Golden Armor (silver treasure): +3 Armor, base speed reduced to 3, can't equip Runes, Immunity to grapple and daze.

Dragon Scale Mail (gold treasure): +4 Armor, base speed reduced to 3, can't equip runes, immunity to bleed, burn, and poison.

I only own vanilla and RtL. Daze is found in WoD, but Golden Armor is found in vanilla. Is this really a silver treasure that is only better than the copper treasure counterpart (Plate Mail) when playing vanilla, by granting immunity immunity to grapple? (as daze is found nowhere in vanilla). At my house we've played where it grants immunity to stun. Just wondering what others have done.

Also, if a hero gets grappled, or acquires bleed, burn, daze, or poison tokens, and then equips an item (such as those found above) that grants immunity to those effects what happens?

Obviously no new tokens would be able to be placed on the hero (or at least that seems obvious to me), and then which of the following:

1) The tokens have no effect and NO rolls are made to remove them as long as the hero has the item equipped

2) The tokens have no effect and rolls ARE made to remove them.

3) The tokens take effect as normal.

Or perhaps new tokens would be able to be placed on the hero, and then option 1 or 2 would be in place.

At my house we play no new tokens and #3. Is there a difinitiveruling by FFG? How do you play?

Eric! said:

Check the FAQ. I'm pretty sure one or both of these cards have been errata'd. I believe WoD offered reprinted cards to replace the base game ones, but I could be mistaken about that.

Eric! said:

I would play it as #3 and no new tokens would be applied. I would not allow existing tokens to be wiped off as soon as the item is equipped, because then a quick game of hot potato makes most of those effects useless against the entire party. I'm not sure if FFG has answered this directly, but it's probably worth checking the FAQ.

Steve-O: The version of the armor cards he quoted already contains the errata (presumably he's got a recent printing, or already looked at the FAQ). The original versions didn't make any reference to expansion status effects.

Immunity to Stun is a rather useful ability; Stun is a nasty status effect, it's inflicted by a relatively common base game monster (spawnable with treachery) and a non-treachery trap card. Immunity to Daze is nearly worthless even in the Well of Darkness expansion; Daze is an extremely minor status effect that's inflicted by dart fields (of which there is one preplaced out of all 9 WoD quests, and the treachery card that creates them is overpriced and hard to use) and the Lightning Runes trap card (a 2 treachery card that's scarcely better than the rarely-played non-treachery Exploding Door). Oh, and some hero weapons can cause Daze, so I guess you could conceivably get it from a Dark Charm. But no standard monsters have it. Basically, heroes don't get Daze tokens, and even if they do, that's just 1 less black die for a couple of attacks; it probably doesn't matter.

I believe the original version of the misleadingly-named Golden Armor was +3 armor and your speed is reduced to 4 (not to 3). Which is no improvement at all compared to the Platemail if your speed was 3 anyway, and a gigantic improvement otherwise. I don't know what their reasoning was for changing it (if they disliked the volatility, they sure didn't apply that philosophy to other cards). But basically, as long as shop armor gives out +2 armor and gold-level armor only gives out +4, there's got to be some treasure level where the armor value doesn't increase. There are few enough armor cards in the deck that you'll probably be glad to draw both the Platemail and the Golden Armor just so that two heroes can both wear good armor, and adding another +1 armor to the Golden Armor and Dragon Scale Mail would be an excessive power boost. When I designed by own homebrew armor cards, I mostly gave the copper and silver armors special abilities instead of increased armor values.

As for status immunities, the way I read it, there's a difference between the effect token and the special ability that inflicts it. Some cards say things like "figures...gain 2 burn tokens (unless immune to Burn )" (from the Fire Runes card). You'll notice that the name of the ability is written in bold, but the name of the token is not. And that supports your interpretation: immunity to Burn would mean that you're immune to the ability (which adds tokens when you get attacked), and you don't gain burn tokens when affected by that particular card, but it doesn't confer immunity to the effect , so any tokens you already have work exactly as normal. And that's how I usually play.

However, like many fine details in the Descent rules, the game doesn't do this consistently. The rules for the lava obstacle, for example, say that "in addition, 2 burn tokens are placed on the figure," with the entire phrase bold, no capitalization, and no mention of immunity (even though it's from the same expansion as the treachery card quoted above). So even in the best-case scenario, a lot of errors slipped through, and you'll have to guess how several things should work; in the worst-case scenario, the designers didn't actually have a system at all and never decided how immunity was really supposed to work.

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