The new divine favor allows some new strategies for the advanced campaign.
At first, I have to say that I really don’t like those strategies because I think they’ll kill the play-style of Descent. But I want to demonstrate those strategies in order to illustrate why exactly I think Devine Favor is a concept that leads in the wrong direction, especially in the current version (conquest-value-decrease down to a minimum of 0).

Strategy: 2-conquest-value-heroes only

At the start of the campaign, you only pick heroes with a conquest-value of 2.
As soon as the OL goes in lead with 50 conquest points, he can’t earn one single more conquest token at all (until the heroes earn some more XP, of course). The heroes can play all dungeons without fear of getting slaughtered, because if they get slaughtered, there is no use for the OL.
They can grab all treasures without fear, they can take any risk they want because it isn’t a risk any longer. When they die, they will simply come back and nothing more happens. No penalty at all.

Moreover, the OL can never lead with more than about 53 conquest points (a group kill after leading with 49 CP. All right, there could be a group kill with tons of curse tokens, but the probability isn't high.). It’s a natural limit for the Avatars hitpoints at the end. The worst score at the end will be something like 327 to 274 – no matter how good the OL plays. You can start to count the hitpoints for the final fight right now, and the result doesn’t seem bad for the heroes.

My personal conclusion: I don’t like this system, I think it is to easy to abuse it. Think how frustrated an OL will be, knowing he can’t earn more XP in a dungeon than the heroes after he gained the lead.

Graf said:

I think if you play with a house rule that divine favor has a minimum of 1 instead of 0 conquest, then it will go a long way to help with problems like this.

Unless the heroes plan on never gaining any XP, it's a momentary advantage at best. Still draw the levels, but don't bother setting up the dungeons at that point. just give the treasure and xp, and let the Overlord play a crushing blow once per two levels. Once the game actually matters again, go back to playing things out. As long as everyone is happy with it, there's no problem. If the Overlord isn't happy with it, but the heroes insist on doing it anyway, find another group.

Don't knock it until you try it. I have a feeling that if that's the strategy your heroes choose, then the end game won't play out well, since the OL will be have all that extra health...

-shnar

So, let's say the heroes decide to do this...oh, let's say, starting at the very beginning of the game. OL rapidly gets up to around 50 conquest, heroes run around collecting gold and avoiding XP. The goal is to get all the copper equipment they want and a ton of reserve money before the campaign advances to silver level. It seems to me the relevant questions are:

1) How much can the overlord punish the heroes on the overland map for this delay? Is ~50 XP enough for the overlord to raze his way to a win or otherwise cause serious harm to the heroes, assuming they're running around with no XP but lots of treasure?

2) How long can the heroes maintain this state, and how much wealth can they accumulate in that time? I vaguely seem to recall that the OL gets 1 free XP each turn, so assuming the heroes grab just enough glyphs to prevent the OL from increasing his lead beyond about 52, I think that puts a limit of around 75 weeks in copper (plus whatever it takes the OL to earn his first 50). Can the OL force a jump to silver sooner than that? How much loot can the heroes grab in an average week? (Don't forget the new treasure maps.)

3) Assuming the heroes start the silver campaign level 50 conquest behind but with "infinite" gold (or whatever you calculated from #2), and then start playing "normally" and trying to take back the lead in conquest, are they better or worse off than a "normal" game? By how much?

Regarding treasure maps, you have to consider that if the heroes don't want to earn xp, they can't kill level leaders except to maintain the 50 xp gap. Treasure map fragments are rewarded when you complete the third level of a dungeon, which means 8 xp for all 3 leaders, assuming standard levels (kill boss, door unlocks, get out). That limits the team to 1 fragment every 8 weeks assuming the OL is only getting his 1 conquest per turn, so one extra treasure every 32 weeks. You'd have to blitz the first level of a dungeon 7 weeks in a row, then finish a dungeon on the 8th week.

Also, I think I saw that party upgrades (like the staff of the wild) now cost XP as well as money (presumably to make up for there being no Tamalir upgrades). A party avoiding upgrades is going to be missing out on those. I don't know what they're like in soB, though, so it might not be a big deal.

A bigger problem would be that you're stuck with a bunch of squishy 2 CP heroes. Encounters and lieutenant fights could go very badly, especially early on.

