Hello All

I hate to say but i have been playing Descent since its started and we must have found a few dozen bad map's or badly designed scenerios and even broken characters i just feel like they needed more playtesting before i spent over 600$ on one game. Just being Devils Advocate .

Thanks for your Ear

Ripley...

Ps : even the Fixes to some of the problems seemed quickly made and do nothing to help the game

Uh...what?

Ignoring the fact that it would be rather hard to spend $600 on Descent (I believe MSRP for the base game and all published expansions is around $330, and I don't know why you'd pay MSRP for board games), it's very unclear what the purpose of your post is or what it's based on. If this is a generic negative reveiw to warn people off, you're posting it in a place where it will be buried within days, while still listing Descent on your favorites, which seems like a poor strategy. If you just want FFG to know about your displeasure, you'd probably be much better off writing them directly. If you're looking for confirmation, disagreement, or advice, it might make sense to explain what quests and expansions this is based on and what your complaints actually are.

Antistone said:

Completely agree, post does nothing of value.

I just purchased the game as well as all expansions. I have yet to play an actual game yet though I am trying to singlehandedly learn it a bit before I spring it on my friends.

I personally would not suppose to infer what the developers might have done worng in their creation of the game. All I can do is look at the results and decide if they are adequate for my enjoyment. I do have many questions and I am working my way through them. But I don't necessarily fault a lack of playtesting for that. As a Software Development Manager, I know quite often that developers are so close to their work that they lack the critical eye necessary to see what might cause issues. Even testers do too, as often times development seeks to satusfy the testers needs which can be quite different than the larger audience's.

If testing is performed, but fails to uncover flaws due to biased testing procedures, one might still argue that there was "inadequate" testing even if the amount of testing done was not small.

In the case of Descent, though, I think the major problems are sufficiently easy to uncover by analysis, without any significant testing, that it would be more plausible to conclude that they simply spent their resources elsewhere and ignored those issues, or even considered them not to be problematic, rather than that they attempted to get them right but made some sort of mistake.

For example, it is quite difficult to imagine that anyone familiar with the game ever seriously believed that adding +1 wound to all monsters would compensate for the addition of another hero, or that Endurance and Leadership were equally useful skills, before or after testing them out. They may have wanted skills to be significantly different in power and different-sized games to be significantly different in difficulty; or they may have decided that it wasn't worth the work of balancing them; but to suggest that any testing procedure could be so bad as to foil an earnest attempt to balance them better than that is quite incredible.

My first impression is also that this game has not been balanced very well. And from my point of view FFG uses too much time cranking out new games, instead of supporting the ones they have!!
This might be good for sales, but it leaves one feeling a bit let down.
Descent being one of the games that has had the most attention from FFG, I still get the feeling that most of the expansions (the exception being RTL) are pretty basic, “now too well thought through” add on’s.
I am not looking for a new edition of the rules every 2 or 3 years like say some GW games. But I too think the game rules could do with a good overhaul.
The problem of cause being the tradeoff between ease of learning/ playing vs balancing and giving more experienced players some fair and challenging games.
I think that one of the issues here is that people are getting used to game designers spending lots and lots of time making sure that everything is balanced. Descent clearly isn't, and I think that it's a shame..... But my question is whether or not it spoils the game.? It seems to me that many people are having a great time playing Descent.

I will admit that I have, in the past, wondered about how much time was spent playtesting Descent. I do not, however, think that the game is unbalanced. The rules are messy and often illogical, yes. FFG's older games, like JitD, have been known to suffer from poorly organized rulebooks. This does seem to be improving with newer games (Runewars's rulebook is very well written IMHO) but it doesn't change the fact that older ones are a mess. Each new expansion adds new things that make it more complicated. At the end of the day, however, I've always found the balance of power between OL and Heroes to be roughly equal provided you don't mess with the rules.

On the subject of illogical rules, one should also remember that the Descent engine was taken from Doom. Doom was designed to emulate a video game (and did a very good job of it, IMHO.) It's not surprising, then, that a fantasy setting on essentially the same engine would feel more like a video game RPG than a pen and paper one. I think that distinction threw a lot of people for a loop in terms of what they were expecting from the game, and when the game didn't play as expected, some of those people got upset about it. This isn't FFG's fault, however. They designed the game to work this way, and viewed from a computer game angle I think Descent actually works quite well. I remember some of the classic CRPGs where the heroes couldn't cross water on the map, or where monsters that seemed to be flying still occupied the ground spaces they covered on screen. Play Descent with the same attitude, maintaining all the silly illogical rules, at it manages to work itself out quite nicely.

