The Descent box says 2-5 players, meaning 1-4 Hero players and an Overlord. Is there any way to play 5 Heroes and an Overlord?

Well, the game doesn't actually grind to a halt if you put a fifth hero figure on the board, and it's trivially easy to extend the existing scaling rules to any number of heroes, but unfortunately the existing scaling rules aren't remotely balanced even for the advertised player range, so that doesn't help much; there's a quite noticeable difference in difficulty between 3 and 4 heroes (4 heroes is easier), and 2 heroes is borderline unplayable. Most groups always play with 4 heroes, or possibly go down to 3 for the easier quests, regardless of the number of actual players at the table.

My homebrew variant, The Enduring Evil , is designed to address the player scaling rules (among other things) and seems to work reasonably well with anywhere from 2-5 heroes. It requires that you print a bunch of your own cards, though, and it has its own set of quests (the standard quests wouldn't be balanced under Enduring Evil rules).

Thanks. We're about to start up a Descent group, probably in campaign mode. (I have all the box supplements.)

What should we expect in terms of balance or playability? Descent is pretty highly rated. You mentioned in the other thread about it being too easy with 4 players and too hard with 2. What are the common complaints about the game, and how noticeable are they?

Terrainosaur said:

It's not that it's "too easy" with four heroes, it's just that it's easier . I've never tried less than four; like yourself, it would seem, I have more players than four if anything, not less. From what I've heard, though, the game is more difficult with three, and ridiculously more difficult with two. If I recall correctly, the only real difference is that monsters have one less wound for each less hero, or something like that. When you're facing five beastmen and two skeletons with two heroes, it hardly matters if they each have five wounds or two.

Difficulty depends on a lot of things, but the biggest factor is far and away the quest. Just going through the first ten that come with the original game, number one is largely considered a push-over quest, and four and five are very difficult, if memory serves. I'd actually like to play with more than four players, too; I wish I could just buy the Circle / X tokens and the Order tokens so that we could in some extra players if we felt like it. I'd probably be tempted to balance the additional player out by effectively having a "Hordes of the Things" card in play from the start, or something like that.

As far as common complaints about the game, I'd say the main one is the rat's nest that is the Rules + FAQ & Errata. The rules are often poorly edited, poorly organized, poorly written, contradictory, and ambiguous. I think we come up with a solid half dozen questions and situations not answered by the FAQ and Rules every time we play.

Beyond that, another "complaint" is that the game is "too hard" for the heroes, but that stems from a misconception that it's a game in which the Overlord is an "Adventure Assistant." He's not. He's a competitor, and is meant to be on even ground with the players - i.e. he should win half the time.

The biggest issues I've seen come up when changing the number of players are:

1) Action economy. The Overlord gets one activation per monster. The heroes get one activation each. When there are fewer heroes the monsters die slower, so the overlord's action count ramps up (due to spawns) instead of staying about the same or going down. When there are more heroes the overlord's action count will quickly approach 0 as all of the monsters die and the usable spawn points dwindles.

2) Spawn coverage. With 4 heroes it's pretty easy to cover the majority of the maps we've played, though there's still usually a few nearby places where the OL can spawn unless the party has Boggs the Rat. With 5 heroes there would never be nearby places, and a lucky draw of Boggs the Rat would make even the far away places hard to use.

Unfortunately, the designers decided that changing health levels for monsters would balance the game, when it actually does very little to change it. Monsters still go down in one hit (two for the big ones).

I have to agree with Cymbaline that one of the biggest problems with the game is the rules themselves. They work, and they make for a very fun game, but you have to slog through them to find what you want and if a question arises good luck finding an answer.

I definitely suggest starting with just the base set and reading the rules thoroughly as well as the FAQ. It probably won't stop questions from coming up, but at least you'll have a better idea if you'll need to agree to something as a group or if there's an official answer.

Terrainosaur said:

If by "campaign mode" you mean the advanced campaign introduced in the Road to Legend or Sea of Blood expansions, that doesn't even pretend to scale; they tell you to always use 4 heroes. I haven't played it myself, but based on forum discussions, it sounds like it's got a steep learning curve, and decisions made early in the game have a lasting impact, so you may not have a great experience if you try to learn as you go.

If you mean the "basic campaign" rules printed on the base game quest guide, then I don't think they'll have much effect on player scaling, but few people seem to use those rules (and I'm not one of them) so I can't give you detailed comments.

Common complaints about the game in general include the poor rules editing, inconsistent power of random draws (some heroes, skills, and treasures are a lot better than others), and a tendency for the game to get very easy for the heroes at the end of the quest, because no monsters can really stand up to gold weapons and the boss often dies in a single round, before he gets a turn. (When the overlord wins, it's usually not in the last room.)

There are also some other things that aren't really flaws in the game, but that occasionally put people off because they're expecting something different:

• Each quest is really a stand-alone game, not a piece of a big campaign; there's character advancement within a quest, but not much continuity between quests, even with the basic campaign rules. This was such a common complaint that they added an entirely new game mode in an expansion (Road to Legend) to address it, but I actually like the original version better, and I don't think I'm alone.
• Monsters can spawn out of nowhere if you don't maintain line-of-sight coverage. I think this is cool, and I think of it as representing monsters having access to secret passageways or hiding places that the heroes don't know about, but some people complain that it feels "video game-y".
• Combat is very deadly. It's not uncommon for a hero to go from full health to dead in a single round, and even powerful monsters routinely die in a single hit. (This ties into the player scaling issues, as Cymbaline noted, but some people also object to it on principle.)
• Descent is more of a race than a systematic dungeon romp. Heroes often benefit from looting the room before killing the monsters, or from leaving monsters behind rather than finishing them off. Topping off your health before you move on to the next area is usually impractical, not least because monsters can continue to spawn all around you and the overlord grows stronger with each passing turn.

Already talked about to death in the last few years.

My opinion is that the game scale badly with more heroes-player and that there is no easy nor evident fix because of the many correlated adjustement to be made ( number of monsters by spawn cards, ratio red/white monsters, monsters stats, more treasure cards by chest, more guard action by turn ).

I would rather share the OL-spot with another player or start another game in parrallele. Descent balance is already quite random, no need to tip anymore.