I've been playing Descent for many years now. All but the first two times I've played I have been Overlord. I say this because it may taint my perspective.

I've always thought that magic and ranged characters were pretty similar in effect. One uses staffs, the other uses bows, etc. Mages just seemed to be a little weaker was all. That being said, I've really wanted to make a larger difference between the two.

I've been playing DragonAge: Origins on Xbox recently and thought of a few ideas they have there that could be applied to Descent. In DA, the mages can't miss so long as they have line of sight. I am considering applying the same to Descent. I'd have mages ignore the range numbers on the dice. I'd have the ranged folk ignore the "X"-misses.

In effect, magic is always in range and arrows are always accurate. This would make the two classes a little different.

What do you think? What do you think the effects on game play would be?

How did you come to the conclusion that magic is weaker? Magic weapons generally roll more base damage and have better surge->damage efficiency than their ranged counterparts.

First of all, that's a significant buff to both ranged and magic attacks. Ranged attacks basically get a 20% boost all the time (more against dodging targets), and in a game where heroes frequently do more damage than necessary to kill the target, that might make some ranged weapons effectively more damaging than their melee counterparts (though the crossbow still can't beat the axe against most monsters). It certainly means that all ranged monsters become noticably more dangerous. Magic attacks with infinite range could dramatically change tactics; bane spiders are suddenly awesome snipers and can be spawned at the far end of a 10-space corridor and wreak havoc on any party that doesn't have its own magic attacks to counter with.

Secondly, that means that rolled range is no longer a consideration in magic weapons, which will tend to further mess up treasure balance. IMO, range is actually over -valued in the design of most of FFG's weapons, which means that giving all magic weapons infinite range will make the best weapons better and the worst weapons (comparatively) even worse. This may be especially problematic because having crappy range is actually a noticable weakness in a lot of the best magic weapons; heroes using a blast rune tend to always be on the edge of their realistic attack range, for example. Making blast attacks from huge range could change a lot.

Thirdly, your proposal is kind of the opposite of game's existing tendencies. Ranged weapons tend to have better range than magic weapons, due to the dominance of range on the blue die, good surge->range efficiency, and just a generic bias in favor of range in the weapon design. Magic weapons, on the other hand, already score more hits due to AoE (which isn't the same as missing less, but has some similar implications). So your changes would be kind of counter-intuitive, and fighting the existing slant of the game.

Finally, I think that "infinite range" and "never misses" are both fundamentally bad bonuses to hand out (at least commonly); they both remove mechanics from the game, which would tend to remove tactical depth, and they both seem to me to be against the general character of the game, which is one where distance and dice luck are important.

i like what you did with the magic user but having a character ignore his miss dice is too broken

just my opinion