If you start making house rules to make the game work more the way you expected it to, that's your choice and that's fine, but you can't really blame FFG for balance issues when you're modifying the rules they wrote yourself. If that's the case in your group then perhaps YOU should do some more playtesting of your own.

(for clarity, since posts on a forum can often come across more hostile than intended, when I says "you" in this post I'm not speaking to any particular poster. I mean in the generic "not me" sense.)

Well first of all this is my first posting in any forum i'm sorry i might have posted it in the wrong place. second of all i have spent more then 600$ Canadian more like around 800$ i have 2x every set because i wanted more of the Creatures and map pieces to play with and yes it is one of my favourite games.

What im trying to get at is im tired of buying incomplete games in my opinion from PC- Games , console games and board games they never needed fixing before because the proper amount of play testing was made seems like now a days companies just produce games without completing the process themselves they rely on the community of gamers to find the games bugs and they patch it ( im not saying thats nesasseraly a bad thing ) IM just saying when it comes to a board game especialy one that takes time to play like Descent's RTL it kinda sucks that we played every tuesday for 4 months to find out that the fix to the final boss (Avatar ) was to give him almost 1000 extra hit points cuz people complained that he was eassy to defeat so there fix was to make it impossible to kill ( we managed to win but only cuz we had a web weopon and the DM quit )

Anywho my original post was not meant to anger people just to propose that there should not be Fixes to a board game, it should not happen and that i feel companies are a bit lazzy when it comes to playtesting and the fixes. You can understand why they do what they do you can produce way more games faster that way but like i said before in video games that fine a patch fixes it i just hate having my rule book in one hand and the FAQ fixes in the other and searching both to find the sollution to the problem at hand.

Thanks

Ripley...

PS : English in my second language srry for grammar and spelling mistakes

Oh and Thanks for the replies i feel this is a major issue that us the consumers must addreess to eachother and to the manufacturer

OH and one more thing

I Love you guys : )

Play on

Ripley...

Just to pitch my two cents ($US - ), I have found the game to be extremely balanced. I'm using all expansions except SoB. I've played with two different groups as both Hero and Overlord in Vanilla Descent as well as Road to Legend. We all comment on how often a dungeon comes down to the Heroes having only 2-4 CT at the end, or the Overlord claims the last two CT with a last gasp attack from the dungeon boss. On the smaller scale, how often do you see a monster left with one wound or dying by just one wound? We see it constantly.

I do agree with Ripley that it would be nice to buy a game and not immediately go to the Internet to download the latest patch/update/FAQ. I also agree with Steve-O that the rules are rather helter-skelter. I myself have made several aids such as writing my own list of skills/abilities/effects updated with all corrections from the FAQ so I don't have to double-check everything.

End of the day, once you get the rules flowing I feel this game is rather well balanced.

Steve-O said:

This is, in fact, the easiest way I've found to explain to new people how to play:

"Remember Diablo? Yeah, Diablo 3 is coming out, I know. Anyways, this game plays a lot like Diablo. If you die, you lose some stuff and start back in town. There are "town portals" called glyhps. Monsters appear (seemingly) random, etc."

Really makes me wonder why FFG hasn't created a Diablo game based on the Descent rules. They've done plenty of other Blizzard games. In fact, I think they've done ALL the other Blizzard games...

-shnar

In my terminology, both sides having an equal chance of winning is not sufficient (or necessary) for a game to be balanced. Though I realize that's a contentious definition.

I also think it's a bit unfair to say that the game is well-balanced if what you actually mean is that it's well-balanced after applying a bunch of common house rules. I'm not 100% sure what house rules (if any) either of you use, but if you find the game to be extremely fair between the overlord and heroes whether you play with 2 heroes or 4, I'd really like to see some blow-by-blow accounts. Lots of people also draw-3-pick-1 heroes or port the reinforcement marker into vanilla, cherry-pick the quests that the community says are best, randomize treachery, ban or limit specific options like dark glyphs or particular "unbalanced" cards, etc., all of which are not part of the originally rules and presumably have an effect on balance...so if you use any house rules like that, you really ought to qualify your claim that the game is balanced.

