I was very much looking forward to playing the Labyrinth of Ruin campaign as the Overlord. I played and liked Descent 1st Edition and I saw a lot of potential in the new edition. But now that I and my band of three heroes have nearly reached the finale of this campaign I must say that it has been one of the most one-sided and dull gaming experiences ever for me.

Our group consists of Syndrael (Beastmaster), Ashrian (Disciple) and Widow Tarha (Runemaster). I won’t go into the details of everyone’s weapons and skills. We have Rune and Stone Armors, an ally called Raythen, a recurring Wolf familiar, a Sun Stone, exploding runes, lucky charms and so on. In short: The heroes are well equipped. I, as overlord, am using the standard Overlord deck (for cards like Dash and Frenzy), upgraded with cards from the Saboteur and Warlord tree. The deck is not bad, it would work, if I got the chances to make it work, but more on that later.

At the point of writing we are in the middle of the last quest before the finale – and like most quests played before, this one is threatening to become a disaster for the OL. A part of this is due to the heroes’ heroic traits, especially Syndrael’s, which made it incredibly easy for them to rush through some of the encounters, leaving the OL hardly any chance to (re)act at all. But it’s not only that. Even after house ruling said heroic feat, we all came to the conclusion that the design of some encounters is just plain bad – and the overlord role vastly underwhelming.

The disaster started early on. From the beginning, the heroes were able to stampede through the sceneries with Syndrael’s ability of providing herself and another hero with a free move action, storming into the Overlord’s forces and killing half of them before they had the chance for retaliation. It’s not fun when your only Ettin is killed without getting a single attack. This gave the heroes an early lead in gold and equipment while the Overlord was largely reduced to trying to deny the heroes search tokens. OL victory was not an option in many encounters under such circumstances. Cards like Tripwire and Pit Trap were a compulsory inclusion in the OL deck and if he didn’t get them into his hand early on he could just sit and watch.

We finally house ruled Syndrael’s ability after the heroes killed the OL’s Lieutenant (Ariad) on their first (!) turn in one quest, instantly winning the encounter. The new rule allowed Syndrael to either give herself or another hero an uninetruptable free move. That worked better.
Still, both bad quest design and the frustratingly few options of the overlord to develop himself and his tactical possibilities kept annoying the whole group. Even the heroes, after enjoying their early victories, realized at some point that the games were repetitive and without real challenges. Up to the point where we are now, the OL won two quests; one by heavy luck and mainly due to the fact that we played the un-errata’d (read: stronger) version of the Elemental, the other one (Tipping the Scales) actually by skill and a favorable setup.
Some quests shone by exceptionally dorky design. The interlude, where the heroes have to activated some (randomly placed) statues was a bad joke which we quit half way through to save the time for something more interesting and less imbalanced. The Act II quest in which Ariad tries to morph into her new body and the OL’s only reinforcements are
a) a single Arachyura at the end(!) of his turn and too far away to be of any significant use and
b) some spiders which come up in totally predictable (and avoidable) spaces,
was worse than watching Star Wars Episode I.

The issue that particularly annoyed me (and the heroes) is that the OL is being reduced to some sort of (bad) KI in so many encounters. His meager development options over the course of a campaign consist of buying at most a dozen OL and Threat cards with the few XP he gets. On the other side the heroes gain a myriad of abilities, weapons and other equipment. What’s worse - in a lot quests the heroes, supported by an ally and a familiar, had twice as many actions (especially attack actions) on their turns as the overlord. Often the OL’s cool (and tactically selected) open monster groups do not receive any reinforcements during the encounters, making the open groups priority targets for the heroes and leaving the OL with weak single-monster reinforcements in distant areas. No feeling of commanding hordes of minions comes up under those circumstances. Add to that the fact, that the OL’s targets (like the heroes') are often determined by the random placement of tokens and the OLs available tactics become frustratingly one-dimensional and luck-dependent. If even killing the heroes for cards or threat tokens is not an option anymore because your single Volucrix Reaver per round is not able to hack through the hero with the stone Armor blocking the reinforcement point, you realize that you could spend your time doing a hundred more interesting things than to play Descent as the OL.

