I bought Descent directly when it got out. My experience with the basic set is that it is mostly very easy on the heroes. The OL will have a difficult time winning.

A year or so back I bought the Well of Darkness expansion. Playing with all the normal rules (incl. expansion rules) it became a real nightmare. We keep track of each players wins and losses with heroes and we're aiming for a 50% hero win. with WoD we went from 80% win to maybe 30% win (being optimistic here.. and to be honest basic Quest 7 already downed the heroes win% a LOT) We changed the rules now slightly (depending on the players):

The OL receives only 1 card per turn instead of 2 and no treachery. Now it is still very challenging for the heroes, but we have a win of 80% (average is still below 50%).

Last weekend we played the chase OL'ed by someone's second Descend game (first time OL), using the rules above.. until we had the silver treasure it was very challenging. We even had a few moments that our faith was literally in the roll of the dice (and we, the heroes, had the luck we needed to not loose or last conquest both times ). Once we had the silver treasures the stalling was over and it became a cakewalk.

I am wondering if we are alone in this experience and maybe do something wrong as heroes, or is this the general concensus about Descent+WoD ?

Hey.

Well, we have all the expansions apart from the last one, "Tomb of Ice".

I agree with you, the first campaign book was quite easy, with some exceptions in some quests. I think the OL / Players ratio would be 30/70 at most.

Well the Well of Darkness introduced treachery and the damned rolling boulder.

Let me get some things straight before I start writing this. I am an avid gamer. I have played tons of games for many many years. I have dm'ed for 12+years in many many rpg's as well, and have played many board games. So when I say this, I do not say it with a light heart:

THE GAME IS HARD FOR THE PLAYERS!

In this game, being so many years a DM etc etc I wanted to be a player. i played some adventures as an OL but soon stayed as a player as we have a very good OL. Do not get me wrong though. I LOVE the game because it is challenging. Because, me and my mates, after being gamers for more than 16 years playing together and knowing the ins and outs of tons of war games and board games we still LOSE and we are challenged in each adventure to try our best!

Some adventures are just plain HARD. And for example that treachery spawn card that spawns the two red sorcerers... imagine that being played in the first 2 or 3 rounds of the game. These two sorcerers with their undying ability and 4 sorcery could easily pick a group apart...

What we do is that we go with the random selection of character. And this sometimes builds a group that lets just say is made of NOT so very good characters. And when I say good, I do not mean 4 conquest cost characters. I mean good. There are many 2 conquest worth characters that are very good. We were thinking that maybe sometimes the groups dynamic was the fault. We sometimes over-analyze it and miss the point...

But in any case you are right. The game is HARD and it requires a lot of concetration to win. Which I enjoy, but it does sometimes cheat us, as in it gets TOO hard, as in unbalanced. Oh, and I am not even talking about a group of less than four characters. It is a nightmare...

So I have one question to all of you reading this post: Do you pick your chars random, pick them specifically or have you made a home rule?

My answer is that we made a home rule, so we have more flexibility in creating a more well combined party. Each player draws 2 random characters. If he picks one of them the other one goes into a "pool". When a player does not like any of his 2 characters he can pick one from the pool.

...and that's it. So please let me know as well what you feel about it. I have tons of examples about the "unbalanced" part, but nothing that cannot be tweaked with minor changes like the above.

Cheers

I think game balance is one of the hottest topics when it comes to Descent (well, that and what the next expansion will be ). However, the embers may have burnt out, looking at the new boards.

Having only really played Vanilla and WoD, we had similar experiences - WoD being harder than an earth elementals pecs and Vanilla easier than a nymph come Spring-time. From what I understand, AoD and ToI are more balanced...especially ToI with it's Feats.

I'd be interested to know how Feats effect the balance of the older games. I'm assuming they make Vanilla a push-over, but do they balance out WoD's marathon dungeons?

With regards to character draw, we usually have all players pick three and choose one. No swapping, because that defeats the purpose, though. If you don't get at least one decent character in your three then the gods of Descent (FFG?) are not smiling on you and you deserve a good pwning.

Iuz said:

It's reassuring that it is not just our group.

We play using random characters, but we use our own campaign rules. We are with about 3 or 4 more or less regular players and some that play every once in a while. Our campaign rules:

When the heroes win, I note them in a spread sheet together with their skills (so it's player / list of heroes / 3 skills per hero / level per hero). When a player randomly gets a hero he as already played, then his character is lvl2 (or 3 or 4..) with the same skills as before. When the OL wins, then any levelled heroes will be marked as RIP, which means at their next draw they are level one and get random skills again. The OL receives one threat at the start of the game per hero per level. This is the same as in the rules, only without the averaging.

I noticed a flaw in my thinking there, because we let the OL draw 1 extra card per hero per level. This should be +1 card per average hero level.. I just noticed this while reading another threat..

Cheers!

Number of heroes seems to significantly alter the difficulty. I'm curious to know how many you're playing with.

Always with 3 or 4 heroes. Our last game, "The Chase", was with 2 hero players, both controlling 2 heroes.

