Greetings,

I recently bought vanillla descent and greatly enjoyed it. My group loves the mostly-cooperative gameplay and, as D&D players, we love the setting and elements. We like the dungeon crawling feel and our experiences have been great so far. I plan on buying WoD, AoD, and ToI as these seem to add more elements of the game that we like.

My only concern stands with Road to Legend. While I may personally like the overarching campaign (I am usually the OL) I don't think my players would want to participate. So I was wondering if Road to Legend added many elements that help the dungeoncrawling aspect of the game or if it just focuses on the main campaign? Also, many reviews I read seemed to view RtL in a bad view. What are all of your personal experiences?

Acebob said:

RtL adds little if you don't use the advanced campaign, the great majority of the set is used entirely for it. Granted, there's a lot of neat stuff in there, and with a little houseruling, you could incorporate it into vanilla descent, perhaps allow people to upgrade to silver/gold dice using fatigue or power potions, or maybe user the random dungeons to craft a more variable dungeon experience, where the heroes start with X conquest (and the OL some amount of treachery), and then do 3 random dungeons, or perhaps make a survival mode and see how many dungeon levels the heroes can do before they run out of conquest.

The advanced campaign is pretty cool, with some balance issues to cope with. It does require a greater investment of time to complete a full game (putting a rough estimate at 40-80 hours to make it all the way through the final battle), so it would be played over many game sessions. The balance can cause some issues, as the heroes can get thrown around if they're not careful in copper level, it could go either way in silver level as the heroes and OL both advance their power, and if the heroes survive to gold level, their equipment quickly becomes godly and they start taking control again, and the OL will likely have to invest in item destruction treachery to have a chance. And your heroes might lose interest long before gold if you take a hefty early lead.

Personally I like the advanced campaign, I feel that while it can sometimes have some trouble with balance, and a little bit of house ruling here and there can help, it's overall an enjoyable experience to play and advance your heroes/minions. So the question seems to lie in whether your players would be up for that different sort of gameplay. If not, there's plenty of exciting quests between the base game and the 4 other expansions, I'd personally love to get a chance to try out some more of those, I've practically only done the advanced campaign.

Unless I'm much mistaken, Road to Legend adds nothing that is designed to be used outside the extended campaign. I've seen suggested house rules for playing through a few of the RtL dungeons as a one-off game, but if you're looking for new monsters, treasures, skills, heroes, overlord cards, and the like, you won't find them. If you don't actually want to play the extended campaign, I'd stick to the others.

If you're really dying to house-rule the silver and gold dice into a vanilla game, you can buy those separately. But you'd need to really like sparkly colors to consider that worthwhile.

If your not up for a really long running campaign, I'd skip RTL. All the other sets will easily supply you with tons of play time. RTL is fun, but there are some frustrations that will come from playing it, but that's partially because descent wasn't created with a long-term campaign in mind when it was first made. RTL does have a bit of butterfly effect in that some early mistakes can really cost you big later in the game, and since it is such a long game, that may bother some players. Still, I think it's up there on my list of great gaming experiences, especially as the campaign is very low on book-keeping.

I just recently purchased RtL for my group. We also played D&D together. So far we all like RtL much better than normal Descent. We used the basic campaign suggested in the JitD main box, but my players were growing very frustrated that they could never actually advance their characters. They saw no point in spending 1000 gold to buy a random skill that they would not even be able to use the next time we played. Moreover, many of the WoD dungeons did not even have gold treasures at all, so they started feeling powered -down- as we started into that campaign.

Admittedly, we are not too far into RtL - just about 4 game weeks in and at the copper level. However, they are excitedly making plans of what they want to upgrade on their characters and are loving how they can power up their power dice! And the look of relief when I told them that they get to keep any items they find as long as they want was priceless.

For me, RtL turns Descent into a more cohesive whole with characters you care about instead of just some random party doing some random dungeon. The above posters are correct, though, in that if you and your players do not like a longer campaign feel, then RtL would not be for you.

Vanilla Descent is rather anti-climactic. You spend a good 4 hours progressing through a dungeon and building a character up and when he's finally really good, BOOM, the quest is over and you start back at "level 1". The best part of RtL is that not only is there a slower progression of your character, but there's a good few sessions of playing while your character is bad-ass!

If RtL seems a bit clunky, pick up Sea of Blood when it comes out next month! It looks *very* cool, and is such a shake up to game play (both vanilla and RtL) that it should be very fun

-shnar

I don't find Vanilla anti-climactic at all. Instead, the quests in vanilla offer sometimes rather difficult tactical puzzles to be solved, instead of an epic, over-arcing quest. That may seem problematic for a dungeon crawler, but I think it's pretty great. Each quest is a variation on a theme (mechanics), which can be quite beautiful.

My group just put RTL away after 6 dungeons, the Hero's just got tired playing it. Will maybe try again and have longer breaks between sessions next time.

Road to Legend can be fun, but it's a long term investment. I means several months if your group meets to play once a week. It is a bit long for a board game environment and we've only played one or two campaigns (none of which made it to the final battle, or even the gold campaign level) but that's not to say I'm disappointed with it. I do enjoy all the extra bits like outdoor terrain and so on.

In summary, if I had gotten into Runebound before the release of Road to Legend, I might've skipped it as Runebound provides a better "campaign" experience in my opinion, but I'm nto disappointed with Road to Legend either. It has its place, and the bits will most certainly come in handy in the future for RPGs and such (Terrinoth or otherwise.)

The anti-climactic feel of vanilla is not in how the dungeon is designed, it's how the game plays overall. The hero players (at least in my groups) feel like they've invested a lot of time getting their characters to a really good power level, then suddenly the game is over and they have to start back at level 0. They prefer having a longer experience with their uber characters...

-shnar

I think that having longer breaks between sessions is the answer, we played once or twice a week for 3 month. next, will play a week/dungeon level, and then take a break for a few weeks, play other stuff, then come back to the game. We are lucky that we can leave the game up if we want, while we do other stuff.