This is not the first bad experience our group has had with Descent 2nd edition. The core set campaign suffered from the same issues. Three heroes, as a group too strong for an overlord equipped with limited tactical options and little room for individual development. We used house rules in that campaign as well and finally gave up.
We are regular gamers. We know what we are doing, we play for victory and we discuss tactics for both sides after our games. My (and my group's) conclusion: Descent 2nd edition is meant to be a game where two equal facions try to achieve their goals, but while one of those factions (the heroes) has large potential of development, individualization and sophisticated tactics the other faction is largely forced into a predictable playstyle without many options of development. Yes, the OL gains new cards, but getting them into his hand when needed is luck-dependend. Yes, the OL gets to chose open monster groups, but if they don't reinforce, they can be largely useless.
I’m sure a lot of players will have had different experiences or can tell stories of their OL having a good time while the heroes are struggling. And that is fine, I envy those groups for their games. Also, I don’t doubt that another group of heroes would have performed differently and perhaps less devastatingly successful in our campaign. Still, the issues of bad quest design and an uninspiring Overlord role remain for me and so I’m being left demotivated and disappointed by this game.

Which quest was the one where your Lieutenant was insta-gibbed?

This game has a lot of bad IMBA-momements.

As an OL I got steamrolled all through LoR. SoN went a lot better.

What are the goals for FFG anyways? That the OL should have a 50% win chance? My group played SR -> LoR -> SoN and now just embarked on HoB. Hero win rate is ~75%.

It bears repeating that a 3 hero game is biased in favour of the heroes. Add in an ally and you tip further into the pot.

If you want a better experience, play with 4 heroes (with the players controlling the fourth as a committee)

This game has a lot of bad IMBA-momements.

As an OL I got steamrolled all through LoR. SoN went a lot better.

What are the goals for FFG anyways? That the OL should have a 50% win chance? My group played SR -> LoR -> SoN and now just embarked on HoB. Hero win rate is ~75%.

In my mind, the Overlord occupies a bit of a dual role. On one hand, he's meant to be a player that competes with the others, and he's not supposed to be pulling any punches. On the other hand, he easily ends up in the role of a game master, and I had problems hammering this into the head of one of my players, that I'm not, I'm your enemy, my goal is to kill you. Either way, I think that this role has become regrettably ingrained not only in many player's, but also within the system itself, and the game ends up slightly torn between these mutually exclusive roles.

That being said, having only played The Shadow Rune, we're sitting squarely at 50/50. They won the prologue, two Act 1 Quests, and one Act 2 quest; I won the interlude, one Act 1 quest, and two Act 2 quests. We're about to do the finale. However, I think it's important to keep in mind that the game has a tendency to snowball for either side, and depending on player experience, IQ, and hero party composition, it's easy for the Overlord or the players to gain the upper hand, and with relatively few quests (any campaign without rumors sits neatly at 9 Quests), numbers will inevitably be very deceptive.

I mean sure, your players may sit at an overall ~75% win rate, but that doesn't actually mean that the game itself is unbalanced. You might just suck. You might be conciouscly or unconciously be pulling your punches or avoiding "cheap tactics", when you shouldn't. ~75% isn't actually that far off from ~50% in the context of the game. But I do feel like the game somewhat favours the heroes, and the Overlord often ends up taking a reactive role. This isn't necessarily something bad, and it might just be a feeling. At the end of the day, the Overlord still has a chance to win the campaign up until the very last battle, and that's what he should be focused on.

And as much as I sometimes feel like I can see a defeat coming a mile away, I must say that I've had some really tense moments where it, despite seeing the failure coming a mile away, it's come down to the last few rounds and small mistakes, resulting in a desperate win.

My suggestion as an Overlord is to cheap-shot it as much as possible. Use cheesy tactics. Infuriate your heroes and make them hate you. These are not your friends. They are agents of Good, and Evil will always triumph, because Good is dumb.

It bears repeating that a 3 hero game is biased in favour of the heroes. Add in an ally and you tip further into the pot.

If you want a better experience, play with 4 heroes (with the players controlling the fourth as a committee)

I've been considering doing this, but so far, running a 3-man game, I feel like the game has been balanced. I might end up doing the 4-hero group thing, though, since I've heard it suggested a ton of times that it's the better option.

As an OL I got steamrolled all through LoR. SoN went a lot better.

It's funny, because I've also handily trounced an OL during LoR, but on another occasion, the OL won every quest except 2 during a LoR playthrough. A third time I played it, twas very back-and-forth. I don't think it's the campaign.

Same experience with Nerekhall. Love that expansion.