I must admit that in this particular game the OL had the luck of being able to spawn kobolds on the first round and clock the corridor, which held us of long enough to spawn some more in that same room.. We seem to have the overall tactics right. Leave monsters you can outrun and keep making progress. Maybe we are still killing to many monsters and making not enough progress, but that seems hard to do otherwise when you have some low-armor heroes.

I have played games with 2, 3 and 5 players. 5 Players, 1 OL + 4 heros is probably the best fun out of it all but I do enjoy beating down my buds when it is just 1 or 2 Hero Players.

We also allow the hero's to choose the characters that they want to play but we use these house rules.

1). If the Hero's run out of CQ's they do not automatically loose, they cannot respawn dead hero's, once all the hero's are dead the OL wins.

2). If the OL wins by killing the Hero's those characters aren't allowed to be repicked

3). If the Hero's win and they are dead hero's in town unable to respawn due to no CQ's they can not be repicked.

Of course at some point later they will be allowed to be picked again but for now and 36 heros and since we are creating our own hero's with the FFG hero Creator we will have well over 50 heros by Christmas.

I find every add-on they have released before ToI makes the game harder (and sometimes, much harder) for the heroes. I hope ToI rebalances this somehow.

One option for a slight rebalance is for the OL's treachery cards to be added to the deck rather that replacing cards.

Well you can mod your way out of it... and still lose :-P

So after some more sessions (3 at least) we got ourselves so BADLY kicked in the @$$ that we lost all faith...

Got bored of moding as well...

So we started a campaign.

And things look MUCH better. We actually finished the WHOLE dungeon we entered. All three levels. Of course the OL having no treachery cards helped a lot. We are looking optimistic, had a good start and we have a nice set of characters and skills. Still we were discussing if treachery should be used or if we should play by the simplified rules. Thus avoiding spawn cards like two master sorcerers and ambush played by the OL in a devastating combo for example. Not to mention the undying ability of the sorcerers making the encounter from dangerous to down right deadly.

And speaking of the undying, there is a broken ability... mathematically quite unbalanced. Assuming that one is lucky enough (but not extremely lucky), monsters like master ogres and master sorcerers could even get a third chance in life (2 consecutive succeeded rolls). That easily turns tha balance SO badly in a game that can secure victory for the OL. Even once if you succeed is quite dangerous, but you say ok, he is undying. Anyway we allow only one roll per monster, and still is more than balanced.

I was also reading the forums and all the mods people have done to add feats in the campaign. We will probably go down the path of allowing threachery in the game, and players can use feats. So this will (hopefully) bring some balance. Of course there will be no holding of feats from dungeon to dungeon. Feats, like OL cards, will be drawn and played per dungeon level. Something like that anyway.

I just wanted to say something that has been said many times in the forums:

a) Even though the game has good mechanics, its poorly written and badly playtested (if playtested at all). It reminds me of some of Games Workshop's games, like Warhammer, when in older versions of the game, each new army book was made so that it was the most cool and powerful from all the previous ones, forgetting all about game balance, so that to make the army sell good! (and believe me I have played most if not all of GW's games)

b) The game in the normal play mode is heavily unbalanced and the overlord has a huge advantage with treachery (not even worth mentioning corrupted glyphs). It is quite a miracle if a party survives half the dungeon. I hope feats will bring some balance into the game, though I doubt it it will make it smooth. Introducing something to counter something already too powerful does not remedy the situation. You first need to rethink, nerf, and redesign the first element and then introduce, in the same perspective the new element. Otherwise you probably end up with two broken things trying to nullify one another.

c) Finally, once more I want to say I like this game. The guys at FF have made a solid base for something good in the fantasy board game area, but they have to press the brakes a bit, and do some major revisions. Small details that can alter the game significantly and bring some balance. Also they need to clarify a LOT of rules, like movement through many different kind obstacles (pits followed by mud followed by whatever) etc etc. Also some characters need to be re-thinked. There are some characters that worth 4 CT that are not even slightly better than some 3 CT characters.

Anyway enough already!

Cheers and happy holidays!

I'm just curious. When you say campaign, do you mean the campaign from the Quest books or are you talking about Road to Legend?

Road to Legend mate

Well my 2 cents

Treachery: Why would you want to handicap the OL so badly by removing their chance to buy Treachery points? I know Copper level sucks for Heroes, but once you get into Silver and especially Gold the Heroes will walk all over the OL if he can't get any Treachery to help balance it.

Undying: Yes, I agree its screwed up especially since in RtL any excess damage from a killing blow does not carry over so the Undying Ogre you just killed comes back at full health. But don't be too upset by 2-3 times, I've had the same monster come back 7 times. One way to nerf it if you really want to is to make the Undying roll a blank instead of a surge. Or if you are lucky, you find the Staff of the Grave Copper treasure which ignores Undying. If you get it, guard it with your life, since its the only weapon in the game with that ability.

Feats: I don't know much since I don't have ToI yet, but KevinW came on and gave guidelines for using them in RtL. I don't think they were ever really designed for use in RtL at the outset.

