As already discussed in other threads, SoB introduced some changes to the campaign system. Now I'm thinking about using all those rules for a new RtL campaign. However I'm concerned that they might cause some unforeseen problems. I'd like your opinions.

1) Nanok

His Armor rating is equal to his melee trait.

2) Secret Training

Maximum fatigue is increased by one.

3) Scaling Dungeon Leaders

Dungeon Leaders gain X extra wounds and Y extra armor per Campaign level.

4) Lieutenant Encounters

The OV no longer has access to OV cards. Instead, lieutenants may "Ready" to place Aim, Dodge or Guard orders.

5) Final Battle

Heroes each receive +1 maximum wounds for every 4 conquest tokens they've collected since the beginning of the campaign. The Avatar receives +2 maximum wounds for every conquest token he has collected since the beginning of the campaign.

6) Divine Favor

The hero conquest value increases/decreases for every 25 XP the heroes/the OV lead in the campaign.

7) Treasure Sites

Heroes my collect Buried treasures by collecting treasure map pieces.

At the moment, I'd say I'll definately use 1) - 3) and 6) but I'm not sure whether 4) or 5) will harm the "balancing" of RtL. I think 7) should rather remain a special SoB option.

theasaris said:

To 4:

Orders won`t save the lieutenants as long as they get killed in the first turn. But treachery trap cards may rescue them.

Maybe the ship-to-ship-situation changes the lieutnants battle, so there are no treachery cards needed any more. But in RTL, I think treachery cards are essential.

To 5: I'm not sure if making the final battle longer will make it better as well - or even balance it. As long as the heroes will cause more damage with their attacks than the Avatar, it won't balance the game to simply multiply the wounds.

(Maybe yes, but only if the OL is leading in conquest in a very high degree.)

To 1: Nanok doesn't sound like a good pick any more with only two armor at the start, does he? Maybe you should at least give him his melee-trait plus 1.

my opinions:

1): This rebalancing of Nanok makes him nigh worthless IMO. He now starts as a standard melee hero with 2 armor with no further abilities and an inability to wear armor. He wasn't that unbalanced anyway, A smart Overlord can get around him. His only ability was his high defence, at least then make him able to wear armor again. I don't plan on using this rule.

2) I'll definately be using this. Fatigue is one of the reasons why the heroes can become so overpowered in Gold.

3) I'm already using it in RtL and it has worked well up to now.

4) Have not used this one yet. I think the Farrows would be very weak without some treachery to help them.

5) This is a tough one. Maybe we'll try it once and see what happens. Not too sure though.... A longer battle doesn't necessarily mean a more balanced one. And it could get boring hacking trough these huge life pools.

As for two other SoB rules: I am not using the conquest balancing rule. The overlord needs more XP in RtL or he is toast, he has so much more he needs to upgrade to be able to hurt the heroes at higher campaign levels.

I am trying to incorporate the treasure map... I like the idea to reward the heroes for finishing a dungeon. Not sure where to put the X' es on the RtL board yet though.

Scy800 said:

Some suggestions where to put the X'es:

1. at the trails of the legendary areas that can not be entered in the current campaign level (as long as it is copper, than the X'es are on The Fouls Rapids and the Valley of Souls, as soon as it gets silver, than the X'es are on the Caverns of Thuul and the Valley of Souls, at gold campaign level the X'es are placed on the caverns of Thuul and The Fools Rapids).

2. Always at the trails adjacant to the OLs keep. If there is only one trail adjacant to it, than there is only one X in game.

3 At some trails at the edge of the world: Guardian Hills, Sacred Bog of Bator etc. Maybe you could use the trails of the OLs keeps from Avatars that are NOT in play (Blackthorn Grove, Whispering Forest, Mountains of Despair)

4. at the secret master's trails.

5. The X is at the place where they will win their next encounter. Or maybe at the next dungeon they have finished completely.

To 1: You might be right that compared to other Tanks Nanok might now be weak with the new rules, but he'll still get free armor improvements with each trait upgrade. Other tanks won't improve their armor that easily, if at all.

To 4: I see your point regarding the different nature of encounters in SoB, Graf. Traps wouldn't make much sense on a ship anyway. Perhaps treachery should really be kept for RtL.