It's also worth considering that you're probably playing with a bunch of errata that weren't in the original game, like the one-potion-per-turn limit, skeletons with Pierce, etc. So if Ripley is complaining that they release the game carelessly and then "patch" the problems that players complain about later on (which may or may not be his point; language barriers strike again), saying that the game is good now seems a bit beside the point.

shnar said:

Arent they announcing a new game system in the near future at their Decent-Con or whatever it's called? Perhaps a Diablo3 board game using decent/doom as a basis is in the works?

Thats sort of what i mean

Any other company would have a recall and send you a product that has been fixed its not so with games with video games lets say you buy the game cuz you collect games ( like i do ) and you never end up playing it until many years down the road but you find out that it had a serious error in it and needed a serious patch but the company and or website does not exist anymore What do you do Now . You spent good money on a broken product . The same is true and even worse with board games i cant just download a patch i need to alter the main rules itself and or remove cards add cards creatures places ect ...

Im just saying that when i buy a product i expect to buy a defect free product not something that i have to work at fixing yet again it seems to be exactly what all companies are doing now a days. releasing a product that has not been sufficiently tested and having its consumors test it for them which can lead to serious outcomes for example the family that died do to Hondas faulty brakes. That might be an over exagurated example but its what i feel.

For Example in the Industrial age why does everything still work 100 years later .....Because they were well made and tested nowadays we buy plastic crap that works for mabe a yea:r and is trashed. Im Tired of this and making a stand personaly wether its with board games or a toaster i am fed up.

Srry for ranting and raving

Your Friend

Ripley...

Yes there is lots of talk about a Diablo board game i would love to see what they will do with it

Fizz said:

There's a Descent-Con? o.O?

-shnar

Ripley... said:

Any other company would have a recall and send you a product that has been fixed

Actually, pretty much the only things that are recalled and replaced are things that could cause bodily harm. And that's just because companies want to protect themselves from lawsuits.

For Example in the Industrial age why does everything still work 100 years later

This is a dangerous sampling bias. If you're only looking at things that still work 100 years later, then obviously all of them will still work 100 years later. This ignores all the garbage that just didn't survive for 100 years.

when i buy a product i expect to buy a defect free product not something that i have to work at fixing

Complexity can make games fun, interesting, and highly replayable, but it also makes those games very difficult to test. (And if a company did spend a sufficient amount of time thoroughly testing a highly complex game, those costs would be passed along to the consumer, making the retail price even higher.) If we would only buy games that were 100% polished out-of-the-box, we probably would be stuck with much simpler games. While it can be
frustrating to need house rules to 'fix' games, I'd rather have the option of buying partially-tested games with a lot of potential that than be stuck playing Monopoly. (Speaking of which, does anyone play Monopoly without house rules? Free parking? Auctioning a property if the player doesn't buy it?)

shnar said:

Yeah, Realms of Terrinoth I think is the real name. I haven't read too much about it since I'm assuming it's too far away for me to be bothered going. (Not in south-central Ontario? Yeah, that's what I thought =P)

There's some debate about whether the new product they'll be unveiling is a whole new game, an expansion to one of the three existing Terrinoth games, or both. I think the portions of the news release that have been quoted are pretty explicit about the fact that it's a Terrinoth product though, as in something set in the Terrinoth world, not something in a different world that uses the same mechanics

I'd be interested to see a Diablo board game, and FFG certainly seems to be in the position to do it if anyone is. I don't know that I'd want it if it was just Descent (or RB) with a Diablo re-theme though. I suppose I'd have to see the rules. What was changed, etc.

FFG has done two of Blizzard's Big Three. I'd personally like to see a Blackthorne board game though =P

Actually, as far as the comparison between Descent and video games go, they actually "fix" and patch video games all the time. I noticed you have a World of Warcraft badge as one of your favorite games. I can only assume you play the MMORPG as well. Blizzard patches that sucker all the time.

This is not to say I think FFG has playtested everything nearly as well as they should have (take the Quest Compendium for example), but at least they have the decency to sha "whoops, we messed that one up". When it was pointed out that it was possible to beat the first dungeon in a single player turn with unlimited fatigue potion swilling, they limited potions to one a turn. When people pointed out how the Quest Compendium was borked, they released a addendum fixing the issues.

