It's my first ever post and a long one too so apologies.

I have a few points to mention that others have touched on already. I have played a lot of the Descent Scenarios and finished a RtL campaign a while back. The problems there were the dungeons and encounters not staging up per campaign level and obviously the final battle (beastman Avatar) being a walkover for the heroes as the beastman got 1 attack in (which missed) before he and his 2 clones were wiped out.

I was happy to see these imbalances were addressed in SoB for the most part but playing a campaign in which we've just hit gold level, the OL is being nice to the heroes becuse the game could have been ended long ago at this point.

1. Captain Bones Avatar took Death Head upgrade as the first action in the game. Suicide bomber skeletons do stupid damage to copper level heroes. This was compounded by Hordes of things being in play in many dungeons.

2. The heroes got pwned in the first week as they thought to leave the island straight away and suffered a total party kill right off the bat. This is a huge issue combined with the above because we're on the Shadow Queen plot so, week 3-4 saw the introduction of A New Law. Without ready access to fatigue potions, the heroes can't fatigue into battle so easily and for the rest of the game are slower in each and every dungeon (preserving their fatigue as much as possible). This can make them even easier prey for well placed suicide skeletons on a clever set-up.

3. In the hope of getting better weapons and xp to upgrade the ship, the heroes hit dungeons looking for decent treasure and a few potions. In the interim they allow the Siren to place a siege. Tarianor, should be the first to fall. It has low defense and no dice training in Fighting or Subterfuge. By the time the heroes see the benefit of Alchemist 8 during a New Law scenario, Tarianor is gone as is the access to Shark Tattoo. All future sea encounters become difficult.

4. Finally in relation to sea encounters, The heroes have gone out twice to tackle the Kraken and break a siege. The first time was in The Wild Vortex. Shot a tentacle and Webbed the Kraken before the current pulled them onto the rocks (second turn) and gave away another TPK. Second attempt directly after took place in the Dire Straits. This went better. The Kraken got webbed again, All the tentacles got blown off it BUT, with no sails and 4 attempts to drop anchor, the current still had the party "flee" before finishing him off.

We're now at the start of gold level and the Siren and Kraken are wandering artound together doing nothing. The heroes are incapable of defeating them and if they sack another city the game will end so the OL is just playing it out till the final battle for the heck of it.

Also worth mentioning that the OL is so far ahead of the heroes that since near the start of silver level, each hero is worth -3 conquest.

Since you are using skeleton avatar. The heroes will not stand a chance in the final fight. The health bonuses doesn't play apart in the fight. Because it is easier to sink the Revenge in 3 turn with overlord ship going first. The heroes need to take off at least 600 wounds from captain bones. The skeleton avatar could spirit fog off the western edge of the map at his turn which render the heroes to do nothing but guard order on the other side of their cannon.

A friend of mine also played set up battle against captain bones with well upgraded Revenge hero ship, and a well upgraded captain Bones (with lots of bonus health if you use the new all conquest earned gives twice the HP).

The heroes were massacred according to him. I am worried about this avatar fight being even possible for the heroes, though I haven't tried it myself.

Aww, no Captain Bones for me then. I like balanced games.

The Siren is very powerful early on.

the exploding skeletons are deadly, but not game breaking in my opinion.

The sirenencounters ended our first campaign, as players had no way to stop her. they will only play if we house rule some of the water rules. She can just swim so far away,. and players burn thru fatigue ignoring her effect, and cannot go in the water after her because of the deep water rules, which make moving around very very difficult.

Sea battles need to be boat on boat.. you add Liuetents, that are not on the boats, and they can break the encoutners very easily, and if you add one of the maps with too many rocks, the players just wont even want to deal with hit.

You could say, players could avoid the Lietutents, but one of the Overlord plans can be to gather items, which they could easily do, in the bronze campaign, because No player group will defeat the Siren unless they are very lucky, or the overload is just playing wayyyy to sloppy.

From the way things have gone, the lack of availability of potions has been the real game breaker. The players usually hit things hard and fast and fatigue potions help that immensely. The Shadow queen plot slows them down so much that there are often 2 or sometimes even 3 spawnings in a dungeon level.

We're commencing gold level this week. OL still with 80 more conquest than heroes so only 2 of them are only worth 1 conquest each when killed the other 2 are worth nothing, one of them is worth nothing even when carrying a curse token at this point.

Kevin has chimed in on these boards that there was supposed to be a minimum of 1CP for a hero (i.e. no hero is ever worth 0CPs). Will probably be in the next FAQ...

-shnar

That seems fairer.

Any rumours on when the FAQ is expected?

Well here is a few house rules for SOB that allows you to even the odds.

1. Use Feats from Tombs of Ice with standard rules, but also allow a feat draw after every ship battle as well as a reward for compleating a dungeon or a rumor. More feats mean better handling of the tough nature of the expansion.

