We just got this game and have played it maybe 5-6 times already.

It seems to me to be lacking something. The problem is that the game seems very skewed towards the OL right away. The typical strategy being to spawn as many monsters as you can and dump everything else. With only 2 players, one being the OL and one player running 2 heroes, the heroes can only really kill 2-3 monsters per round. Spawning monsters each turn and attacking as many times on the weakest character as much as possible before they die seems the best (and only?) strategy for the OL. If the OL can kill one character in the first room, which usually will not have much for conquest tokens, then the players are at a very quick disadvantage.

On the other hand, if the players can avoid dieing in the first few rounds, get a chest quicklly, then the game becomes almost overly skewed in thier favor and no amount of monsters will take them out, especially once they start getting enough money for a ton of potions.

I must be missing something, cause this game seems like it could be great, but each time I play (as an OL or hero) it seems repetitive and lacking. The OL seems to have plenty of attacks each round in most cases that you can qucikly take down the heros or on the other hand, the OL has too many spawns and no where to put them anymore and cant get the attacks in, again in the OL favor as time works against the heros.

I have also played the heroes and found it overwhelmingly hard. The stakes are always against you. Theres not usually a way to cover all spawn points with only 2 heroes and it simply becomes an exercise in moving as fast as you can, getting the chests and gates for those extra conquest tokens that you will need in order to die a bunch of times and drinking as many potions as you can. Once you cover that its simply moving and killing as many creatures as possible per turn before the OL can spawn more (cause you know he will). Also, using gates to pop in and out seems like almost cheating. And then it seems like even if i can take out that master beastman, then the other 15 attacks he has on me from the spiders and skelly archers are bound to, if not outright kill me, then at least damage me enough that I will have to drink 3 potions next turn.

I guess it s the round and round repetitiveness of it that gets to me. Plus that fact that the game is either over very quickly, or drags on for hours. Any thoughts?

With 2 heroes, the game is in the Overlord's favor.

WIth 4 heroes, the game is in the Heroe's favor.

Playing with only 2 heroes is going to make things very difficult. I haven't played many 2 player games, but the only one that the heroes won was with Battlemage Jaes and Trenloe the Strong; the reason they won was that the monsters couldn't damage them fast enough through all their armor.

About repetitiveness, I agree. This game always seemed to me to be very repetative, with the heroes and overlord going through the same motions every turn for several hours. I never cared for it extremely much. Now, you might ask "in that case, why does he rank it fourth out of 14 FFG titles?" The reason is the Road to Legend expansion.

Imo, the Road to Legend expansion makes the dungeons much more interesting. For one thing, they are a lot shorter, so the tedium of the same motions doesn't set in so hard. Secondly, each dungeon has its own unique "puzzle", or "problem" that you have to solve. For example, there is one that is a three story dungeon (very small levels; two of them are only one piece) with a razorwing that flies between the levels through holes in the floor. In order to proceed to the next dungeon, you have to kill the razorwing. However, as it has routes of movement that you don't, you have to spread out and try to pin it down. I had so much fun as the Overlord, flying that thing from level to level and always staying just out of the heroes reach through judicious use of charge cards.

Most of the dungeons in Road to Legend are unique, and fairly short, meaning that boredom can never set in because there is something new and exciting just an hour away.

But about the base game, I would tend to agree with your assesment. It won't be quite so bad if you get more heroes in it though.

EDIT: And by the way, the FAQ ruled that you can only drink one potion a turn.

The RtL snippet is great encouragement and exactly what I was looking for. This is definately the next on the list to get, more so now than before.

Another questions then: if 2 heroes is swaying towards the OL and 4 heroes is swaying it for the heroes, then would that mean the sweet spot in this game would be 3 heroes? or is there such a thing as a sweet spot in this game.

Also, I read about the potion limit in the revised FAQ, but we have not implemented it yet, beacuse as I stated earlier, we are having too hard a time with 2 heroes and even drinking 3 potions a turn isnt helping when you get mobbed by 15 monsters a turn. This would sway the game in favor of the OL even more.

What I am looking for is a way to even out the playing field.

As noted above, the scaling rules in Descent don't scale the game enough, so the number of heroes is a major factor in the overall difficulty. I've found 3 heroes to generally work pretty well.

And the OL spawn cards are generally excessively powerful, especially in a game with only 2 heroes. Some people have recommended using the reinforcement marker from RtL to make the OL pay extra if he wants to spawn more than once per area, though that strikes me as being kind of like fixing a stuck doorknob by breaking down the door with a sledgehammer, at least with the default numbers (3-4 times the cost of a spawn card to refresh the marker so you can play 1 more card? I'd really like to hear the thought process there...)

Really, almost every balance issue with Descent can be traced back to the fact that monsters drop like flies, and therefore most of the game parameters that should be important (like monster health or weapon damage) have very inconsistent and usually rather little effect on the game.

You do know that the OL can only play 1 spawn card per turn, right?

In your post it is not exactly clear whether the OL just spawns once every turn or even more..

Don't forget that figures do not block line of sight for spawning purposes. I know in our first game we didn't do this and the heroes couldn't even move.

