Okay, there are some characters in Descent that are generally regarded as pretty bad draws. While it's unlikely that these guys will get played in an advanced campaign, sometimes they come up in general quests when a group uses random draws. I'm thinking it would be nice to come up with some general strategies for some of these "bad" draws so the player can still feel like they can contribute to the success of the party. I'll give some ideas for one character now, and I'll open up the discussion to either discuss or nominate for discussion other problem characters. I'm focusing on usefulness during normal questing, as campaign play usually won't see these guys.

I'd like to talk about Mr. potion, Aurim. Bad heatlth, one die in each attack type, meh special ability. How can we make this guy okay? Melee weapons do the biggest damage without surges, so I'd start there. It also seems worth doing to pick up a crossbow at start, just in case he gets webbed or something. I'd avoid magic because we'll probably want to sheathe his frail body in heavy armor.

His special ability involves potions, so he should probably make sure he always has 3 potions whenever he visits town. In fact, I wonder if it wouldn't be a good idea to spend all of his income on potions. You're not going to be buying trait dice, and treasures are always a crapshoot anyway. I think Aurim should be drinking a potion every turn if possible. Basically, assess which potion would best be used in each situation. This character might also be using Power potion a lot in vanilla Descent, just to get 4 extra black dice. each turn, he can choose to regain fatigue, heal 3 wounds, roll 5 black dice once, or +10 armor. I'd avoid invisibility because they would go away very quickly with thisb strategy.

What do you think? Also, who else would you like to see some ideas for? Feel free and include your own strategies for some less popular characters.

the best strategy involving aurim is to throw his card out of the window when the game owner doesnt watch

I'd be interested to see who is considered to be a "bad" character. I know our group doesn't get a lot of mileage out of Mad Carthos, on account of he's a bit fragile, but I'm not sure I'd class him as "bad".

Well, my local group dislikes any character with only 1 power die in all three categories. They tend to favor offense and it's hard to get good use of weapons without 2-3 power dice. I picked on Aurim because he's pretty much universally considered bad, whereas that faerie with 1 CP still makes a pretty good scout with fly and ghost. I would also include heroes with very limited special abilities, such as Eliam - sweep is nice, but he only has one melee die, and it uses all his fatigue to do once. Maybe I should compile a list of who my group dislikes; that way, if someone says, "hey, no, that character is great, and here's why" it pretty much fulfills the point of the thread.

Getting a crossbow "just in case you get webbed or something" sounds like a terrible idea. That's 150 coins and a backpack slot that will give you a marginal advantage in a low-probability scenario, on a character where you specifically want to have a bunch of potions.

Power potions are still a bad idea, even with only 1 die in each trait, because a vitality potion will give you 5 fatigue that can be used to add 4 power dice to one attack with one leftover. There are maybe some rare situations in which the power potion works out better because you can't efficiently use all your fatigue before drinking a potion, but come on. I'd think the best part about Aurim is that you can convert any power potions lying on the floor of the dungeon into potions that don't suck.

I believe that Zyla, that "faerie with 1 CP", is generally regarded not only as a pretty good scout, but as one of the most generically powerful characters (overall) in th entire game. Fly and Ghost are both excellent abilities, and at a mere half the conquest value of the second-lowest hero in the game, she can be sacrificed over and over with relatively little penalty.

If you have any interest in house rules, rather than strategies, then The Enduring Evil , my rebalancing of Descent, makes several changes aimed to reduce the disparity between different heroes:

• A cheap "Other" item in the shop, the Ring of Skill, gives an extra black die on attacks when using a trait in which you have 1 or fewer dice; this basically turns a 1/1/1 hero into a 2/2/2 hero for the cost of an "Other" slot, and makes a 2/1 hero more likely to use his secondary trait.
• Power Potions cost only 25 coins and don't count against the one-potion-per-turn limit, making them a much more reasonable option for a character looking to boost attacks made with a poor trait. The Bandolier "Other" item also increases the number of potions you can equip and eliminates the MP cost to drink one, making it even easier to quaff these constantly, if you devote the coins to it. This also means that Aurim effectively gets all potions at half cost, since he can buy Power Potions for 25 and conver them into whatever he wants.
• Most skills are not tied to attack type, so characters with split skills don't end up with one worthless skill nearly as often.
• Ranged weapons don't sacrifice so much damage for the ability to attack from a few spaces further away, so heroes reliant on them can still kill things.
• More defensive items in the shop so that squishy characters can improve their defense when the monsters get tougher, even if they don't get a lucky armor treasure draw.
• No Sunburst rune that's ridiculously good for heroes that can roll lots of surges and worthless for heroes that can't.