Have your group play a 4th hero collectively. The difference is amazing for the ol. Also, with having 2 overlord trees, were you able to even get the more powerful ol cards? I'd probably stick to on tree.

@Luckmann:
The first-turn victory was in the Act-I-Quest where Ariad and Splig are present and Ariad is controlling the undead dwarf; I don't know the name right now. The heroes used all their heroic feats in this one and with the help of Syndrael's they got within reach to finish off Ariad. It was a risky move, though, and it could have gone painfully wrong which would have probably meant a lot of problems for the heroes, so I grant them the joy of a daring move that paid off.

What bothers me the most is the fact that I often feel like I have so little options. If I see that I'm losing an encounter, when it's the first one I might decide to go for cards or threat tokens by defeating heroes instead. I might try to stall in order to draw cards for the second encounter. Or I might try and force the heroes to rush so they have to leave behind search tokens if they want to win. I usually try to hit the weak spots of the chain and change tactics when necessary. What I hate though is, when the heroes can take all the time they want looting the map, knowing exactly when and where my reinforcements show up, while those reincorcements are too few or too weak to even threaten defeating a single hero before that hero gets healed and/or supported by the rest of the group. And that was true for more than one quest. If there are 3 heroes + 1 ally +1 familiar, one reinforcement unit per turn is just miserable.

@thedremak:
I considered sticking to one OL class tree, but the Disciple of the hero group is able to discard conditions with relative ease, so a lot of the trap cards, while very strong in some instances (like Web Trap imho), are not as powerful as they could be and due to the high armor values of the heroes I needed something to deal damage (Blood Rage in this case) as well.

What I hate though is, when the heroes can take all the time they want looting the map, knowing exactly when and where my reinforcements show up, while those reincorcements are too few or too weak to even threaten defeating a single hero before that hero gets healed and/or supported by the rest of the group. And that was true for more than one quest. If there are 3 heroes + 1 ally +1 familiar, one reinforcement unit per turn is just miserable.

If reinforcements is from a tiny monster whose group is specified on the quest, ok nothing to do!

But if it's from an Open Group, it's up to the OL to choose which is best for is strategy,

- either a tiny monster with many figures which could cause once a lot of trouble (many little attacks) and whose reinforcement will be peanuts

- or a big monster with a single figure and one lonely attack. but each time he will come back will be a burden to the heroes !

I haven't done LoR yet.. but up to now I haven't found many quests where the Heroes could take all the time they want to finish looting...

And once where this could have happened (TSR > a Fat Goblin > Enc 2) I ended their looting by playing Blood Rage on Splig itself !

It's funny because I just roflstomped my party through The Shadow Rune where they won nothing but the Introduction.

So first thing first;

Use Plot Decks. They really give the OL's incredible tools to play with, and while a reroll can be life-saver, it's often worst than the Plot Card you will use. Some decks (Seeds of Betrayal...) can win a campaign on their own.

Warlord OL class is also probably the biggest noob-bait. As OL, you need to understand that your monsters are only a tool, and probably not even the main one. There are some decent cards in it, but the mere fact that you were already behind, losing quest by quest, and splitted up your EXP into two classes including Warlord... I don't know, I feel like Warlord cards are just great one or two points cards if you snowball ahead of the heroes. I'm also surprised how you seems concerned by hero mobility when you should have one or two Web Trap in your hand. Hands down one of the best, if not the best, 1XP card.

Also as mentioned, 3 hero game is indeed tipped in favor of the heroes in most cases. Most of the game balance completely revolve around 4 heroes.

I'm also curious to know how the hell they were able to one-round Queen Ariad. She's one of the tankiest lieutenant there is, and even with Syndrael's Feat, you need some move action.

But the first thing I read in between the lines is a misconception about the Overlord Role. Check your objective. Your goal is definitely not to knock down heroes. While it may help in some cases, it's secondary.

You also need, ABSOLUTELY NEED to adapt to your heroes. How were they doing so much damage ? His their mobility the issue ? Is it their ability to Pierce ? There's plenty of options both in your monster choices and your OL card choice. You need to be versatile and adapt to the heroes not only from the start, but from where they will get as the campaign progress. Have they got an amazing weapon ? Who holds it ? How can you control it ? Pierce-immune monsters ? High speed ones ?

I don't know how restrained you are since I don't know which packs you own. But in doubt, get 1st Edition Conversion Kit. Use proxy figures. It's a very cheap option to get A LOT of options.

