House Rulez

By Willdnd, in Descent: Journeys in the Dark

I was wondering what kind of house rulze you ppl use

for

a - normal game play

b - campaign game

c - advanced campaign game

The only house rule we use is Blood Ocean's Divine Favor rule in Road to Legend, which discussion of here leads me to believe may have been a mistake. We'll see when the campaign is over. Other than that, I've generally avoided house rules. I can't even remember all of Descent's rules and addenda, so why bother making things even more complicated or trying to fix the balance when I'm not even sure I have every variable in the equation accounted for?

I guess the only other thing you might consider a house rule is how we deal with the little situations that come up six times a night that aren't covered by rules or errata. We typically try to hash it out and come up with a consensus, and failing that, roll a dice to see which possible outcome we pick.

It's sometimes hard to say what's a house rule or not with Descent, because there are a number of places in which the rules are ambiguous, or look like they were probably meant to say something slightly different, or where there's some informal ruling made by someone years ago on the old forum that some people follow and others don't.

Enduring Evil covers most of my house rules. I also typically say:

  • Draw 3, pick 1 for hero selection; players can trade their entire pile of 3 with another player if they want
  • Closed doors block all effects, as if they were walls
  • Use the original rules for large monsters, rather than any of the 3 ambiguous (and possibly self-contradictory) revisions from various versions of the FAQ
  • Use the original rules for line of sight, rather than the ambiguous and more complicated version from the gathered list of answered questions, which I believe creates more problems than it solves

I use loads, I'm afraid. Which I'm constantly tweaking. It's how I play most games.

A lot of people house-rule healing potions to give you 4 (or sometimes even 5) wounds. I actually house-rule every potion except the Stealth potion.

Here are the house rules my opponent and I play with. They are mostly designed to remove the various sucker punches that both sides have.

RtL:

*The OL cannot take crushing blow except in his Keep, but broken/ super strong items ( like the web weapon / staff of the grave) are removed from the game. We'll often leave them in the treasure deck to keep the # of each weapon type the same, but if you draw it you get a different weapon of the same type at random instead.

*The skill "Wind Pact" doesn't exist, but in lieutenant encounters the OL must play with his hand face up, cannot take cards costing more than 1 point of treachary, and the heroes get to discard 1 of the OL cards at the start of an encounter. The OL can start with more than 8 cards, but must then discard down to 8 (gaining threat for discarded cards). This is deal with the fact that wind pact is a truely must have skill, and there many broken OL combos with cards costing multiple treachery

* At any time on the heroes' turn when they are on the overland map, the heroes can kill themselfs, getting back all their HP, but giving the OL their conquest value. This stops the situation where if you have multiple lieutenants in a space, one can lower most of the heroes HP's to 1 and then flee, and the 2nd can wipe them easily.

* The OL can chose to not accept conquest tokens from hero deaths (so that heroes can't just kill themselves until 600 conquest and start the final battle if the OL is 1 turn from winning)

* A hero can commit seppuku as an attack, killing themselves.