Also, only 2 CP heroes might leave the heroes weaker at the endgame as well.

A simple solution is that the Conquest Advanatge should only kick in once in either direction. Also OL ought to get +1 Conquest a week when at a disadvantage.

Landrec or Astarra are 2-point heroes. I wouldn't call them squichy.

Quote: "then the end game won't play out well, since the OL will be have all that extra health..."

The point is: there won't be a big advance of extra health at all, as the OL will never lead with more than about 53 CP. In RTL, it was normal that the OL was leading with much more CP, here this won't ever happen if you take this strategy.

Quote: "Unless the heroes plan on never gaining any XP, it's a momentary advantage at best. Still draw the levels, but don't bother setting up the dungeons at that point. just give the treasure and xp, and let the Overlord play a crushing blow once per two levels. Once the game actually matters again, go back to playing things out. As long as everyone is happy with it, there's no problem. If the Overlord isn't happy with it, but the heroes insist on doing it anyway, find another group."

The next point: This is exactly what I was talking about when I wrote that this Divine Favor rule will kill the spirit of the game. This way of playing the game doesn't sound to me very interesting. Just counting the points of a dungeon and no gameplay at all until it matters agein - no, not for me.

Finally: You don't have to play this strategy literally. Just pick a party of heroes with - say - two conquest-2-heroes. As soon as the OL gains the lead with 50 XP, just send all other heroes to town and let the two "cheap" heroes kill all monsters.

Quote: "Don't knock it until you try it."

Of course, you are perfectly right, Shnar. But there are systemic problems that are predictable. I think the minimum of conquest-values should be 1, no matter what happens.

And I fear that this Divine Favor will be abused in many ways.

REMARK: Sorry, but the quotation system doesn't work accurate.

In our current RtL session, the OL would be happy if there was the "Divine Factor" rule, as the heroes are leading with about 50 conquest. So just because this is a new expansion, we are not forced to forget everything we learned from RtL, especially when it comes to fleeing or blitzing.

And as said before, the OL has other means to gain power than just killing the heroes. Time is on his side, especially if he can get out early some Lts and raze some cities. As learned in RtL, if you cannot hit the heroes in the dungeon, hit them on the map.

I can see that this rule could lead to some exploits, but already screaming "Exploit" before one has even played a single dungeon is a bit too fast for me.

In another tread, KW posted:

"Yeah...that should be a minimum of 1. Consider it errata'ed."

Problem solved. And I'm glad that this problem has been brought up and discussed early.

The actual problem with Divine Favor is that it denies any reward to the side that plays better.

That being said, even if conquest values are rediced to zero the heroes can not win with this strategy. The OL will easily raze cities, thus gaining more conquest per week. And the heroes are already a lot slower on the overland map than in RtL.

Most important, ship upgrades cost XP and without at least some of these upgrades, travelling along a sea trail is suicide. Thus, they can't even reach the sieging Lt's. Once the OL gets another Lt (which only some avatars can do in copper), the game is over (actually, with the current ruleset it is over regardless of how much XP or treasure the heroes have... but that is a different problem).

Darastin said:

How so?

Short answer: Unkillable Lts.

Long answer:

Most Lts - including the Siren, the generic Lt every Avatar can buy for 5 XP - come without a ship. Thus, they are set up on any border of the location (with a certain minimum distance to the Revenge ). The smart thing to do is to place the Lt exactly at the opposite side of the ship. There, he (she/it) is outside of the firing angle of any cannons and too far away for the heroes to reach in one turn (except maybe for Runemaster Thorn - his teleportation ability will be priceless on those maps due to the long distances involved). So, you are almost guaranteed to survive the first turn. Then just flee. This merely moves the Lt one trail away from the encounter location. Thus, while you can keep one of them occupied by attacking them again and again, a second one will be free to raze the cities.

In RtL, there were locations where the Lt could be reached in one turn by the heroes and even if the Lt managed to escape, they were reset to the Overlords Keep, thus losing a lot more time. Time the heroes could use to play dungeons, train skills and traits and all that stuff.

Ah. Good catch. Looks like something we'll have to agree not to do once we get around to playing SoB (assuming they haven't errataed something to make it unworkable).