Labyrinth of Ruins is an hard campaign as OL, I won't lie on this one. As soon as I got my hand on the Sun Token, I just discarded it for EXP so they would never gain it back. But I honestly think it shouldn't be as one-sided as you felt it was.

I seriously LOVE the OL's role and I feel like it's MUCH more diverse and has much more options and diversity. Which is the exact opposite of what you're saying. So errm yeah, one of us is probably wrong somewhere. I could talk about it for hours, but I really think OL's role is much more versatile than the Heroes will ever be.

We played shadow rune campaign four times (never finished, because every time I steamrolled heroes as OL) and I played against all combination of hero amount. Then few days ago I played as OL once again and my gf played 4 heroes in LotW minicampaign. She sucked at it pretty bad, conjurer lost his first image and she decided that he sucks and she´s gonna play him as nuker without skills. She was pretty **** lost in the mess that her party was. Even her moves weren´t clear to me. She even sent Leoric with strength 1 to move boulders and then was angry, because she thought that I said she can move it using knowledge. It wasn´t her brightest day...

Even then she was able to kill Valyndra within 2 rounds. One round she took her 12 HP and next she only had to attack 2 times. You should have seen my thoughts in that moment.

Use Plot Decks. They really give the OL's incredible tools to play with, and while a reroll can be life-saver, it's often worst than the Plot Card you will use. Some decks (Seeds of Betrayal...) can win a campaign on their own.

[...]

Warlord OL class is also probably the biggest noob-bait. As OL, you need to understand that your monsters are only a tool, and probably not even the main one. There are some decent cards in it, but the mere fact that you were already behind, losing quest by quest, and splitted up your EXP into two classes including Warlord... I don't know, I feel like Warlord cards are just great one or two points cards if you snowball ahead of the heroes. I'm also surprised how you seems concerned by hero mobility when you should have one or two Web Trap in your hand. Hands down one of the best, if not the best, 1XP card.

[...]

I'm also curious to know how the hell they were able to one-round Queen Ariad. She's one of the tankiest lieutenant there is, and even with Syndrael's Feat, you need some move action.

But the first thing I read in between the lines is a misconception about the Overlord Role. Check your objective. Your goal is definitely not to knock down heroes. While it may help in some cases, it's secondary.

You also need, ABSOLUTELY NEED to adapt to your heroes. How were they doing so much damage ? His their mobility the issue ? Is it their ability to Pierce ? There's plenty of options both in your monster choices and your OL card choice. You need to be versatile and adapt to the heroes not only from the start, but from where they will get as the campaign progress. Have they got an amazing weapon ? Who holds it ? How can you control it ? Pierce-immune monsters ? High speed ones ?

I don't know how restrained you are since I don't know which packs you own. But in doubt, get 1st Edition Conversion Kit. Use proxy figures. It's a very cheap option to get A LOT of options.

@Amuny:

I'm unsing Queen Ariads plot deck. The cards aiming at making and improving monsters with the Wilderness trait.

I'm aware of the fact that Warlord isn't the best deck. I'm not teching for the expensive cards in that deck. But when you have Monsters with Ravage (like Volucrix Reavers and Beastmen from the Conversion Kit) with additional Pierce from a plot card, Blood Rage is a pretty nice card, especially if the monster is going to die next round anyway. This is the only Warlord card I have, however, the others are 2x Web Trap, 2 x the one which lets you discard condition tokens (necessary when the whole hero group has stun effects) and something else I don't remember right now. The problem with the otherwise great Web Trap is that it becomes very situational when the Disciple of the hero group can discard conditions of himself or others for free. That, in many situations, basically takes away half the power of Web Trap, which is to immobilize a whole group.

Concerning the defeat of Ariad (human form, not Queen form): The Runemaster had an additional attack due to his special ability, he could reroll due to his heroic feat, he had a powerful ranged weapon and the Sun Stone. It was enough (well, apparently Ariad's defense roll wasn't great either).

My conception of the Overlord role is: Win the campaign. To win the campaign, win quests. If you can't win a Quest, minimize the loot for the heroes and maximize your threat tokens gained. If you can't win a first encounter, maximize your hand size and/or threat for the second encounter.