To 5: I've yet to see a Final Battle so I can't really say anything on that. But I'd just guess this change makes to battle more epic? I think I've read some report of a Final Battle where the Avatar died in two rounds. I'd really hate to see that happen and can't imagine the heroes would enjoy such an ending to a campaign either. So right now I'd vote in favor of adopting that rule.

6) Conquest Balancing

Oh right, I forgot about that one. I think I'll use that. Scy800, your arguments against it don't really convince me. The OV has to purchase exactly the same upgrades in SoB, so you're automatically implying that this rule breaks balancing in SoB as well.

7) Treasure Sites

Don't you agree that this rather belongs to the pirates-theme? Going around with a ship searching for long lost treasure maps? I think I'll leave that to SoB.

theasaris said:

Other heroes upgrade their armor by spending money, which is vastly easier than spending money, xp, and an extra week in town. Reducing Nanok's ability this much makes him worthless. At the bare minimum you should his conquest value, though even that is going to leave anyone using him feeling ripped off.

James McMurray said:

You make this sound is if it were a house rule. To emphasize: this rules change is taken directly from the Sea of Blood rulebook. I guess FFG must have had a reason to weaken his ability.

I still imagine Nanok to be worth taking, as he can reach higher armor values than any other hero.

You make this sound is if it were a house rule. To emphasize: this rules change is taken directly from the Sea of Blood rulebook. I guess FFG must have had a reason to weaken his ability.

It's 100% a house rule if you're adding it into Road to Legend. It seems to me like FFG screwed the pooch on this one by over-reacting, but without full access to Sea of blood I can't tell what other things may be in the set that make it reasonable.

Are you also using every other rule from Sea of Blood, the entire gestalt of which was playtested and presumably balanced, or just picking the bits you like and ignoring the (hopefully) hours of playtesting that FFG did to make sure that these changes make sense within the campaign's framework?

I still imagine Nanok to be worth taking, as he can reach higher armor values than any other hero.

How? With this change his maximum armor is 5. Brother Glyr can start with that. Any other 2 armor hero can get that with copper gear, and still have their in-game ability and 3 melee dice. They'll have one less base movement, but IMX movement for high armor heroes rarely comes from advancing, and the movement from Knight would be the same for either layout.

-

Have you asked the players if any of them would consider playing this neutered version of Nanok? If the answer is yes, go for it. If it's no, just remove him completely so nobody has the bad luck of drawing him in their 3 choices and having their viable options reduced to 2.

Comparing the neutered Nanok to other 4-point high armor heroes:

Varikas's fatigure ragain means that unless they're running, the movement is the same when Varikas dons +3 armor, but Varikas has more options because fatigue does more than movement and grants movement when battling.

Trenloe loses one speed but starts with much better offense because of the reroll.

Brother Glyr gets higher armor and the same movement (more movement when battling). He lacks health though, which makes a poor choice early one when pierce is rampant, but a decent one later when secret training is available.

Jaes: magic insteda of melee: nuff said.

Corbin: similar to Glyr, though with inborn trap protection instead of one extra point of movement.

Mordrog: a weaker (IMO) version of Varikas, though he's got better offense.

Nara: far and away better, even with the lower health.

One Fist: much better offense.

Tahlia: is any discussion of hoe much better she is than a neutered Nanok really necessary?

Yeah, I change my "I think they overreacted" to "they definitely overreacted."

I could possibly see Nanok as a good runner with this nut sack removal, but that means you're relegating a 5-melee tank to the role of running around and grabbing stuff, when you could have had a lower cost one with more speed.

I'm glad the problem with Nanok has had something official done about it. His previous self was completely broken in RtL. As for only having armor equal to his Melee trait, this DOES make him horribly, horribly weak off the start. But I think if his armor was Melee + 1, he'd still actually be overpowered (though obviously less so than Melee + 2). An important thing to realize about Nanok is that it's not only his own armor that's important; sure, any other tank can have armor 5 by finding the plate-mail. But with Nanok, you can have TWO tanks with armor 5+, because Nanok doesn't NEED the platemail, thus freeing it up for someone else. Thus, even in his neutered state, you can turbo-charge his melee dice to potentially end up with two 16-life, armor-5 Hereos (and that's without Ring of Protection, which can go on either) by the mid-point of Copper level. This is something you cannot do with any other Hero combination. And Nanok can STILL pick up enduring, which is awesome for him but not for anyone else. So the bottom line is you can still get him to Armor 6 (a very respectable total) without consuming any of the resources necessary to get someone else to Armor 6.

