A few Overlord questions

By balim, in Descent: Journeys in the Dark

Posted at
Hello, this is my first post in this section, I would like to thank all the people who keep this forum alive which has helped me a lot since me and my group of players have returned to play the game. With a special mention to Zaltyre, his amazing contribution in the forum relevant to the rules has helped me a lot.


I have owned a Descent journeys in the dark since 1 year and 8 months ago, but due to time issues, my group and I have played less than what I would like to. We started playing again since last december and we decided to start with heirs of blood. We had a lot of issues with regard to the rules during the campaign and the forums have helped me a lot, due to poor decisions, bad luck and lack of rules understanding, the campaign is right now on my favor. I have in my possession all the artifacts that were awarded during the campaign, and also I have won 6 of 8 quests that have been played until now.


Now, due to the things mentioned above, my players are feeling that "descent" is too hard for players to win it, and they said that the campaign it's really hard. So, I have came to realized that maybe I'm doing something wrong as overlord. I have a few questions that I would like to ask, in a attempt to improve my player's gaming experience in descent as an overlord.


1.- How much quest disclosure is OK to grant to my group of players? Until now I have always told them everything not related to reinforcements or rewards, I have kept those as a surprise, and in this campaign it has been a really nasty surprise when a lieutenant comes back from the dead.


2.- It is our first campaign after a while, so we only played with the basic game components, all the hero and monster collection due to date, and the convertion kit. Does it impact the campaign in a bad way if I include the other game components, like shadow of nerekhall, labyrinth of ruin and manor of ravens? and by the way, if I include a small expansion like lair of the wyrm, can I also include the trollfens and manor of ravens?


3.- What kind of tips can you give me, so my players won't throw the towel and we can keep our campaign nights.


4.- This one for Zaltyre: I'm not an english native speaker, so I was wondering if I can translate your campaign to spanish and submit it in the quest vault; I intend to play your campaign next, once we finish the Heirs of Blood Campaign.


Regards, Balim the Overlord.

Posted at

1. You should be telling them everything, INCLUDING reinforcements and rewards. It is important for heroes to know reiforcements because it affects strategy- if a shadow dragon respawns every turn, why take the time to kill it (instead of disabling it, for example.) If the dragon is gone for good, might be worth the effort to finish off.

2.By the book, there is no problem including all the expansions. However, it is supposed to be decided before the campaign starts, and an expansion should be included fully or not at all. (If OL has access to monsters that can weaken, heroes should have access to classes and gear that weaken, too.)

3. This varies group to group. Community! Assemble!

4. I'll PM you.

Posted at

If you don't want your players to quit and your investment flushed down the toilet you need to tell them everything in the quest. It sounds like you don't natively speak English so it might be a good idea to find an OCR reader for all the quests and translate them for the players. The only hidden information you can hide as the OL are the OL cards you're holding. Preventing information other than that is borderline cheating.

Edited by Cursain
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First of all the campaign book is totally open information, there is no secret whatsoever and in fact it's best to let the heroes read it themselves while you are picking your open groups to avert "you forget to tell me this"-anger-arguments, because you explained something when they weren't paying attention.

It also helps to point out some key points so everyone is on the same page (tell them what you can reinfroce where, what your goal is, what their goal is, in which rooms you are going to place your monsters and so on).

What should you do to keep them interested in the game? That's a good question. If one side steamrolls the other it often helps to give the rewards for winning to both teams, give the losing party some additional gold and especially tell them where they made suboptimal decisions and help them with skill selection if they keep ignoring the importance of positioning.

Imo as long as both sides aren't even in skill-level, there is no nead to be strict about rewards and so on, just make sure both parties are on a somewhat even ground, so your games stay exciting and challanging for both parties.

Another thing that worked reasonably well in my group is to bargain with the heroes, when they start to say "I don't care about the objective anymore, it's unwinnable, let's go for the search tokens instead." You can offer them 90% of the searchtokens they are likely to get, if they try to go for the win and fail (or even 100% if they are really far behind). This always makes for a much more fun and exciting finish and the heroes won't be angry if they don't make it, because they didn't get nothing.

Always try to help the weaker players to learn the game, if they are intrigued by the game in principle and want to keep on playing, you can even give them hints during the game. They will get better this way and until everyone is roughly on the same skill level, try to lift them there and make these games as enjoyable as possible (by keeping everyones resources on par or give the weaker team an advantage). There is no fun in losing on prupose to make them feel good, better give them an edge on you and fight against the odds as hard as possible. This way they will win by their own tactics and you lose against overwhelming odds, which feels much better than winning/losing, because someone intentionally handed you the win.

Edited by DAMaz
Posted at

Thank you all for your answers, I will keep in mind all your suggestions. We play in a game store owned by a friend, so it's easy to pick up players, but is hard to keep them (we are all adults, and the time is a constant issue). Zaltyre, I'll PM you once I start translating the campaign.

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3- Have patience. Your hero players will get better as they accumulate experience from playing the game. Once they know how to use their strength to their maximal potential. they will make better choices overall and therefore be able to compete a lot more with an experienced overlord. I started like you and now my players have caught up with me, making it truly challenging for me.

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I think you could point out mistakes that the (new) heroes made if they are clueless how they lost. For example; searching instead of sticking to the objective, a mage straying away from the healer, or as Zaltyre said, spending precious actions to kill a shadow dragon that respawns every turn. Or give tips about how to spend their xp. I find skills that trigger often better than skills wich are more powerful but also very situational. If there is a good item in the shop you can recommend it. Also, if the heroes were planning their turn I would remind them of the OL card that could still be in play like 'Tripwire', with this reminder they could come up with a better plan. You don't need to, but newcomers will often be caught off guard and be quite frustrated instead of blaming themselves how they could not see that coming.