Reading through the forum, I saw that many people are disappointed by the way the game scales.However, i believe that its scaling mechanics don't really suck. Below are posted some things that haven't been mentioned by anyone and I'd like to discuss on them.

1.In games with 2 heroes each monster has 2 fewer wounds than its version in a 4-player game. Consequently, don't you think such monsters can be killed with weaker starting weapons?

eg.: In a 2-player game, a beastman has 2 wounds and 2 armor. Thus, it is possible that a dagger or maybe a sword instead of an axe can do the trick.Using a dagger, the average hero will roll 3 hearts+power dice+skills+fatigue.The beastman is dead. That way, tanks can opt for daggers, not for axes, runners for bows and not for crossbows and mages for mage staffs not for immolations.This will result in saving 50-75 coins for every hero and supply them with extra potions.

2.In a 4-player game, it may be unlikely that opening a chest will provide everyone with suitable equipment. On the other hand, in a 2-player game, even a weapon which is not suitble for a hero will be able to kill the weaker monsters.

eg.: Mad Carthos gets the Dwarven Fire Bombs. Attacking a sorcerer, he needs 5. Blue die:1-2+green die: 2-3+fatigue= dead sorcerer.

3.Taking point 2 into consideration, heroes with split trait dice will be much better than heroes with 3 dice in one trait.

eg.: In a 2-player game, Mordrog attacks a razorwing with his axe and needs 6. Red die: 2-4+ green die:2 +power dice: 2-3 +skills:2 .Total 8-12. Now take Red Scorpion with a sword: red die: 2-3+ green die:2+ power die:1+ skill (if any):2+ fatigue= 6-7 damage. Again enough. Now imagine that Red Scorpion can do this with any weapon while Mordrog will have to rely on his short-reach axe .

4.Particular hero combos can make some of the Overlord's powers useless.

eg.:If using the Tomb Of ice expansion, Zyla ( http://www.descentinthedark.com/_z_/zyla.php ) + Shiver ( http//www.descentinthedark.com/_s_/shiver.php ) will make melee attack monsters useless. Cautious skill+ Spiritspeaker Mok= low threat.

To sum up, although fewer heroes ultimately favor the Overlord, I certainly don't believe it is impossible to win a 2-player game.

dragontamer said:

This is more than counterbalanced by the fact that 2 heroes are far more likely not to get *any* weapons in a treasure draw than 4 heroes are. You really only need one hero to have a really powerful weapon (to kill the quest boss). More is good, certainly, but not essential- other heroes can kill weaker monsters with their starting equipment if they have to. And 4 heroes are much more likely to get one hero with a really good attack than 2 are.

It is of course correct that the reduced monster health in a 2-player game *helps*- no one has ever disputed that, but what is quite certain is that it doesn't help nearly enough, because even if you can kill every monster with 100% certainty with one attack, 2 heroes have barely enough actions to keep up with the rate the Overlord can Spawn. It's not impossible to win a 2-player game (Into the Dark is eminently beatable with 2-players), but it is unquestionably a great deal harder.

YellowPebble said:

I understand this point. What I wanted to say is that 2 heroes have access to more equipment at the start of the game, as weaker weapons are good enough. Anyway, good scaling mechanics can be found in DOOM (the board game- similar to Descent). There the number of monsters decreases when heroes are fewer. What about a house rule with fewer monsters in Descent?

dragontamer said:

A noble effort, but I don't think one or two extra potions per hero will help as much as you think. Better to buy the same weapons you normally would and make extra sure the target is dead. Our group was heavily reliant on (healing) potions at first, but once they learned how to play they stopped buying as many potions because they didn't need them. Potions other than healing do not gain or lose utility based on the number of HP the monsters have.

The real hurt in having fewer heroes is that you have fewer attacks to go around. Average damage per attack isn't so much a consideration since no two weapons at the same given level (town, copper, silver or gold) will provide enough variance to make up for a whole second attack. Blast weapons certainly help, but this is true regardless of how many heroes there are. Having the monsters one or two HP does not make up for the missing attacks the heroes would otherwise have with a larger number.

The scaling mechanism in Doom worked much better, since it modified the number of monsters present on the map rather than their stats. Fewer monsters meant fewer attacks were required to clear them, which was convenient since the marines had fewer attacks to work with. Of course it was also hell to design quests that way (no pun intended) so I can see why they changed that mechanic in Descent. In theory, receiving less threat means the OL will not be able to spawn as much, but in practice it doesn't really slow him down as much as it should. If you really want to make a better scaling mechanic, consider limiting the OL to one spawn every other turn (you could use the spawn marker from RtL/SoB to track it if you have that) Or for that matter just use the spawn marker from RtL/SoB complete with its normal rules. I understand several people have tried that already to resounding success.

dragontamer said:

It might have a better chance of killing the monster, but considering how easily you can add dice if you know how to manage your fatigue, you could also kill these monsters with these weapons in a four player game. Adding two or three extra power dice to a low-stat attack is not hard if you have to go that way. I notice you use the reliably squishy sorcerer as your example. Something like an Ogre won't be so easily dropped just because it has two fewer HP.