As for opinions on the other changes you mention:

Scaling bosses are good. My comprehensive RtL house rules use them already.

Less Fatigue is good. I did something similar to that as well (although I was more generous in fact).

The treachery change sounds extremely dodgy. Right now, in RtL, Lieutenant fights are the ONLY reason to buy treachery. It is not worth its cost in the dungeons for anyone except MAYBE the Spider Queen (who can hide it in her parlor), even then, definitely only traps. It would need to be drastically cheaper if the Lieutenants can no longer use it.

Overlord life: I did massive tweaking to the Avatar fight to fix it up. This is a different way of going about it than I did. If you check the math, the Avatar is actually getting life twice as fast as the Heroes, so maybe this is good for him. However, I found in my tests that becaues the Avatars have such weak offence, an increase of a single point of damage per attack per Hero (say, adding Command to the party) is worth something like ~40 HP for the Avatar. So I really feel like adding these extra HP is like delaying the inevitable.

I really, really despise the Divine Favor, and that's not even including the fact that from what I've seen, it's obviously broken (though easily fixable). It also totally favors the Heroes, since having the 2-point character's value cut in HALF when he's up by a measly 25 CT is a huge blow (basically cuts his kill-income in half), whereas raising Hero CT values by 1 when they're so powerful you can't kill them anyway doesn't help. Plus I hate negative-feedback mechanisms in general.

One small note on Nanok, just remember his armor can never be Crushing Blowed away...

-shnar

Too theasaris: I am actually worried that the divine favor rule is broken in Sea of Blood too, but we'll see. I agree with the assessment The immortal gave in his last post.

Too Graf: I like the legendary area idea for the X'es. I'll use that and see what happens.

I do realise these rule changes were done to balance SoB, but I am just going to try if any of them help make RtL an even more enjoyable experience. If something doesn't work we'll just stop using it.

Do people really find nanok that overpowered in RtL? He can go down pretty good with high damage monsters (gotta love gust of wind and a beastman war party) in combination with some nasty traps. I agree it's tough, but that's why I tend to target the other heroes...

The dream combo in our group is Nanok + Hunting the Wyrm (for Ironskin) + Taunt. Outside of that, he seems powerful but not incredibly broken, though we haven't had a chance to actually use him yet.

Nanok is strong because by mid-point in Copper level, he can trivially have 8 armor (and relatively easily 9 if he picks up Enduring). Any other 16 HP tank can only have at most 6, and that requires finding the Platemail, which you might go quite a while without seeing. A dwarf can hit armor 7, but they only have 8 life and thus can be trapped much more easily and/or be killed by a couple of really lucky rolls from Master Naga.

The reason this is a problem is that Copper monsters CANNOT hurt armor 8. Only a tiny fraction of them even scratch this on a maximum roll, and the only spawnable one to do so is the Master Beastman. So sure, you'll have one class at Silver soon enough (hopefully), but 2/3rds of your monsters are automatic write-offs, and many Silver monsters can't scratch armor 8 either (non-master Silver Skeletons can't, for example, Silver Sorcerers do at most 2 on a max roll). Add to the fact that Nanok can be dodging and have 2 shields on most of the time, and it is impossible to kill him in practice.

Attack the weaker heroes, you say? Why are they even on the map? Once Nanok has 8 or 9 armor, he CANNOT die at Copper level, so he just does the whole dungeon by himself. Doesn't matter how long it takes, because nothing can hurt him. Or alternatively, if the level can be easily controlled in terms of spawning, you can have one hero with armor 6 (plate-mail + Ring of protection) and Nanok at 7 which, while not impossible to hurt, can take out pretty much anything without taking anywhere near a lethal level of damage.