Playtesting: I think it was playtested as well as they could, since there is no way they could have anticipated all the hidden problems that have cropped up. I think RtL is a much better game than vanilla Descent.

Big Remy said:

Nice find, I hadnt noticed this! We've always played w the original game rule (where overkill goes on the recovered monster). But looking back, it appears that was changed as far back as Well of Dakness - in the abilities summary in that book, it's changed undying to where the monster comes back fully restored.

Did they change it in WoD? I had always assumed it was an RtL change. Huh, looks like they did.

I don't think they ment to change this in WoD, because then it would have to be described somewhere as a rule change.

JitD Special Abilities:

" Undying

When an Undying figure is killed, roll one power die. If a power surge is rolled, the figure is instantly restored to full health (although any leftover damage from the killing blow is then applied to it) and any lingering effects are removed. An Undying figure must stay dead in order for effects that take place when it it "killed" tp actually occur."

WoD Special Abilities Summary:

" Undying : A figure with Undying olls 1 power die when killed. On a [surge symbol], the figure is instantly restored to full health."

The reason that the leftover damage part is not in WoD, is in my opinion because it is a summary in which they rephrased everything a lot shorter. The fact that the leftover damage part is between brackets in JitD implies that this whould not have to be mentioned, because it is obvious. I myself do not think this is obvious, but that is why it is between brackets. I also assume that lingering effects are still removed, even though this is not mentioned anymore (also because it is just a quick overview in WoD).

However, some clear answers on this would be very nice, because all I can do here is assume.. and we all know assumption is the mother...

I know KevinW clarified that for RtL it is a rule change to Undying, but I wasn't sure about WoD. There was a reply posted in a BGG forum .

(Currently down for maintenance, but I know the link works)

@ Big Remy

Well, for the most part I agree with you.

But, while treachery is a huge advantage for the OL, I still have to see how the campaign advances and how the heros gain power against the OL.

About playtesting I disagree with you on a simple fact.

Assuming someone has played the original Descent and then gets down to playing WoD, it should be obvious to them that the quests are quite unbalanced when they reach the middle of the book... So even if they have played the adventures one time they could spot the problems with vr hard dungeons combined with lethal OL combos...

Unless they play with an OL who likes to play it easy on them and either picks the "weakest" treachery cards or tries to avoid using all the time deadly card combos. I always assume that since this is a board game and not an RPG people try to see it a as game, hence play to the best of their ability, min maxing, "rules lawyering"etc etc

Cheers

I'll just leave my disagreement about the playtesting to personal experience then,

Hey people,

This is my first post on this forum. I have played Descent JitD quite a few times now, and I think it's time for an expansion. I've been reading other topics on this forum and it seems that I need to buy at least WoD before getting RtL. I have one question; How difficult is it exactly? My gaming group really doesn't want quests that are as difficult as The Black Blade in JitD. I, as an Overlord, agree. Both times we played it, it wasn't fun for anybody. If the Overlord knows even a little what he's doing, it's a total nightmare for the heroes. So are the WoD quests even harded than that? I'm hesitating on buying it if they are. Difficult isn't a problem, impossible would be.

Thanks in advance!

Welcome to the forums!

I am quite new as well :-)

Well, my personal opinion is that the quests are hard. Very hard to be precise. Not impossible.

I think there is no easy comparisson between the basic set and the expansions. I believe almost every quest in the expansions is for the most part much harder. And to be honest, it is not the quest by itself. It is treachery that makes it deadly. Maybe if you play them without using treachery... then maybe it would be just hard quests with a lot of challenge but a logical chance of winning as well. I was thinking trying a few like that...

With treachery I am sure that a competent OL can win you with no trouble at all at at least half of them. And on the other half he will just have to try a bit more ;-)

The supplaments are nice. If your group has the money pick them and then add whatever you like better about them. House rule anything else you feel like adding but it is too powerful, and enjoy the game.

One thing is for sure RtL sure brings a whole new meaning to the game and adds a different kind of gameplay.

@luz

If its the Monster treachery that is a sticking point, have you ever tried using the Reinforcement marker (or a proxy) from RtL in vanilla Descent? I've been told it works well.

@Remy

You mean adding the 15 threat cost before th OL can spawn again?

Thanks for the reply, and the welcome.

I'm still a bit hesitant, even if very willing to spend my money on the expansion. If the WoD quests are very difficult, like you say, then how would you rate The Black Blade? Is THAT quest impossible or only very difficult? To us it really was. Once we played it through no matter how much the heroes were on negative with the conquest tokens. I think they ended up with -12 conquest, and I was being "gentle" in the final room. But I also understood that WoD is almost required to enjoy RtL so I think I'm getting it anyway. My main concern is my group's will to continue playing, if it gets that much difficult with WoD.

The black blade quest (Quest 7, I thnk) is about the same difficulty as the WoD quests. I think the Black Blade quest is even a bit harder then the first WoD quests.

However, if you play with treachery, then the WoD quests are even more difficult than the Black Blade, (in my opinion)