I'm not saying your observations are wrong, btw. Mathematically you're right that less HP = easier to kill. I'm just saying the difference in difficulty is not as great as the difference in firepower the heroes lose. Not even close. Regardless of the weapons they're using, having 2-4 attacks per turn rather than 4-8 hurts.

dragontamer said:

Making some types of monsters useless is the last thing you'd want to do in a two hero game. Then the OL could just ignore those spawn cards (discarding them for more threat) which he can use to spawn things that DO hurt them. You've heard people complaining about how heroes can often clear a whole room before anything inside can respond? That means the things the OL spawns (that actually do get at least one action) are the bigger threat most of the time. Granted it won't be so easy to clear with only two heroes, but that just means the OL will have some meat shields left over to block LOS to the important things he's spawning (by which I mean LOS for attacks against such creatures, not LOS for the spawning itself.)

I don't believe it's impossible for two heroes to win either, I just think it's very, very hard. Certainly if the OL is inexperienced or scared to be an ******* the heroes will have a better chance, but even if he played top notch there's still a chance the heroes will win. Especially if they draw GOOD heroes and get lucky with GOOD weapons.

Two good heroes with the right weapons can easily win, four bad heroes with the wrong ones and newbie players will probably lose. Luck of the draw is an unpredictable aspect of the game, but it cannot be ignored when trying to decide how well a given party might do.

ok, so the shortcoming of Descent's scaling mechanics is the number of monsters?

dragontamer said:

This is greatly oversimplifying the discussion, but it's fair to say that's the biggest single factor.

If you are wanting some common house rules people use when playing with only 2 heroes, some I like are:

Heroes draw 2 treasures and pick 1 to keep when opening chests (let's them have more options)

Play with the reinforcment marker from the Advanced Campaign (helpful to slow down the spawns)

The Overlord draws two cards each turn, picks 1 to keep and 1 to put back on the bottom or top of his deck. (Just generally slows down the overlord a lot)

None of these are any Enduring Evil by any means, but with any or all of them can help reduce some of the problems encountered when playing with just 2 heroes.

I haven't played Doom, but I've heard that it scales poorly in the opposite direction (more marines makes it harder) because the number of monsters scales up but the amount of ammo doesn't.

You can take a look at this spreadsheet to see how many attacks you save yourself due to the monsters having 2 less wounds. It's not zero, but it's nowhere near the factor of 2 that you'd need to make up for having half as many attacks (actually less than half, because when you need one hero to run for a glyph/chest/etc. it will sap a larger fraction of your actions).

Finding ways to get extra potions is nice, and in fact you already get extra potions per hero because the ones you find lying on the floor in the dungeon don't scale, but a vitality potion is worth maybe one half-action...even if you ignored the 1-potion-per-turn rule, the 2-hero party would need to find a way to get something like 4 extra potions per turn for the entire length of the game to make up the action difference, and that's just not happening (actually 6 extra on the turns when both parties would already be using potions).

The threat scaling doesn't work because the overlord actually gets a large chunk of his threat from discarding cards; it looks like the overlord gets half as much threat in a 2-hero game, but in reality he only loses maybe 20%. But it's a questionable mechanic anyway because most overlord cards are effectively scaled already. It's primarily spawn cards that become too strong in small games, and the reason they become too strong is that the monster scaling rules don't work in the first place. Regarding most events, traps, and power cards, the small party is actually better off as things currently stand...but only slightly.

Your reasoning about small parties doing better with treasure is actually just another way of saying that small parties benefit from monsters having reduced health, and therefore they don't need as much treasure, which I'm afraid is double-counting your advantages (the health difference isn't enough for small parties to keep up even if they get the same treasure). And large parties actually get better treasure, because they've got more traits covered (due to having more heroes) and can trade treasures back and forth to optimize.

Winning with 2 heroes isn't impossible. I once won quest 8 with 2 heroes (against a newbie overlord). Heck, monsters could roll nothing but X's the entire game. But 2 heroes are at a very large disadvantage compared to 4 heroes.

If you want to fix that...well, Kartigan already mentioned The Enduring Evil . That's my homebrew mod designed to fix player scaling issues, and it does it mostly by giving monsters a lot more health in large games, so that they take multiple attacks to kill, and therefore can take fewer attacks to kill in small games.