2. Give players incentive to battle through a dungeon rather than free, I give PC's 1 CP for every floor of a dungeon they compleate. Thus there is a tangable reward to going lower in a dungeon rather than running away at the first sign of trouble.

3. Alter the rules for reefs and the like. Make it so that the ship takes some automatic damage and stops at the edge of the obsticle rather than TPK the party outright. I find the insta-death from the coral reefs too harsh.

4. Allow ships to turn 90 degrees in a sea battle (costs 2 surges, rotate on the place and line up with the squares. The turn must not colide with obsticles or another ship). The lack of turning in the game is just ANNOYING!

The 4th Man said:

Yes, I would like to know this as well. I am somewhat putting off a SoB campaign until some of the more pressing questions get answered. Thankfully, I was in the middle of a RtL campaign when SoB was available.

Darkfire14 said:

I may do something like #3 for sure...

My players really want to turn the ships, but I feel the ships are too big for the small space on the map for it work well.

Luckily my players always attempt to finish a dungeon. They have never tried to abuse the rules by going into and just doign 1 level and then leave.

Jonny WS said:

I would strongly recommend holding off on playing Sea of Blood until the FAQ hits. It's tougher and probably on a higher curve than RtL but that just means the little glitches seem a lot more broken, as you can see from the various threads.

Jonny WS said:

Repeated attempts from myself and others who have participated in sending the questions for the FAQ update previously have for the past several months have gone unanswered. It could be tomorrow or it could be next year, FFG has given no indicators (at least I've gotten no indicators).

However, March marks the 1 yr mark for the current FAQ so maybe they decided to do one once a year.

I short email conversation I had with FFG support a couple months ago indicated that they consider the Descent FAQ an "expert only" document. Meaning that only one person (i.e. Kevin W) could update it. They indicated that Kevin was a bit busy with other products and didn't have the time for an FAQ update. Also, I asked that the PDF of the Sea of Blood campaign record sheet be uploaded to the support page (just like the RtL sheet is). As you can see, it's not there yet.

I truly think that FFG is just to way too busy with new products to support the older products (other than sending out replacement parts). Also, the polish on some of the expansion products is a bit lacking (Descent Quest Compendium and Sea of Blood).

It would be nice if they reached out to the Descent community for help. I think there are several people here that would help draft the questions and answers for the updated FAQ that could then be reviewed and approved/corrected by Kevin W. This would ease the burden on him and increase the speed in which we would get "official" answers. One can only dream...

Leveraging volunteer work from fans is a really good idea that I wish more companies would do...

-shnar

edroz said:

Really? I find that incredible. In the literal sense of "not credible". Some parts of the FAQ give the distinct impression of being written by a non-expert.

Maybe they had a looser policy in the past, but have revised their position based on the problems that caused? Hm...

Everything in this thread reiterates what I've said numerous times in the past about FFG's lack of support for Descent, and is the main reason why our group isn't playing SoB. It's full of rules and balance holes and the designers abandoned their customers from day 1. SoB fixed many lingering and unresolved issues in the unplayable RtL and introduced countless new issues making SoB unplayable, by our groups definition, without liberal house rules and house fixes.

Contrast this with the recently released FFG game Runewars. Not only is the Runwars rulebook infinite better organized, written, proof-read and precise than any Descent rulebook, the minor issues the game has (compared to the countless MAJOR issues SoB has) were IMMEDIATELY addressed by the core Runwares designer (Corey Konieczka), in posts both here and on BGG. Not only did Cory reply tocustomer questions, he has also released 2 FAQs for Runewars, and the game has only been out for ~3 weeks!!!! Not that Runewars needed much clarificination or rule altering. It's FAQ is a single page with maybe 15 Q&As.

The designers and FFG support staff for Descent should be ashamed of themsevles. Honestly, with the state that SoB is in, and the obvious lack of support it's getting, customers should be able to recieve a full refund. I certainly won't play it and I defintely feel ripped off.

My god the registration server on these fancy new forums is horrible. Anyways...

I would have to counter z22. While Descent is full of loopholes, it still the best entry in my mind for the "dungeon crawl" style of game. Since that genre is one of my favorite kind, I can give it a few passes considering how grand a scale the game is on.I do wish it had a larger amount of "official" support. Still I'm not about to let something small (in my opinion) like needing to make a few house rules stop me from enjoying it.

On a related note, I can't remember the last game I played that I didn't use a house rule on. Hell for years I though that getting money from Free Parking was an official rule.

z22 said:

I disagree with a lot of this, or at least, partly disagree.

Yes, FFG's rules (Descent at least, right from the start) are terribly written, but that appears to be a design decision rather than a lack of support

Yes, there are some obvious mistakes and apparent loopholes (such as the Avatars that have overland keeps and so can't start several Lts - though unless those Lts are specific to those Avatars, that too could even be deliberate) in SoB.