You are right by saying I need to adapt to the heroes. There, however, lied the problem within a lot of encounters we played. How do you adapt to the heroes when you may chose an open monster group but those monsters do not respawn (and the heroes are very aware of that)? What do you do, when the monsters that reinforce don't deal enough damage, don't stun or immobilize and so on. The theory of being versatile as the OL (and I'm totally with you there) sometimes collides hard with reality when you are not given any tools to be versatile with. And the OL deck isn't such a tool, the card draw is too random for that, at least until you have saved some cards. The plot decks are more helpful since you can trigger the cards when you need them, but you buff the heroes with that too, so you can't do it all the time. The heroes optimize their skills, they create synergies by dividing weapons and armor in a way that weaknesses are migitated and strentghs are build upon. And they can use their skills all the time, in every encounter. This is where the OL theory fails, imho. He buys the cards and he choses the monsters, but he has far less control over whether he will be able to use the cards and monsters (far less so if the monsters are one-time and killed early on).

To conclude: I don't think that one of us is "right" or "wrong" here. I consider my point of view not to be an absolute one, Descent is a system with a lot of variables and as soon as you change some variables the whole equation comes out differently. In any way, you have a better time being OL than I have and I like that, so I hope you beat up some wimpy heroes where I'm currently unsuccessful.

A rapid comment to add that in every campaign me made ( more than 10) with different players, randomizing OL, the outcome of each campaign has been tense and far from obvious.

But one thing is sure and that is something that is never mentionned in the "Descent balance threads" for not hurting the players, it is that the outcome of a quest heavily depends on the skills of the players. Same monsters, same quest but the results would be completly different depending the decision you make. Descent is a heavily tactical game. I recall some quests were as heroes we thought that everythins was lost, the suddenly after discussing the situation and poundingall possibilities we came with a combo that brought us victory.

...my experience was the reverse, also in a three hero game, but it ended with us not even finishing the campaign.

I, as overlord, won the introduction, chose the less favoruable ally quest (Serena, since they already had a healer), won that because the heroes could not even get to serena due to the goblin witchers' abilities and thus were at a rather big disadvanatge in the second one and then...

Then We played Fury of the Tempest, and that one is terribly broken. A whole group of hybrid sentinels, constantly reinforcing were devastating and after a whole group knock out, they gave up.

Then we later played this campaign again with another player as the overlord and it was relatively even, we lost the Raythen quest and Fury of the Tempest, which is also pretty hard in encounter 2, but we won all other quests but we did not finish after the interlude.

We have had campaigns which were completely in the heroes favour, but that usually was because of a bad overlord.
There are quite a lot of things you can do to slow down even well prepared heroes, almost no group is without some weak point.

Some characters break down completely when immobilized, others have weak stats that make certain overlord cards and such very powerful, some break down completely under a full assault, others can be exhausted with stalling and hit and run tactics.

You do have to plan though, you often need to save up cards to impede them just when it hurts most.
A tripwire at the wrong time can be almost inconsequential, a tripwire at the right time however makes an entire tactic collapse and can lead to many actions wasted (not being able to help a hero up for example).

Similarly, extra attacks can be devastating if you manage to knock out several heroes at once or inflict them with stun or immobilization.

I you get impatient though, you will just waste cards or monsters though.

...and of course, soemtimes you just have rotten luck.

How is the disciple discarding conditions (plural?) for free?

When you use web trap in any hero's turn (apart from the healer's turn) the hero instantly becomes immobilized and can't move for the reminder of his turn (which usually screws him up or disrupts him severly). The disciple can only use his healing skill in his turn, so ofc he can make the hero discard immobilized after his turn (but he will discard the condition at the end of his turn anyway).

It just baffles my mind a bit, because most of the time I found immobilize/stun very hard to deal with, especially if it's aplied within your turn.

When I played against Syndrael, I found her extremely susceptible to trip wire, often messing up her attacks completely.

Which hero was the Runemaster? I don't know of a mage that can reroll for an heroic feat and gets an extra attack as the hero ability, but I don't know them all. If the Runemaster is Widow Thara, her heroic feat lets her attack 2 targets with one attack action. She can't target the same figure twice with this feat. If she is using quick casting it takes up a lot of fatigue and the second attack can't be modified with runic sorcery or blast.

I wouldn't waste XP for cards that boost your monsters (especially if you use Basic I), instead I always get "Dark Resilience" esepecially in encounters where your lieutenants needs to survive, this card is really powerfull.

You didn't go for "Uthuk Demon trap" or "Curse of the Monkey king", when you are behind and leveling saboteur? Imo they are the most powefull OL cards. Why not?