Steve-O said:

The overlord has the option to do that anyway. Making monsters useless can only help the heroes, and Shiver is certainly better (relative to other heroes) in a small game. If he truly made the monsters useless, that would actually be a huge help, because you could save quite a few actions by not bothering to attack them, but "useless" is an exaggeration; they can still try to attack other heroes, and can still stand in your way, so they will actually probably cost you almost as much as if you didn't have Shiver. If you still have to kill the monsters the usual way, it's just not that big an effect.

That's also one hero, and from an expansion no less...most heroes don't have special abilities that become stronger in small games. In fact, several heroes and skill become weaker; the Blessing skill (which gives Command ) costs a smaller fraction of party resources in large games but still benefits the whole party; the threat reduction from Cautious works the same way; Spiritspeaker Mok's ability; etc.

Steve-O said:

Healing potions don't gain or lose utility based on monster health, either; though they do lose utility in small games due to costing a larger fraction of party resources for the same amount of healing, which means you'll want to avoid them even more in small games.

Antistone said:

2 Marines is the sweet spot in Doom, the main reason being that the most powerful factor in Doom is the Marine Card (i.e. skills), and in a 1 or 2 marine game, each marine starts with 3 cards, while a 3 marine game each starts with only 2. So you can get some amazing combos with 3 cards, and having 2 marines with 3 cards outweighs the dangers of extra monsters or less LOS coverage (i.e. more LOS coverage w/3 marines, but with fewer killer combos).

Having said that, 3 marine games are still very playable, so the scaling isn't bad, just 2 marine games is the sweet spot. Not like Descent where the scaling is just... odd.

-shnar

Antistone said:

That is true, although that's generally an easier issue to fix than the Descent scaling issue. There are a couple optional rules in the expansion that pretty much make up for that. If you were to remove ammo altogether (which is what Descent basically does) then Doom's scaling issue would disappear - not that I'm suggesting you should do that in Doom, of course. I'm just sayin' is all =P

Also, there are those who would argue making things harder is advantageous in Doom since it's at least partially a survival-horror atmosphere. Something which Descent by and large is not considered to be.

Antistone said:

Of course, the OL can always choose not to use spawn cards of a particular type, but when to make that choice and how stringently to follow it may not always be so cut and dried. My point was mainly that if the OL recognizes a certain class of monsters will not significantly hinder the heroes due to abilities and skills making them "useless" then he can discard those cards without thinking about it and focus on things that will hurt. There's less to think about which makes the OL's job that much easier and his Threat pool that much larger.

Perhaps my choice of the words "the last thing you'd want to do" was a bit strong and made this tactic sound like more of a game maker than I really intended.

Making the number of monsters linearly proportional (both on the map and from spawns) to the number of heroes would not fix descent's scaling problems, at least not wholly, though it might improve things. It would go a little too far the other way.

It may then take 2 heroes about the same time to deal with the monsters as 4, but then they will take less damage while doing it (because there are fewer monsters to attack them). Since the Overlord requires the same number of Conquest tokens (hero kills) regardless of the number of players, this is an advantage to smaller numbers of players.

Of course, given that monsters on the map tend to die before doing anything anyway, and given the small disadvantage regarding treasure distribution to smaller numbers of heroes, things might balance out somewhat.

Actually, the designers had the right idea, they just didn't take it far enough. The "correct" way to balance the game *is* to scale monster hit points. It's just that they need to scale linearly (so monsters have half the health with 2 heroes that they have with 4), and the monsters need to generally take more than one hit to kill with 3 heroes (since what you're actually trying to do is keep the number of turns required to deal with a given pack of monsters the same). Neither of these is true under standard Descent rules. The designers obviously realised this wasn't enough, and tried to tag threat-token scaling on to help smaller numbers of heroes out, something which doesn't go nearly far enough and wasn't the right approach in the first place.

The only really good way to scale Descent, though, in my opinion, is to design quests with a specific number of heroes in mind. No scaling mechanic will actually work in every quest- the game is just too complex. This is actually the approach FFG seem to have taken post-Journeys-in-the-Dark. All expansion quests are really designed for 4 heroes, and the campaigns are explicitly only playable with four.

Also, make sure that if you are playing with 2 heroes you are actully using the monster stats for 3 PLAYERS, as the OL counts as a player too! (err.. IS there a 2 player monster sheet?)

If you don't like the way things play with 2 heroes, you could always have each hero player control 2 characters and use the 5player stats, or play with 3 hero characters and they can alternate controlling the 3rd hero.

The monster cards do have a "2 player" side, but it's exactly the same as the "3 player" side, because the rules say that the single hero player should control 2 heroes.