However we found RtL to be a very finely tuned game with a very delicate balance - not at all 'unplayable'. The game did improve with the latest FAQ issue, but even with Telekinesis, 2 crushing blows, bear tattoo etc it was still quite playable and oh so often very tense (a sign of good balance I generally find).
What it was, and to some extent still is, is a very tight, very demanding, very unforgiving game. If you don't, won't, or can't adapt tactics and strategies to do the best you can you will get smashed - painfully, thoroughly and demoralisingly smashed.
The biggest problem is that new groups (even too an extent ours) tend to just jump in blindly without an analysis at all. So they get smashed (the OL's task is much easier at the very basic level of the game) and complain. I mean, seriously, the amount of group that don't look at how much better silver upgraded monsters are, and therefore how fast the OL can get them and concede 23 or more CT in the first dungeon without fleeing is really ridiculous. The most cursory analysis makes this very basic turn one strategy obvious.
If you play any good, tight strategy game at all without any analysis you will get smashed. Chess for example.

I see the same thing happening in SoB. New groups are launching into the great unknown, literally blythely sailing off blind. Then they get smashed and complain about balance...
The most cursory examination reveals that the heroes start with only 1 basic cannon. The least NPC ship starts with 4 cannon. Basic monsters count 4 trait dice in their best trait, and 2 in the others - often only 1 or 2 heroes in he party will have 2 or 3 trait dice suitable for the cannon. Many of the monsters have bonus abilities that outweigh most if not all hero abilities in a ship-to-ship fight. Further examination reveals that a number of the maps are quite dangerous as well. Basic water rules show that any swimming more than a space or two is suicidal, so the Revenge is going to have to sail up close to enemy ships in encounters - without specific skills or abilities there will be no quick-kill encounters so plenty of time for the OL's minions to mess with the heroes.
In short, don't go to sea until you have upgraded your ship, skills and/or traits somewhat!
Heroes start of on land, there is no starting Lt so no early map pressure and there are plenty of land dungeons to do early with no possibility of dangerous encounters!

I think the howls of 'unbalanced', 'unfair', etc in SoB are premature. People need to have not only played more, but played smarter. The game needs learning before it can be judged fairly.

Interestingly, this sort of discussion...not anyone's conclusions, the discussion itself...is one of the reasons I don't want to play RtL or SoB.

I don't know whether they're balanced. I don't think anyone in this thread knows whether they're balanced. I don't think anyone at FFG knows whether they're balanced.

The game takes, what, 60 hours? 80? To have even finished the game once apparently makes you a veteran player, and probably makes it one of the top games in your collection for total hours you've spent playing it. (I've played Dominion over a hundred times, for example, but I don't think I've spent 80 hours on it.) There are lots of games you can play a dozen times without getting a solid handle on the strategy. RtL/SoB feature a ton of randomized content that makes it unlikely the same strategy will work every time. Your opponents have no more experience than you, so you can't trust that their response to your strategy was in any way reasonable. I bet you could overlord several campaigns with the exact same strategy and still not know with any confidence whether it's a reasonable strategy in general, let alone how it compares to other strategies.

Yes, there's a lot you can learn by analysis, and I'm a big fan of analysis. But honestly, if you expect the extended campaign to be accessible to anyone other than a hardcore fan, it is absoutely mandatory that you be able to learn as you go, because the game is way too long to write off the first game or three as a learning experience, and expecting that a typical player will do things like comparing all the monster stats before they start playing (or that their analysis will be complete and accurate if they do) is wildly unrealistic.

And this ignoring the fact that players make mistakes all the time about even the best-written rules, which Descent's are not.

And I'm sure that a lot of tactics can be used more than once in a campaign, so it's not like you need to sink the entire game into a single failed experiment, but I still can't imagine that anyone on the face of the planet can honestly claim to be an expert, except by comparison.

</rant>

Antistone said:

What you say is fair, but it is surely reasonable to expect to do at least some cursory analysis before starting a 60hr game!

No more than a single read of the rulebook and one look at the map and the cannon cards was enough to tell me that it was plain stupid not go through a few dungeons on land (quite probably all of bronze and partly into silver!) before heading out to sea.
OTOH, to be fair, I have extensive RtL experience giving an unfair advantage over an absolute newcomer.
But still, straight to sea with only a single cannon?

Corbon said:

+1 Everything Corbon said is true, people are rushing to conclusions about this game before they've played it enough to adapt to the new tactics it requires. Upgrading your ship ASAP is essential, people fighting the Siren with 1 or 2 cannons and complaining that she's unbeatable seem to be using the wrong tactics IMHO. As for what Antistone said, that's also true. I think 60 hours to play a campaign is a bit high, more like 35 or 40 but even so that is a MASSIVE time investment. It means that people are going to take quite sometime to be able to develop new strategies, let alone discover if this game is "balanced".