"Get in, kill the boss and loot everything we can on the way, right? That sounds sweet, but there are 4 of us!"

I'm working on making a few changes to the game with 2 main goals, 1 is to make the game scale better with heroes, and 2 is to add competition to the heroes (basically reward working together as well as reward backstabbing). Here's a few of the changes I want to make, but I really want to insure stability and balance with the game, so I ask anyone with suggestions about balance or suggestions for more 'competitive heroes' ideas, please post them, I'm very interested in hearing ideas!

First idea I'm stealing from someone else: Spawning cards threat cost must be payed for each monster; 4 threat to summon a beastman or 8 threat to summon 2 beastmen, or 12 threat to summon 2 beastmen and 1 master beastman. I'm thinking of changing this a little bit because I don't like the cost of a master being the same as a normal, so IMO beastman war party will allow you to summon up to 2 beastmen and 1 master beastman paying the following costs: card's threat cost - 1 for each beastman and card's threat cost + 1 for a master beastman (making summoning 2 beastmen and a master beastman cost 11 threat) This same concept will apply to all spawning cards, non masters cost card cost -1 and master's cost card cost -2, you cannot summon more then the card allows you to (IE: cannot summon 3 beastmen or 2 master beastmen)

Next I change how looting chests and gold works. When a hero opens a chest (in this example it awarded 1 copper treasure) he gets 2 options; either allow up to 3 heroes adjacent to the chest to draw a copper treasure, including him, the looter choosing who gets to draw, or he may draw 2 copper treasures for himself (If the chest rewarded 2 copper treasures he would draw 4 and put 2 back). This allows for major douchery between the heroes and adds an exciting twist to looting treasure (after all, how many heroes REALLY want to share all of their loot?) If the chest had X Curse(s) then the overlord could choose to either add X Curse tokens to the hero that looted the chest or receive 1 threat per hero. The same rule applies to gold, the hero who loots the gold can allow all heroes within 2 cells of the gold to receive 75 coins, or he can be greedy and take 200 coins for himself.

Trading: In addition to paying 1 movement point to give a player an item heroes can now also pay 2 movement points instead to give an item and reveive and item on his turn from the hero he traded with. This is to balance the chest loot system.

Heroes have their own conquest points (I want to express that this is a huge WIP). All heroes start off with CP/Heroes, rounded up. So if there are 2 heroes and the quest starts them off with 5 CP, then they each get 3 CP instead. When a portal is opened the hero who opened the portal gets 2 CP and all other heroes gain 1 CP. Chests that reward CP still reward half the amount of CP to all players. Heroes can purchase CPs in town for 300 coins each. Heroes can not trade CPs. A hero cannot have more then 6 CP at once. The overlord only generates threat per turn for each hero in the dungeon.

Limit how many monsters can attack per turn. the overlord can move any amount of monsters a turn, but may only attack with (players+valuechestopened) monsters. Copper=1, Silver=2, Gold=3. So in a 5 player game with an overlord and 4 heroes, after the heroes open a silver chest, the overlord may attack with 7 monsters in one turn. In a 2 player game with the overlord and a hero who hasn't opened any chest, the overlord may attack with 1 monster per turn.

Choose your hero: Instead of drawing randomly allow players to draw 3-4 random heroes and choose 1. Then allow them to pick a starting talent of their choice (IE: If a hero has 3 melee skills then allow the player to pick any one melee skill, the rest are drawn randomly)

Sorry won't let me edit OP, so here's an update of the rules after play testing it, I played the OL and my brother played a hero, so this is what we came up with for 1v1

Spawning cards threat cost must be payed for each monster. For example, beastman war party will allow you to summon up to 2 beastmen and 1 master beastman paying the following costs: card's threat cost - 1 for each beastman and card's threat cost + 1 for a master beastman (making summoning 2 beastmen and a master beastman cost 11 threat) This same concept will apply to all spawning cards, non masters cost card cost -1 and master's cost card cost -2, you cannot summon more then the card allows you to (IE: cannot summon 3 beastmen or 2 master beastmen)

Open is now a half action, allowing players to open chests and doors in addition to another half action, rather then paying a movement cost.

When a hero opens a chest (in this example it awarded 1 copper treasure) he gets 2 options; either allow up to 3 heroes adjacent to the chest to draw a copper treasure, including him, the looter choosing who gets to draw, or he may draw 2 copper treasures for himself (If the chest rewarded 2 copper treasures he would draw 4 and put 2 back). This allows for major douchery between the heroes and adds an exciting twist to looting treasure (after all, how many heroes REALLY want to share all of their loot?) If the chest had X Curse(s) then the overlord could choose to either add X Curse tokens to the hero that looted the chest or receive 1 threat per hero. The same rule applies to gold, the hero who loots the gold can allow all heroes within 2 cells of the gold to receive 75 coins, or he can be greedy and take 200 coins for himself.