With ANY other hero combination, the best tag-team you can have is an Armor 6 plus a very, very squishable armor 4 (or 5, if it's a dwarf, but again, only 8 HP then). 6-4 is a WORLD of difference from 6-7. Armor 6 is still really, really tough for Copper monsters. I ran the numbers once and the basic result is that every point of armor after 4 doubles a Hero's effective health (which makes a lot of sense, given that dwarves have 1 more armor but half the health).

Later in the game (by Gold level), the standard tanks can reach Armor 8 too, but by then the monsters can actually deal with that. But having Nanok has given the Heroes such a big advantage in the early game that it doesn't matter (and besides, he's still AWESOME at Gold, just no longer IMPOSSIBLE to hurt).

Why have you not upgraded your monsters and/or put overland pressure on the heroes by the time Nanok has collected 45xp to get to max armor? Have you played this out, or is it fear-based theory?

I have both played it out and seen it played out, and done all the math behind it.

I'm also not saying that Nanok is an automatic overall win for the Heroes (although he's close). They still have to play well and not make mistakes early on, which is true of any party. I'm just saying he's categorically vastly superior to any other Hero and makes for very boring games where the Overlord is totally neutered because Nanok can't be killed, and that are tactically uninteresting for the players as well, since most of the characters just sit in town. Even if the Conquest splits evenly up to the 45-45 point, the entire second half of Copper level will be trivial for the Heroes, as the Overlord will earn nothing in dungeons and is entirely dependent on his per-turn pension. The decision to nerf him was long overdue.

A thought on Nanok. Armour = melee trait +X. X= 0 at copper, 1 at silver, 2 at gold.

We just went into Silver at the end of last session, no-one has done anything yet. We have Nanok on 5 melee and he started the campaign with Enduring.

Through judicious use of traps, big monsters with pierce and the like, I've killed him a couple of times, but not often. This should take the edge off of him at lowe levels.

That fix is a good compromise, although I think that the main problem (and why he got nerfed) is that RtL lets Nanok hunt down and obtain all of the skills and items that max out his armor. It's not that he can get 7 armor on his own in copper, it's that he can almost always have 10+ armor by Gold level, and your fix doesn't really address that.

Good points, The_Immortal! My player group would never think to just sit out an entire dungeon and let nanok do everything. They would find that too boring (and i would stop playing than and there too, games need to be fun too). I think Slev might have a nice balancing idea in that case, but I don't think it will be necessary in our group.

I'm slowly making my way through it but flipped ahead a bit.

Mata and Kata are now incredibly awesome and will just be nasty on a high speed/high fatigue hero who has access to wizardy skills.

Mata and Kata
These familiars are granted by a Wizardry skill card, and follow the rules governing familiars. Mata and Kata’s speed is 6. Mata and Kata are both represented by markers that may move independently of each other. The familiars can each be given or pick up and carry one item (including potions). They can give a carried item to an adjacent hero ( or each other, whether they are adjacent or not ) by spending one movement point. If Mata and Kata begin their turn in the same space, they may move together. While moving together, they may pick up and carry one chest, treasure pile, or runekey . If they wish, they may still carry one normal item instead. Mata and Kata cannot enter the same space as another figure while carrying a chest, treasure pile, or runekey. Mata and Kata may separate at the beginning of any of their turns, but if they do, any chest, treasure pile, or runekey they are carrying must immediately be dropped and left where it is.

I didn't notice that they could give items to each other without being adjacent . That's pretty crazy. Though if SoB continues the trend of not putting potions in the random dungeon levels, it won't happen all that often. I hope that's not a rule they plan on using in vanilla Descent.

I'm thinking more of Kata being next to the runner who just opened a chest, and being able to hand the Staff of the Grave to the mage facing the Undying Big Guy through Mata who is across the **** level in one turn. At least I think it can work that way.

Yea, I think it could work that way, although going straight by the rules, even in SoB, when you open a chest the treasure goes directly where you want it. Which I think is pretty stupid, even speaking a typically hero player. So we play that the hero who opens the chest is the one who picks everything up in it, and if he finds a great weapon for someone else, he needs to find a way to get it over there.

Duh...forgot about the instant chest distribution.

Okay, how long until someone asks if that whole Mata and Kata thing will work while one of them is in town and the other in the dungeon? (and no, it will not work).

Big Remy said:

Familiars can't go to town, so the situation can never come up.