Did you downsize your OL deck to 15 cards every time? This is very important. (mind that you reshuffle your discard pile once all cards are used).

The scenario you described could've been very different if you had used web trap or trip wire or some kind of movement ending card to disrupt the mage. If you can keep him some more space away from your monsters, he needs more range, which makes his attacks weaker.

Of course maybe you didn't get web trap, or pit trap or anything similar and the mage had extreme luck with his attack and you had extreme bad luck with your defense, but that's a lot of bad luck at one time and is not exemplary by any means.

Did you downsize your OL deck to 15 cards every time? This is very important. (mind that you reshuffle your discard pile once all cards are used).

Oh ****, and I thought the OL only reshuffled after the end of the quest. I was actually looking it up to prove you wrong, but nope, I played that part wrong for quite some time now:p One thing to add though, you reshuffle discard pile the moment the last card is drawn to create a new deck, not the moment the last card is played (p.16 rulebook).

I'd add that Descent has a very snowbally nature;
A side winning the first few quest will tend to win the following too. One-sided campaign is a thing. Point is, it can be from both side.

But if the heros are starting to struggle, they will struggle a whole lot. If anything, I feel like the OL suffers a bit less from snowbally heroes than the hero does on a snowbally OL, mostly due to quest rewards and the way shop is limited.

And for the case of Ariad getting 1 rounded. Welp, that's 4 less search token in their hands, which are quickly crucial as the final comes up.

Plus, Descent has it's share of luck-based games. That one-round Ariad is a great exemple. As OL, I also managed to have Baron Zachareth killed in one turn. (That's to an Hugo the Glorious using his feat and me rolling triple blank defense dices... twice.). But that's also what gives it this thrilling feel, that every dice roll can potentially be game changer. For both sides.

I'd add that Descent has a very snowbally nature;

A side winning the first few quest will tend to win the following too. One-sided campaign is a thing. Point is, it can be from both side.

Find it less true for Nerekhall, and even less for Heirs of Blood though.

Bonus read here; https://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/205588/guide-descent-2ed-plot-decks

I really like this list, I think it's quite accurate. It can really helps select a few Lieutenant Packs to buy.

Descent is a very frustrating game. It's a good game nonetheless, if you can take that frustration and elevate your level of play to bounce back on your feet. When you manage to do that and it pays off, then it's incredibly rewarding. That's what I´m always looking forward experiencing, personally. It can take many encounters for me and hours of try before I can get somewhere. But I like the work implied to get there. Most of the fun is strategizing and preparing. Adapting to a new situation. And then accepting that sometimes a good strategy can be annihilated by an even better strategy from the opposite side. You sort of have to give it credit too, because it's part of the game.

There has to be luck involved on the dice roll and card draw, otherwise the faction on the lead would always win in the end, if people are consistent with their level of good decision making. On the other hand, it is true that a dice roll or a bad card draw (for the OL) can obliterate anyone's strategy and cost the quest. That's also why you need to try to get re-rolls, and manipulate your deck, at least to mitigate that risk.

My advice is also to get past that conception that the improvement curve of the OL is nothing compared to the heroes' incredible margin for improvement thorough the campaign. That's just the way it is. The power the OL has, though, is the power of SELECTION. Whereas the heroes accumulate gear and are getting more and more powerful by getting more skills and enabling synergies, the Overlord gets to choose his/her weapons against that everchanging hero configuration. I can garantee that I could win quests based on solely open groups choice and a standard Basic deck. You don't really need that Level 3 OL class card to win. They have tons of armor? Take monsters with Pierce. They don't have Blast? Pick Kobolds. They have tons of regeneration effects? Take Crow Hags. Disrupt their fatigue economy, use Howl, Soul Shackle. Use Constrict, Immobilize, etc. This is all available to you from the very start (quest trait set aside).

Then know when you´re losing. If you´re losing, then try to prevent them from looting. Kill a hero or two to get threat. Grab anything that might be relevant for the next encounter (if you´re playing the first encounter of a quest)

Brother felt the same way, felt he couldn't win as the OL. Because of this he was not enjoying playing. I'm a bit better at this kind of tactical game so I have been able to pull out some wins as OL. But honestly I don't mind losing so long as the heroes are enjoying the experience. I feel I have enough power to punish mistakes keeping things exciting. I don't think playing as the overlord is for everyone.