Trading: In addition to paying 1 movement point to give a player an item heroes can now also pay 2 movement points instead to give an item and reveive and item on his turn from the hero he traded with. This is to balance the chest loot system.

Heroes have their own conquest points. All heroes start off with CP/Heroes, rounded up. So if there are 2 heroes and the quest starts them off with 5 CP, then they each get 3 CP instead. When a portal is opened all heroes gain 2 CP. Chests that reward CP are either recieved by the looter or divided using the chest distribution rules as stated above. Heroes can purchase CPs in town for 300 coins each. Heroes can not trade CPs. If a hero dies and has CP remaining, the hero is sent to town. If a hero dies and no longer has any CP, then the hero dies and must wait to recieve CP from a portal. If all heroes die the OL wins.

The overlord only generates threat per turn for each hero in the dungeon (2 heroes in dungeon, 1 in town, and 1 dead equal 2 threat for the OL).

Limit how many monsters can attack and move per turn. The overlord can move an amount equal to players + valuechestopened monsters, but may only attack with (heroes in dungeon+valuechestopened) monsters. Copper=1, Silver=2, Gold=3. So in a 5 player game with an overlord and 4 heroes, after the heroes open a silver chest, the overlord may attack with 6 monsters in one turn. In a 2 player game with the overlord and a hero who hasn't opened any chest, the overlord may attack with 1 monster per turn.

Choose your hero: Instead of drawing randomly allow players to draw 3-4 random heroes and choose 1. Then allow them to pick a starting talent of their choice (IE: If a hero has 3 melee skills then allow the player to pick any one melee skill, the rest are drawn randomly) The overlord may grant mulligans if a random talent does not fit the player's hero.

The game is designed with the assumption that the heroes are working together. These rules seem to be designed with the assumption that they will be fighting one another as well as the OL. By which I mean that these rules so severely hinder the OL that if the heroes decide to cooperate, they will steamroll him with no difficulty. That's fine if you expect your group to be in-fighting all the time, but having known a fair number of players like that I wouldn't be surprised if they suddenly started cooperating once they realized how much easier it made things. As long as your OL doesn't have a problem with being taken out of contention for victory, then all is well and good.

Secondly, when designing a set of rules specifically aimed at encouraging party in-fighting, doing a "play test" of one hero vs the OL is going to provide skewed results.

Next time, run a play test with four heroes (even if you have to have one player controlling multiple heroes - just make sure that player understands he should be fighting himself to properly test the rules.)

Edit: If your group of players really enjoys the concept of heroes fighting one another for treasure, you might want to check out Drakon or Cave Troll. Both of those games are designed around the idea of less-than-cooperative heroes =)

EDIT: Hm...the OP timestamp keeps changing to match the timestamp of the most recent reply. That's an interesting bug.

I'm still suspicious this thread is an April Fools gag, though.

I've actually used one of these rule-changes myself, or almost. We generally play that 2 mp allows two adjacent heroes to trade any number of items back and forth. In fact, I'd forgotten the original rule was 1 mp per item transferred.

After playing the game with a few more friends I was able to get more info on balance and what's fun.

We changed the loot system so that when a hero loots a chest or pile of gold, he can choose to greed it or not, greeding means that only the looting hero gets to draw Treasures+1, so a chest rewarding 1 Copper Treasure grants 2, a chest rewarding 2 Silver Treasures grants 3. If a hero chooses not to greed, then the normal rules apply and every hero gains a treasure, regardless of where they are.

We changed the turn system so go clockwise from player to player with round robin rules

The spawning card cost change was accepted by everyone

Open being a half action was removed

Individual Conquest per player ended up being a HUGE nerf to the overlord and was removed.

The overlord generating threat per hero in the dungeon was removed, so the overlord continues to gain threat per hero, no matter where they are

The changes to monsters moving and monsters attacking was changed. Overlord can move any number of monsters and can attack with Players+Chest Value monsters per turn, we have changed chest value to be (Copper=Heroes/2, Silver=Heroes, and Gold=No Limit)

Using this system 4 Heroes means the overlord can attack with 5 monsters at the start, when a copper treasure is opened OL can attack with 7, when silver is opened OL can attack with 9, and Gold removes the limit

At the start of the game the overlord deals 2-3 hero cards to each player and the players pick from their stack what hero they wish to play, the heroes are allowed to pick one of their starting skills and the other 2 are drawn randomly, mulligans are up to the overlord

I'd like to add that were playing with Vanilla Descent + AoD Expansion