Bucho mentioned the dice- I'd like to see more aggression with dice combinations. We are too far in this game for this to actually happen, but...

Red+green? Yellow+yellow? I like the H&M monsters, but if this idea had been explored beyond just the (well-designed I think) rat swarms, I think monsters would be more distinct rather than some of them (flesh moulders/dark priests cough cough) being different flavors of each other.

3 hours ago, Lightningclaw said:

Bucho mentioned the dice- I'd like to see more aggression with dice combinations. We are too far in this game for this to actually happen, but...

I think there's a more profound problem with their system. Ask yourself if monsters in 1e had this tendency to feel the same? Once you've noticed that they didn't take another look at the 1e dice:

they're even more fixed than 2e and yet the monsters were less prone to feeling identical. Perhaps some of that has to do with there being fewer monsters but I think a lot of it has to do with the monsters actually not being identical. Once they made the design decision in 2e that monster groups should be equivalent instead of purposely making some groups way more powerful than others I think the game's doomed to run into this problem.

Monsters end up feeling the same because they were purposely balanced to be the same.

I don't think the goal was to make them the same, but more to cut down on the number of variables needed to balance them. Thematically the red/blue/white system was nice, but functionally there wasn't an important difference. Generally the only side that mattered was the X, the difference in the number of surges or hearts often didn't matter. Heck most of the time you ended up blowing some monster away with enough excess damage to not even bother rolling for defense.

Balancing attacks around less dice makes it easier to prevent balance outliers and focus on making things stand out by the abilities you give them. Maybe they failed that last goal. But they did need to tone down the outliers since the changed the spawning system to give the OL more control over what he's getting. Having ridiculously better monsters was ok when you were at the mercy of the deck for spawning them. It's not so great when you can just pick the overpowered choice every single time. Sure the game still has this problem to a degree, but most things have a response if you change your strategies.

18 minutes ago, Proto Persona said:

I don't think the goal was to make them the same, but more to cut down on the number of variables needed to balance them.

I'm using the terms same and balanced as synonymous. My point being that this time the groups are supposed to be balanced, last time the "groups" were not supposed to be balanced.

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Heck most of the time you ended up blowing some monster away with enough excess damage to not even bother rolling for defense.

There was no rolling for defense last time.

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Balancing attacks around less dice makes it easier to prevent balance outliers and focus on making things stand out by the abilities you give them.

Both games use the exact same number of dice.

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Maybe they failed that last goal. But they did need to tone down the outliers since the changed the spawning system to give the OL more control over what he's getting. Having ridiculously better monsters was ok when you were at the mercy of the deck for spawning them. It's not so great when you can just pick the overpowered choice every single time.

The previous system didn't balance based on random chance. The OL had to use more of his resources to get stronger groups on the board and the strongest monsters originally could not be placed via cards. Expansion rules created a sort of pre-game buy system that allowed the OL to bring a limited amount of OP stuff into each quest.

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Sure the game still has this problem to a degree, but most things have a response if you change your strategies.

It's worse in a sense as reinforce one member of an open group heavily favors the smallest groups.

I imagine Descent 3e will use a similar system to IA with the Overlord gaining “Threat” per round (which, if you’re not familiar with IA, is spent to purchase reinforcements).

Nice way to balance the groups/ game while allowing different groups to have different power levels (and opens Descent 3e up to having a Skirmish game grafted on top!)