Brother felt the same way, felt he couldn't win as the OL. Because of this he was not enjoying playing. I'm a bit better at this kind of tactical game so I have been able to pull out some wins as OL. But honestly I don't mind losing so long as the heroes are enjoying the experience. I feel I have enough power to punish mistakes keeping things exciting. I don't think playing as the overlord is for everyone.

Don't tell my players, but half of my bluster and indignation and my menacing laughter is entirely for their benefit and to make them hate me. I'm perfectly fine with losing and there's been times I've almost thrown the fight (but never entirely). Obviously there's also times I fight tooth-and-nail to win, but you're right that it probably isn't for everyone to play the overlord, since you'll be in clear opposition to the rest of the table.

The others will always have eachother to lean on and to strategise with, or to go awww shucks with when things go south. But the Overlord is alone and I think that if you're a person that takes things too personally, then, you'll probably take that harder than you should.

One day I'll not restrict myself to taking what I think is thematic for a fight, but purely strategize and pull every dirty trick out of the book, and properly trunce them. But not today.

Descent is a very frustrating game. It's a good game nonetheless, if you can take that frustration and elevate your level of play to bounce back on your feet. When you manage to do that and it pays off, then it's incredibly rewarding. That's what I´m always looking forward experiencing, personally. It can take many encounters for me and hours of try before I can get somewhere. But I like the work implied to get there. Most of the fun is strategizing and preparing. Adapting to a new situation. And then accepting that sometimes a good strategy can be annihilated by an even better strategy from the opposite side. You sort of have to give it credit too, because it's part of the game.

There has to be luck involved on the dice roll and card draw, otherwise the faction on the lead would always win in the end, if people are consistent with their level of good decision making. On the other hand, it is true that a dice roll or a bad card draw (for the OL) can obliterate anyone's strategy and cost the quest. That's also why you need to try to get re-rolls, and manipulate your deck, at least to mitigate that risk.

My advice is also to get past that conception that the improvement curve of the OL is nothing compared to the heroes' incredible margin for improvement thorough the campaign. That's just the way it is. The power the OL has, though, is the power of SELECTION. Whereas the heroes accumulate gear and are getting more and more powerful by getting more skills and enabling synergies, the Overlord gets to choose his/her weapons against that everchanging hero configuration. I can garantee that I could win quests based on solely open groups choice and a standard Basic deck. You don't really need that Level 3 OL class card to win. They have tons of armor? Take monsters with Pierce. They don't have Blast? Pick Kobolds. They have tons of regeneration effects? Take Crow Hags. Disrupt their fatigue economy, use Howl, Soul Shackle. Use Constrict, Immobilize, etc. This is all available to you from the very start (quest trait set aside).

Then know when you´re losing. If you´re losing, then try to prevent them from looting. Kill a hero or two to get threat. Grab anything that might be relevant for the next encounter (if you´re playing the first encounter of a quest)

This is where I'm at at the moment; learning how to lose . After having played The Shadow Rune (which I narrowly lost) and the group being relatively bad at looting, we're now playing Shadow of Nerekhall and one of the heroes (don't tell my GF I said so, but he's also the best player) is playing Thaiden Mistpeak as a Treasure Hunter (despite his previous promises to play a bard, dammit!).

Not going to lie; right out of the door they got 175 gold and Shadow of Nerekhall seems like it's going to shower them in gold. Finding ways to deal with their looting is going to prove a challenge, no doubt. Makes me wonder what they were thinking when they designed Thaiden Mistpeak; not even Ronan of the Wild , with a dedicated looting-familiar can compete with that. especially when it only applies to other heroes (wtf Pico?).

You'd think that Pico should at least be able to help his master and that Thaidan would require Line of Sight to what he's looting, but nooo.

There are easy things to make the OL harder . For example let the monsters attack two times if not moved, just like the heroes. Very often the OL has to choose the right open group to win.

There are easy things to make the OL harder . For example let the monsters attack two times if not moved, just like the heroes.

I'd advice against changing the rules so dramatically. But of course, if the OL is simply not so experienced yet, some adjustments should be made. I would however go rather for a suboptimal hero group. Either by choosing the heroes at random and/or the classes. This way, the heroes cannot go for special combos and there should be some (more obvious) weaknesses for the OL to exploit.

There are easy things to make the OL harder . For example let the monsters attack two times if not moved, just like the heroes. Very often the OL has to choose the right open group to win.

In no universe would that not break the game.