Our house rule is, if you chose a character that hasn't been used in ages you get to discard and replace two skill cards instead of one at the start of the game.

My thinking is, any character is good with a good skill draw.

Ryric said:

Many (though not all) of the characters generally considered 'bad' are actually rather good runners. Though weak in combat they are often fast and have high fatigue and a low CT value. Aurim is a good example, as is Lyssa, and even (to a lesser extent) Mok, Ispher and Sahla. So equip them with shields and run a lot drinking fatigue potions most turns.
Eliam makes a very good alrounder actually - especially in RtL, or if he draws the right skills. WIth some damage or surge bonuses (Weapon Mastery, say, or even Sorcery) and a Reach weapon that special ability can be awesome at the right time (with his high speed he can usually reach the right place), and he can do good duty as Magic backup with a spare AoE weapon for example. His speed shouldn't be underestimated either - Descent is basically a race.

Steelhorns is not great, but is still a focused character and only 3CT!
Sir Validor is pretty weak but at least makes a semi-tank, acceptable backup to a real melee hero.
Most other heroes have their fans for one reason or another.

But I have nothing good to say about Red Scorpion!

Mok aint that bad. Especially if you can snag Cautious or Lightfinger as well. The OL runs on threat; anything that disables Threat slows down the OL.

At the very least, Red Scorpion looks good to have in the party

"No, its okay...you can just stand over there and look good. If any monsters come your way, just hide in town until the coast is clear"

I don't think Aurim is that bad all around. Not the best, certainly, but not the worst either. His ability is useless 90% of the time, but otherwise he's a reasonable 4th party member.

The only hero who's struck me as completely useless is Red Scorpion. Her ability sounds cool at first, but it's not enough to make up for the jack of all trades distribution of her dice.

Red Scorpion makes a fairly good runner in the advanced campaign with her 4 speed, 4 fatigue, and auto-healing at the end of every adventure. She'd definitely not as good as Ispher at it, but you don't always draw him.

Also, a 1/1/1 skill set isn't that bad in the advanced campaigns, and can actually be a good thing. For instance, with Red Scorpion or Zyla you have a character who is only 2 upgrades away from being decent in one area but can get any skill. That means you could completely forgo having a ranged attacker in the party but still have access to strong subterfuge skills like Acrobat or cautious. It also means you could have 3 people with the extra attack skills Knight, Leadership, and Able Warrior without having to have three people focused on melee (thus opening yourself up to massive pain at the hands of long range eldritch monsters).

It doesn't make her a top tier character, but in the proper party she could be outstanding.

James McMurray said:

What prevents every hero from getting any skill? I can find nothing in the RtL rules limiting heroes to training in skills printed on their character cards, and each hero is even explicitly permitted one draw from the skill deck of their choice during set-up.

The FAQ specifically limits the feats heroes can acquire based on the skills printed on their hero cards, but has no such limitation for acquiring skills (at least not that I can find).

I could swear I've seen it somewhere, though it's possible I'm mixing up the feat ruling. If so, that certainly invalidates a lot of what I said, though it does shift it over to feats if you're using Tomb of Ice. I haven't played with feats yet, so I don't know if a party having accesss to subterfuge feats without a ranged-focused character is worthwhile.

There are some good Subterfuge feats that are independent of attack type (notably Disarm). The Backstab feat even specifically works with melee attacks in addition to ranged attacks, though Shooting for Distance (+8 range on one attack) is ranged-only.

There are 6 heroes that have at least 1 Subterfuge skill while having 2+ trait dice in melee or magic, though. Including Nanok and Landrec.

There is no such thing as a bad character, only bad players.

IMO, Red Scorpion can become a usefull character capable of inflicting high damage if you give her an axe. Her ability can be used as well in order to trigger some fighting special abilities such as the knight. In addition, I don't think it's bad to have a character with 4 speed and fatigue as well as 1 armor and 12 wounds, as this means that she can become a secondary runner, wearing a plate mail and a ring of protection and thus becoming a tank as well. So, I don't believe she really sucks...

CanadianPittbull said:

Really?

There are characters which are better than others. The game is not flawlessly balanced, no game is, not even checkers or chess. There will be subtle power differences between characters which make them more easily playable than others. There can be a broad range in power between models with the same Conquest value.This is what is meant by "bad characters". They are less balanced figures, toward the bottom of the overall power ranking. This happens in game design. It is unavoidable.

Trust me, I play a lot of tabletop games, and there are models that are referred to as "auto include" as well as "auto exclude" among competitive players. Some models (Chaos Terminators in Warhammer 40,000, for example- hell most of the army is quite simply not able to compete with any other army out there). You CAN win with the army, just not in a tournament environment. I won't go into why, there are other forums for that.

