Right now I am starting to get into Descent, but Imperial Assault kind of interests me. I like the fantasy theme of Descent more than the sci fi theme of Star Wars though, so I don't see myself picking it up yet. With Descent, I'm a bit worried about its future. Most of all I'm worried about everything going OOP before I can get it all. The good thing though is that there are a lot of tools, both official and fan made, that let you create your own quests and such. That's got me wondering of how Imperial Assault does things.

For one I've heard that there are side quests for each character that go into their backstory or something. I think that would be really cool to do with Descent. I was wondering if someone can give me some examples on what these stories and quests are like. Maybe give me a short summary about what they do, as I don't mind the spoilers.

Other than that, how do the individual quests play? I really like the varied objectives in each quest in Descent. Are there any more interesting things in Imperial Assault?

The character driven side missions are pretty interesting.

Diala confronts the loss of her master.

Verena confronts her brother.

Gaarkhan tries to rescue his brother a wookie his brother owed a life debt to.

You can read the Side Mission Blurbs here;

http://cards.boardwars.eu/Core-Box/Side Missions/Red/

http://cards.boardwars.eu/Expansion-Boxes/Twin-Shadows/Side Missions/Red/

http://cards.boardwars.eu/Expansion-Boxes/Return-to-Hoth/Side Missions/Red/

http://cards.boardwars.eu/Expansion-Boxes/The-Bespin-Gambit/Side Missions/Red/

http://cards.boardwars.eu/Expansion-Boxes/Jabbas-Realm/Side Missions/Red/

http://cards.boardwars.eu/Expansion-Boxes/Heart-of-the-Empire/Side Missions/Red/

Each should give you a little taster for what's in store in each mission

As someone who's played IA for years and is just now getting into Descent-

If you're talking the app quests, I'd say both are relatively similar. If you're talking book quests, I'd say this: Imperial Assault is far more interesting on the micro level, because the quests contain hidden information including changing objectives (as opposed to Descent, in which all players know all information in the book). At the macro (or campaign) level, I think Descent does more interesting stuff, at least compared to the first few expansions in IA (Heart of the Empire might give Descent's campaigns a run for their money). The campaign structure in Descent just lends itself better to telling a more cohesive and coherent story, and characters tend to show up more frequently.

Not to self promote too much, but since I'm new to Descent I wrote a few articles comparing and contrasting the two recently, if you're interested.

Mechanics I prefer in Descent

Mechanics I prefer in Imperial Assault

The main difference IMO is that IA missions almost always have a turn limit; Descent quests rarely do, I think. This keeps IA missions moving at a rapid pace and forces a result, which doesn't always happen in Descent.

In IA missions, as well as the turn limit, the Imperial player can often win by wounding all heroes. He usually gets very little benefit from actually defeating a hero for the second time (it takes that hero out of the game but doesn't otherwise help the Imperial player win the mission), so nobody ever feels "picked on" - the Imperial player might concentrate on one long enough to wound him, but will then immediately move onto someone else. Compare to Descent, where it's often in the Overlord's best interest to just keep hammering on the weakest hero for the entire quest, knocking them down every time they stand up again. That's usually not much fun for the hero in question.

In Descent, everyone has full mission info and the Overlord player just has to choose how to use his monsters; this means there's little in the way of surprises or in-mission storytelling. In IA, the players might know that (for example) they need to break into the Imperial base, but what will they find inside? What if the guides that took them to the base turn against them? They don't know any of this until it happens, and it leads to really interesting and memorable stuff going on.

Threat is another big difference. In Descent, monsters get more powerful in Act II, and what monsters the Overlord can choose are limited by where the mission is; but generally speaking, if he has a choice between two Shadow Dragons or five Goblin Archers... well... duh!? They're not even remotely comparable. So I found that despite a huge variety of monsters available in Descent, only very few ever actually get used. In IA, in early missions the Imperial player will choose low-threat Stormtroopers while in later missions he might use high-threat Royal Guard, or whatever. This leads to much more variety over the course of a campaign (excepting that, yeah, Stormtroopers will usually be there somewhere) and lets the players feel like they really are "levelling up".

The core game mechanics have some differences too (full disclosure: I think IA is simply better, to the point where I've lost all interest in playing Descent, sadly) but in terms of missions/quests, those are the main differences.

7 hours ago, subtrendy2 said:

As someone who's played IA for years and is just now getting into Descent-

If you're talking the app quests, I'd say both are relatively similar. If you're talking book quests, I'd say this: Imperial Assault is far more interesting on the micro level, because the quests contain hidden information including changing objectives (as opposed to Descent, in which all players know all information in the book). At the macro (or campaign) level, I think Descent does more interesting stuff, at least compared to the first few expansions in IA (Heart of the Empire might give Descent's campaigns a run for their money). The campaign structure in Descent just lends itself better to telling a more cohesive and coherent story, and characters tend to show up more frequently.

Not to self promote too much, but since I'm new to Descent I wrote a few articles comparing and contrasting the two recently, if you're interested.

Mechanics I prefer in Descent

Mechanics I prefer in Imperial Assault

Did you ever write that article you mention in the IA post about taking the best elements from both games to make something really great?

16 hours ago, Pollux85 said:

Did you ever write that article you mention in the IA post about taking the best elements from both games to make something really great?

Still working on that one. I'm wanting more experience with Descent first, since I'm discovering there's still quite a bit to learn, so it might take a while.

52 minutes ago, subtrendy2 said:

Still working on that one. I'm wanting more experience with Descent first, since I'm discovering there's still quite a bit to learn, so it might take a while.

Looking forward to hearing it. The Travel events in Descent sound like a fun thing to incorporate.

https://community.fantasyflightgames.com/topic/113746-differences-from-descent/

https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1220455/10-difference-between-descent-and-imperial-assault

https://boardgamegeek.com/filepage/134544/differences-between-descent-20-and-imperial-assaul

The third one is the most important.

I like how you refer to the mission as Quest, no encounters and they are referred to as missions.

Story missions give 2 xp to the

winner, side missions give one.

Make sure you read the BGG thread linked above with the differences between the 2 games or you will be screwing up a ton of rules by playing Descent rules. It's subtle but it can really throw off a game if you are taking infinite strain movement or not removing strain immediately from Resting, etc, etc.

The biggest thing that killed Descent for me is the fact that there's an x-men on every attack instead of just certain figures defense die. The variance is just so high, I've played Descent games where 3 attacks in a row of missed due to Blue dice. Whoever decided that every single attack in the game should have a 1/6 chance of doing nothing should not be making games. The White dice in IA isn't perfect but it's so much better than the Blue dice in Descent, you can just choose not to attack a white dice defender and the White dice is weak when it doesn't roll x-men.