of 500

Heroes only throw 4 die instead of 5 for chests and encounter loot

OL gets 5 threat at the start of each turn

All familiar skill cards removed

Heroes cannot flee dungeon until OL has accumulated more XP than what is available in a normal dungeon for heroes. (cannot flee until OL has 18 XP)

How it is going so far: OL is sorc. king (he drew 2 avatars, picked one). He is getting 6 threat every turn in a dungeon. Our first dungeon level was Trial by Fire (the one with hellhound, dragon, and demon leaders). Heroes - 12xp OL - 24xp. I figure the lack of money is going to negatively affect the heroes in a big way. OL is going to be able to upgrade a monster set as soon as we are done with 1st dungeon. We'll see what happens.

Rustydust, when you play this way do the heroes take extra money for coin piles and throw an extra die for treasures? Or do you stick with 400 coins and the 4 dice even with the extra hereo?

UPDATE: Yeah, we scrapped the above rules for 5 hero RtL and have went with a more standard fix.

1. 5 threat for OL

2. 20% boost for monsters armor and health (20% seems easier to figure on the fly)

3. Heroes determine at the start of each dungeon lvl. one hero who will not count for LOS. This hero is marked on the board to make it easier to see for all.

4. 5 dice rolls for treasure and loot all the way around.

5. familiars back in play.

The OL was destroying the group 1st time around with the 1st set of rules. (although this was probably brought on by bad play as well) Either way, our current format has been more fun for both sides.

Just an update of what our group did:

We had a 5th hero join the party for one session (and extra friend came along and wanted to play) and we did the following:

- 5 dice for treasures
- 500 Coins on piles
- 5 Threat for OL

Everything else was the same. It played *greatly* into the hands of the heroes. CP before was something like 30 to 50, now it's almost even at 65 to 70. That extra hero did a lot, not really in anti-spawning, but just in extra attack, etc.

Fortunately, it was for one gaming session only, and it re-moralized the troops and everyone wants to continue playing (they almost gave up last session).

-shnar

We often wind up with 5 heroes. This is what we do:

1. OL - 5 threat per turn

2. Starting gold increased by 300

3. Gold Piles - 500 gold

4. Chest - no change

5. Monsters - no change

6. Doom! is placed in play and doesn't count towards limit of powers

Line of sight does become a pain for spawning but the extra die upgrade from Doom! really helps.