While it would be nice to have a perfectly balanced system to play, it's just not possible unless you count checkers and tic-tac-toe, both of which I find insufferably boring. In both of those games, if played correctly by both players, you will always end in a stalemate. *Yawn*

I've played flawed and unbalanced games in the past, but I don't do it for the competitive nature of the activity, even though I do enjoy trouncing the heroes. I play the game to have a few beers and goof off with my buddies. If the game were intended for competitive play I'd probably have a bit more of a problem with playtesting and balance issue. As it stands, having five players in the room, if there's a rules issue we'll discuss it and settle on an amicable solution. Failing that, we'll just vote, and there will always be a majority opinion.

There is indeed no excuse for sloppy writing, but as long as you fix the issues (or at least put forth a good effort), I'll forgive you.

...But that's just my opinion, and I could be wrong.

Etna''s Vassal said:

Really? I never thought about it, but I guess you could have 6 Fatigue potions (but not for every hero, since there's only so many babies-in-a-bottle in the game, right?). Is that enough to just run to the end and kill the giant?

And I have to say, our group doesn't like the 1-potion-per-turn rule, but we understand /why/ it's there (to keep twinks from abusing the game). We've modded it to be 1-potion-TYPE-per-turn, which allows a hero to say drink a Fatigue potion and then a Power potion in the same turn. Still works well and keeps min-maxers from abusing the system.

-shnar

Yeah, I think you can do it with Red Scorpion. You just keep downing every potion you come across to generate additional fatigue and blow through the entire dungeon, laughing at the monsters as they just stand there and watch helplessly. All you really need is a gold treasure and you can pound the snot out of the giant with very little effort.

The (reformed) powergamer in me laughs at this oversight. It's a pretty cool abuse of the rules, IMHO.

The "games are supposed to be fun, not an exercise in explioting the rules" gamer I have since become finds this error to be apalling, but errors like this slip past playtesters all the time. Just look at all the Magic: The Gathering insta-kill loops out there.

Looks like you can open the boss room of quest 1 (after collecting the required rune key) on the first turn with 31 movement points, if you know exactly where everything is. And there's one vitality potion along your route. So a hero with 5 max fatigue could do it on a Battle action if they started with 6 vitality potions, though with only 2 fatigue left over. (I'm pretty sure you're thinking of someone other than Red Scorpion, though. Maybe Silhouette.)

If another hero goes first, hands you a bunch of potions, and opens the door for you, you should have no problem opening 2 silver and 1 gold chests roughly along your path (the +2 max fatigue skill would also work). You can't get around the beastmen just inside the final room, though, so unless you have Acrobat or Telekinesis, you'd have at most one attack to kill the boss, which is a bit of a stretch. But even if you fail, the rest of the heroes can pop into town, and come out right at the boss room on round 2. With silver and gold treasures.

If you assume perfect luck, it's certainly possible to win the quest on the first turn without the one-potion-per-turn rule. And should be pretty easy to win on round 2-3 even with mediocre luck.

One could argue this is more of a problem with the quest design than the potions; if they put in more monsters with Grapple or that physically blocked corridors, that would significantly limit the effectiveness of this strategy. Bosses that take several rounds to kill would also give the monsters you ran past more time to catch up and join in.

But realistically, potions seem generally worth more than their cost in coins, so it's fairly reasonable to expect the game to break if heroes are allowed to drink as many as they can afford.

Yeah, on second thought it may have been Silhouette. I was thinking it was Red Scorpion due to her ability to convert wounds into fatigue, thus making both types of potions fatigue potions of varying effectiveness.

...Or the Beastman Lord being unable to win the final battle when one of the heroes is the faerie (can't remember her name off the top of my head).

Regardless, this sort of exploit is hilarious to me, but can be ended with proper rules revision, which when done makes me smile.

Red Scorpion can convert one wound into fatigue at the start of each turn. This is completely useless for a one-turn blitz through the dungeon.

The melee-immune fairy is Zyla, from Tomb of Ice. She has Fly, which would obviate the need for Acrobat, and I think she has 5 max fatigue. But she also didn't exist until long after the one-potion rule was added.

I guess I was unclear- I was talking about two different playtesting SNAFUs.