In my experience:

JitD - Overall is easy for the Heroes. However, most players will loose horribly to begain with, not understandinghow the game works andtryingto "clear the dungeon". The game becomes easier with practice and you go from OL win to Hero Win, usually on the second or third play of each quest. As an example, my group's first game of Q1 ended in the forst room. They won the second while allowed to go negative (useful for teaching). They where then good enough for a propper win.

WoD - Overall hard for the Heroes, likeley due to complaints from the community. Feats may help here, I don't know yet.

AoD & ToI - ballenced pretty well. Heroes tend to loose towards the end of the dungeon if they loose at all.

The base game is fairly well balanced with three heroes. Even with 3 heroes, games will occasionally be a landslide for one side or another. But over all it is about a 50/50 win ratio.

The way the game scales with the number of heroes simply does not work. I hope this is something they fix in the next edition (HINT HINT HINT*). Road to Legend gets around this by saying you MUST have 4 heroes.

I have been considering better ways to scale the game. Some ideas I had:

-Fixed starting money: The heroes always start with 900 gold, no matter the number of heroes.

-Adjusted Skills: With 4 heroes each hero only receives 2 starting skills, with 2 heroes each hero starts with an extra skill (or maybe 2 extra power dice). Some people have suggested giving two heroes Boggs the Rat automatically.

Overall, don't give up! Descent (while flawed in some respects) is a great game!

* Disclaimer - I am not aware of plans for a 2nd edition of Descent, but I feel there are enough things (like this) that need to be fixed to justify it.

I was not aware that the OL could only spawn once per turn. This does indeed make things a bit more balanced.

I do remember now that figures do not block LoS, but had forgotten that in our previous games. This will also help the heroes a bit.

Overall, I think you guys have givin me the information I need to continue giving this game more tries. I thank you all and in my next game will suggest that we move to 3 heroes and include the above rules as well as the potion revised rule.

Rednek said:

I would not go in that direction--at least not if you were going to make something as extensive as a "new edition." You're basically adding arbitrary advantages and disadvantages to the different numbers of heroes and hoping that it will balance out "overall," and while it's possible to achieve a balanced result in that way, it has the following problems:

• The feel and strategy of the game may change significantly depending on the number of heroes.
• Changing something later on that seems unrelated to the number of heroes (like adding a new weapon to the shop) may screw up balance due to interactions with one of the arbitrary advantage/disadvantages you allocated.
• Lots of trial and error required, unless you have a very good mathematical model for predicting how much each change will swing the balance.

If you're just trying to reign in a major problem to a vaguely sane result with a houserule that doesn't change things too much, that may still be the best approach, but if you're going to do a redesign and you want to start with a sound foundation for the rest of the game, you want rules that negate the natural advantages and disadvantages of having more heroes, rather than just adding on more arbitrary differences. So you should find and try to enforce some key invariants, like the following:

• The average number of conquest tokens the heroes lose per monster encountered should stay about the same.
• The average number of conquest tokens the heroes lose per turn wasted (allowing the OL to collect threat & cards) should stay about the same.
• The average number of rounds it takes to get through a particular stretch of dungeon should stay about the same.

Descent already has this brilliant conquest tokens mechanic where the number of kills the OL needs to get to win doesn't depend on the number of heroes in the game, so his damage output doesn't really need to scale. However, the heroes' damage output scales up with the number of heroes, so the number of attacks the OL can absorb needs to go up, which means we either need to give him more monsters (while keeping his damage output the same, which means each monster is somehow doing less damage) or the monsters need to take more attacks to kill. And that means you either need to set things up so that heroes in a small game are all throwing around AoE attacks from turn #1, or you need to allow beastment and skeletons to actually survive realistic hero attacks in large games.

As I said, most of Descent's balance problems can be traced back to the fact that monsters die too easily...

I agree with all of what Anistone has said and in fact this is exactly the reason I posted this question or concern in the first place. 2 heroes just seems over whelming, while 4 heroes would allow them to kill 4 + creatures per turn while each room only contains about 6+ monsters, therefore leaving less for the OL to do anything with on his first turn.

Basically the base game only seems like it would be too easy with 4 heroes as there would not be enough monsters and Descent does not have a scaling mech for increasing that number. The monster toughness increases are laughable at best and I dont feel this is an acceptable method for dealing with more heroes.

I intend to try 3 heroes on the next try and implement the one potion, one spawn per turn rules and remember the LOS rule. Hopefully this will balance it out, but honestly I really still have my doubts as to wether it will work or not.

And to add to this, if it does work will mean that 3 players is really the only way the game will work and as someone else mentioned, adding RtL means you MUST use 4.

I am beginning to wonder if this was $80 not well spent.

My suggestions where merely ideas to address the problem of scaling with the number of heroes. I understand how modding the rules can introduce new ripples to game balance. Trust me, I understand your points, but I don't see the harm in suggesting/trying new things. And I do truly hope a new edition could work out many of the kinks without resorting to things like this.

Antistone said:

I see this point only in as far as this necessitates OL spawning (pretty much) every turn. I do find that excessive spawning tends to bog the game down, and as you said has a tendency to overwhelm small parties. But I don't see this as the root cause of most balance issue.