Hi everyone,

I currently only own and use the main Descent boxed game so my question is for the second quest (Two respawning clown giants) using two heroes.

I play as the OL and my Girlfriend (she likes the game a lot) runs two heroes.

I am encountering a few difficulties, mostly the heroes cannot take down the giant in enough time. It is proving quite difficult in having to kill the giant at least once and then get to the room for a rune to unlock the room with another master monster and a heart. All this and the giant will be back. The heroes have tried to go around the giant, but it takes precious time causing the OL to draw down the entire deck of cards taking away three valuable Conquest tokens.

I have tried letting my GF pick the heros she likes, she usually takes a good melee hero and a good ranged hero. Is the next best alternative is to allow my GF to use three heroes. I would not want to skip the quest entirely. I kind of find out feel in the future all the quests a third of fourth hero makes all the difference as the quests keep upping the difficulty.

Your thoughts and recommendations.

Thanks

You should always play this game with 4 heroes, regardless of how many hero players there are. Yes it technically can be played with 2 or 3, but the difference in monster hit points is not great enough to counterbalance the loss of attacks. Also, losing the Line of Sight generated by the other two heroes is huge.

If your GF doesn't want to have to manage more than 2 heroes, you could try something wacky like only using the other two heroes for LoS (they can't attack or be attacked and don't affect other rules dependent on the number of heroes), but that's crazy house rule territory. I'd recommend just playing with 4 heroes.

Edit: You are correct that the quests only get harder from here, so skipping this quest is not a very good solution to the problem.

Many people feel that 3 heroes is reasonable for the base game. But definitely don't play with 2.

Additionally, this quest is specifically designed to teach the heroes running/blitz tactics. If the heroes do not collect a rune key on the same round that they open the door to a giant's room, they haven't learned the lesson yet. Ideally, they'd get the rune key, open the chest, activate the glyph, and teleport out all in the same round that they open the door, but not all parties are fast enough to pull that off (this is another reason that larger parties are more powerful than smaller ones). The slowest hero in the game is still capable of reaching the key in one turn, though.

You said that running past monsters didn't work because the overlord has time to draw down his deck, but if running past monsters takes longer than killing them and then running past, your heroes are doing it wrong. Being faster is the entire point of running past monsters.

I played this level a while back with my GF, she played 3 characters: 1 ranged, 1 magic, 1 melee. She had no problems to finish the quest.

1 year ago or so we also played Descent, at that time she only played with 2 characters, it didn't work out to well for the heroes, no matter what level we played. So i came to the conclusion that the base game should be played with 3 or 4 heroes. If you play with just 2, it's a "kill the heroes festival".

Oh, and feel free to take a look at Enduring Evil if you particularly want a version of Descent that you can play with different numbers of heroes.