Even video games (which don't suffer from the vagarities of the English [or any other] language) have power level issues. Take Street Fighter 3 for example. It is widely accepted that Chun-Li was way out of proportion with the other characters in the game. She had an answer for everything your opponent could throw at you, and she therefore broke the system. Two equally skilled players (for argument's sake), one playing Ryu, one playing Chun-Li, will have a very unbalanced win / loss ratio, favoring Chun-Li. This is a balance issue.

Having addressed your inflammatory comment rationally and nicely, I would ask that if you have nothing worthwhile to contribute to the discussion, you cease your running down of those of us who actually have something to say other than "if you think a balance issue exists within a game, you just suck at playing it". There ARE , like it or not, some characters which exist at the lower end of the power curve, and others who exist at the top. That's how game design works. Designers strive for true game balance, but that is an impossible concept.

Yes, some characters suck.

So do elitist gamers.

Wow some people take things a little too personally.

Etna''s Vassal said:

Um, checkers is balanced. In fact, it's more than just balanced - it's solvable as a draw for both players. Like tic-tac-toe. If you play correctly, you can never lose.

I think 'true game balance' is actually often rather boring. Without a sufficient level of complexity making it impossible for people to memorize strategies, perfectly balanced games are essentially either a coin flip or a guaranteed draw. At least in my experience, games are much more fun when random elements give people different chances of victory, and those odds can change throughout the game based on strategy and additional elements of chance. The important part is that everyone has a chance of victory until the end.

Also, CanadianPittbull did not actually deny that some characters are better than others. He said none of the characters are 'bad', which is an absolute term. If one character is awesome and another is merely good, then one is better than the other but neither is actually bad .

CanadianPittbull said:

Sorry, it just seems to me that he was saying that if you can't win with every single character in the game, you are a bad player. Am I so far off base? This, to me, sounds elitist.

I didn't take the comment personally, this is a forum. The anonymity allows for a degree of abrasiveness (to put it nicely), and if you let it get under your skin, you'll go insane.

Sorry about my lack of checkers knowledge, but that does not change my point. A poorly designed character is simply a fact of life. Some characters are sub-par, some are overpowered. A game balance issue is not the fault of the players , it is the fault of the designers .

For anyone with any knowledge of Monsterpocalypse, I can win games with Deimos-9, but that does not change the fact that it is a vastly sub-par model.

The idea that "there is no bad ____" is bunk in any complex system whose bounds cannot be mapped. It's a simple fact of design in games like this that exact balance is impossible, and hence there will always be some pieces that are better than others in the same category. If the original statement had been "there are no unusable characters" it would be true. However, trying to shirk the balance issues onto the shoulders of the faceless masses of other players is very much an elitist view.

It might not be what was meant, but it's definitely what was said.

Antistone said:

I agree! I tried explaining this to my group and our other long term gamer (there are two of us) shot this down immediately with the position that since RtL does say that unless stated otherwise the vanilla rules are not overridden by something in RtL. Since the vanilla rules say that you can only draw skills from the decks shown on the hero sheet, you cannot do so in RtL, despite what the skill selection paragraph says in the RtL manual.

Is there a consensus on what the rule should be in this case?

1. Nothing in vanilla Descent prevents you from buying any type of skill you want. The numbers on your sheet only affect the skills you start with.

2. The rules for skills that you start with are explicitly overridden in RtL: you draw the skills listed on your sheet, plus one from any deck, then keep one and throw the rest away, instead of drawing the skills listed on your sheet and then optionally discarding one and drawing a replacement from the same deck.

Whence the objection?

Antistone said:

1. My argument exactly.

2. Ditto.

I don't want to put words in my friend's mouth, so I'll assume he read the original rules to mean that the skill categories on the sheet are the only categories you can purchase from. He is an awfully busy guy: new kid, tournaments in table tennis *and* Warhammer 40k, so I will just say that he likely didn't think about it much.

However, I am now armed with more data and will be talking to the group about it at our next session.

RhunDraco said:

In fact it is explicit that you can choose any skill deck.
DJitD pg18
* When purchasing treasures or skills, the hero player draws the card at random from the appropriate deck (selecting any one of the three skill
decks when purchasing a skill).

Further indirect confirmation frm the FAQ (pg9)
Heroes may only acquire Feats that match their skill set. A hero may not gain any feats, regardless of skills purchased, that fall outside their printed skill set.
(the second sentence would be unnecessary if heroes were restricted to buying skills from within their printed skill decks).