Fiddly is right. It's one of the reasons I like 2e, so I don't have to spend so much time setting up the terrain instead of just playing. It's a lot less intimidating for new players too if I show the game to some.

On 3/20/2018 at 7:35 PM, RedMageStatscowski said:

Fiddly is right. It's one of the reasons I like 2e, so I don't have to spend so much time setting up the terrain instead of just playing. It's a lot less intimidating for new players too if I show the game to some.

Well I don't think that sorting through over 100 tiles is actually faster than putting out the occasional piece of terrain. I do think that having smaller maps, not having to specifically place all sorts of different monsters and the inability of just about every monster to show up in every quest speeds things up considerably.

The fiddly part I was referring to is how the terrain has a tendency to get knocked around during the game.

On 3/19/2018 at 9:18 PM, Proto Persona said:

I don't understand why they didn't keep terrain and tiles separate in the first place. Was a much more versatile system.

Whilst this was good for flexibility in 1e with lots of possible combos, the negatives were it took longer to set up if using a lot of props in your own designs- maps needed use of the tiles to design in variety if making your own settings. Tricky for packing up and returning to a game when time ran out.

If extra tiles didn't suit D1e tiles often were quite samey- new ones more varied and level of detail was improved a lot (plus double sided tiles were only in d1e later, not from the start.

33 minutes ago, Watercolour Dragon said:

Whilst this was good for flexibility in 1e with lots of possible combos, the negatives were it took longer to set up if using a lot of props in your own designs- maps needed use of the tiles to design in variety if making your own settings. Tricky for packing up and returning to a game when time ran out.

If extra tiles didn't suit D1e tiles often were quite samey- new ones more varied and level of detail was improved a lot (plus double sided tiles were only in d1e later, not from the start.

I agree with you. I also owned Descent 1st ed. I think a good storage system was a requirement. The terrain was fiddly, and the tiles looked generic. It was a system that allowed for a lot more variety though. Less tiles needed to be produced and a bigger variety of map layouts were possible. When it comes to dungeons I think the modular approach was the right call.

What was nice which 2e lacks is it did have some cool things on the scenery/furnishing tiles which were fun to put in your own designs as the hmm, this might be explorable or important (or a decoy or a trap...) or is interesting in a what is it or why's it there kinda way. But then 2e did have the (beneficial, discussed elsewhere) change that all the players knew everything about the quest not just the OL. Although it also had rolling boulders! Yeah, this dungeon's gonna go all Indiana Jones on your peeps. So I'm still planning on working some 1e into 2e somehow at some point.

As awesome as second edition is I do feel one of its few flaws is it didn't update 1e as intelligently as it could have, it did lose some of the good things of 1e instead of refining and reworking them.

On 3/24/2018 at 9:03 PM, Proto Persona said:

I agree with you. I also owned Descent 1st ed. I think a good storage system was a requirement. The terrain was fiddly, and the tiles looked generic. It was a system that allowed for a lot more variety though. Less tiles needed to be produced and a bigger variety of map layouts were possible. When it comes to dungeons I think the modular approach was the right call.

I have mixed feelings, every time someone gets confused by shadows in the corners and thinks they can't shoot through there I wish the tiles were more generic. And the amount that lighting colored the whole tile can get downright wacky.

That said they *tended* to calm down in the expansions. And it's hard to argue that these tiles don't give the game a very different feel:

But where it's already a bit noticeable that only having about 30 highly specialized tiles to depend on hurts them I wonder if it might be worth it to release a road to legend expansion with some terrain and some of the super useful basic tile shapes that they left out of the base box.